Finding Xanana

One thinks of archaeologists spending their days knee deep in muddy trenches recovering the bones and coins of our ancient ancestors, but ANU Professor Matthew Spriggs recently turned his skills to documenting the fragile evidence of East Timor’s recent past.

If the occupying Indonesian army had employed archaeologists in its hunt for Xanana Gusmao, East Timor might have a different president today.

The then guerrilla leader, evaded troops by hiding in caves near the port of Com at the end of the 1970s. Each morning he and his guards would clear every trace of their presence from their cave home, so that no evidence of the resistance fighters would be found if the cave was searched by an Indonesian patrol.

When ANU archaeologist Professor Matthew Spriggs visited Xanana’s hideout in 2001, he instantly knew something was amiss.

“The first thing I noticed as an archaeologist was that there was nothing there, which is extremely unusual; if you go into a cave there is always something in it,” he recalls.

The same precautions that Xanana had taken to outwit his pursuers had betrayed his hiding place to the keen eye of the archaeologist.

“They would always clear out all their stuff — it’s lucky for Xanana the Indonesian soldiers were not archaeologists, they would have noticed straight away that there had been activity in the cave.

“Had he been caught at that stage of the resistance struggle he would most certainly have been shot.”

Professor Spriggs visited Xanana’s camp while in East Timor with Dr Susan O’Connor of ANU and Dr Peter Veth, now of Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) looking for sites that offered more traditional archaeological prey as part of an Australian Research Council funded project. On a visit to Com, he asked locals if they knew of areas, caves for example, where people had lived long ago.

They had plenty of sites, he was told, but also sites of recent significance — and he was then offered the chance to see caves where entire villages had hidden during the Indonesian occupation.

“What I found in these caves was so fragile that it would be lost if somebody decided they wanted to use the caves or, in the case of the bamboo beds people had slept on, so rotten you would only need someone to sit on them and they would be gone,” Professor Spriggs says.

Professor Spriggs set about documenting this precious evidence of the recent past, evidence that he himself was likely to destroy as he looked further into the history of the caves — he later discovered that one of the caves was first occupied 16,000 years before some of the people of Com sought refuge in it during 1976.

Access to the people who lived in the sites he was recording was a unique luxury and one which markedly increased the quality and quantity of information available.

“I went to one cave with Edmondo da Cruz, the local village head. He went rooting around and found all these artefacts his family had hidden. He found a little plastic shoe that had belonged to his sister.

“It was interesting seeing Edmondo reconnecting with a place he hadn’t been to for 27 years.

“It’s a rare privilege for an archaeologist when you have the actual artefacts and can talk to the people who used them.”

In the same area as Xanana’s sparse hiding place, Professor Spriggs found evidence of how close Indonesian forces had been to their quarry. At a nearby spring, they had set up an ambush waiting for the guerrilla leader to come down for water. He and his compatriots never did, but the legacy of the fruitless stakeout is all around for an archaeologist to see.

Unlike the East Timorese, the soldiers are not around to share their stories, instead the evidence — food tins littering the ground and initials carved by bored soldiers in the trees around the spring — speaks to the archaeologist.

“I found the contrast between the ambush site and Xanana’s camp really interesting. The whole point for the guerrillas was to remove every trace of their presence, whereas the occupying forces wanted people to know they had been there.”

According the Professor Spriggs, applying archaeological techniques to more modern history is a growing field, with First World War trenches and Second World War sea defences the subject of recent work, and how people lived in areas of later conflict also being researched.

“Everybody thinks archaeology is about the distant past, but it’s about the material traces of the past — it doesn’t matter if they are from 40,000 years ago or last week.”

Matthew Spriggs

Indonesian soldiers carved their names in trees

bed

Much of the evidence left behind in the caves was very fragile

Contents