ceramics being inexpensive wares), the conclusion drawn from the research was quite important. For now it could be proven that the ceramics found indeed served as funeral gifts, to be buried together with bodies.
Until that time illegal excavators had dug up pots and scattering the human remains, and dissociating them from the funeral gifts. The ceramics from this site were from the 15th-16th centuries A. D. and included Sawangkhalok and Annamese as well as Chinese ware. As the skeletons were furnished with inexpensive wares, the inference was that commoners were buried in graves, whereas prominent people were buried in foreign ceramic pots. This reminds us, of course, of the jar- burials in Anyer (see above)17, where prominent people were buried in jars and commoners in graves. In South Sulawesi, however, the bodies were buried in foreign ceramic pots. Perhaps ceramics were a status symbol in South Sulawesi.
Van Heekeren refers to a report by Van Vuuren in 1912, who found urns in which the ashes of Buginese kings were buried even as late as the 14th century.18 Cremation of Buginese kings is mentioned in historical manuscripts, written by the Buginese themselves,. The Buginese, though lacking inscriptions on stone and copper, have left many manuscripts, which they called: ”lontaras”. They recorded anything from administrative measures, political events, wars and mariages in their diaries and chronicles. In the Chronicle of Wajo (Noorduyn 1955), a principality in South Sulawesi, it was recorded that a king was cremated lying on top of his shields. It was for this reason that he received the posthumous name of ”Matinroe rikannana” (he who is resting on his shield). The ashes were afterwards put in a pot. ”It was perhaps the last cremation of a Wajo souverain”, was Noorduyn's comment.19
This was in the period when Islamization of North Sulawesi had begun. Moslems do not cremate their dead, but bury them. Hadimuljono, saw in Soppeng, on the grave of a deceased king, a ceramic piece as a tombstone. Ceramics were in the past also broken when an oath was sworn during the closing of a treaty between two kings. The words then spoken are: ” If this treaty is broken, so will the party breaking the treaty be destroyed for seven generations” (Hadimuljono 1978)20
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