Traces of Early Austronesian Expansion to East Indonesia? New Discovery of Dentate-Stamped and Lime-Infilled Pottery from Central Sulawesi

This short article report about the new findings of finely made dentate-stamped and lime infilled potteries from the Goa Topogaro site in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. Most of them are red-slipped pottery decorated with dentate-stamped, lime infilled, and can be identified as burial potteries as they are excavated with secondly burials of the Early Metal Age possibly dated around 2000-1800 years ago. When comparing these finds with common decorative patterns seen in early dentate-stamped pottery assemblages in the Philippines, Mariana Islands, and early Lapita sites, the Topogaro dentate-stamped pots lack some common early patterns, but exhibit a wider variety of designs. It is now argued that dentate-stamped decorations at Lapita sites mainly disappeared by around 2800 BP or at least by 2000 BP in the Pacific, but the Topogaro dentate-stamped sherds may indicate that this pottery tradition continued and further developed in Island Southeast Asia or Sulawesi at least until the Early Metal Age. The detailed analysis of these new finds and further comparative study on production technique, variety of design, forms, and styles of both dentate-stamped ceramics in Southeast Asia and Oceania is required.     

Going ‘mainstream’: evaluating the instrumentalisation of multicultural arts

This paper considers how debates over the instrumentalisation of the arts have informed the cultural production of an Australian arts organisation – Multicultural Arts Victoria (MAV). In an effort to make multicultural arts more ‘mainstream’, MAV has increasingly adopted market‐based rationales for its work – particularly the use of ‘audience development’ policy frameworks. It is easy to evaluate this marketisation of multicultural arts negatively as an acceptance of neoliberal policy agendas and as a weakening of its commitment to ‘cultural development’ goals. This paper suggests, however, via a critique of Ghassan Hage’s analysis of multiculturalism, that such accounts do not consider how economic rationales actually sit in practice with MAV’s other (cultural development) agendas. Such critiques, therefore, preclude an affirmative reading of the instrumentalisation of multicultural arts. An alternative analytical framework is proposed – one which can more readily account for multicultural arts as a set of practices informed by diverse agendas, and which acknowledges how such practices might both contest and converge with official government policies.