The Jakarta Globe, November 1, 2013.
A Bali man found a two-millenia-old sarcophagus on Thursday while plowing land to plant coffee seeds, a goverment archaeology official said.
“The shape is like a stone coffin — more-or-less two meters long and one meter in width,” the head of the Denpasar Archeology Agency Wayan Suantika said on Friday.
The farmer, I Nyoman Santika, found the sarcophagus on Oct. 29, 2013 in Pupuan village, in the Tabanan district of western Bali.
The archaeology agency said a preliminary examination of the artifact indicated that it dated back around 2,300 years.
The sarcophagus would have been used to bury a public figure after a preservation ritual, but at the time of writing, the authority was not able to determine for whom the coffin was made.
Such objects have been found before in Tabanan.
“The first sarcophagus was found in Tabanan in the 1930s during land clearing to build the Denpasar-Singaraja road,” Wayan said.
Sociologists believe Bali was first settled around 4,000 years ago as a part of the Austronesian migration.
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vr 1 nov 2013 - 21:30