Bali’s Massive Stone Sarcophagi Included Global Grave Goods
The district of Pangkung Paruk lies on the northern coast of Bali where verdant green jungle meets azure sea. It is off the beaten track, removed from tourist hotspots on the south coast around the city of Denpasar. In 2009, a local rice farmer digging an irrigation trench stumbled upon a massive stone sarcophagus that had been buried for nearly 2,000 years. Experts from the Bali Institute of Archaeology were summoned and, over the next two years, working with the landowner they found and excavated three similar sarcophagi at the site, some of them still containing the skeletons of their owners—as well as surprising items that hinted at the global reach of the culture that fashioned them.
The style of large, oval sarcophagi was already well known to archaeologists working on Pulau Dewata, the “Island of the Gods” as Bali is known locally. In fact, more than 200 such sarcophagi have been recovered by archaeologists around the island over the last century—the first, standing in the temple of Pura Penataran, was initially misidentified as a pig feeding trough by Dutch scholar Pieter de Kat Angelino. The earliest of the found sarcophagi are more than 2,600 years old, but production reached a zenith during the Balinese Bronze Age, from the seventh to early ninth century.
The Balinese burial containers were carved from tuff, a stone formed from compressed volcanic ash. The rock is common on the island, which is riddled with tunnels from ancient quarry operations to carve out stone blocks destined for statues, pillars, bas-relief, and sarcophagi. The Bali sarcophagi are characterized by their oval shape, and by distinctive knobs on the ends that are often carved into animal or anthropomorphic shapes.
