Megalithic and dragon jar cemetery visit, Long Peluan, Kelabit Highlands

I made this movie using footage I shot in August 2008 as part of work on the Cultured Rainforest research project, funded by the UK government through the Arts and Humanities Research Council. It shows Baye Ribuh, who lives in Bario in the Kelabit Highlands, and Balang Tau, who lives in Long Peluan, a small Kelabit longhouse community just outside the highlands, visiting two cemeteries near Long Peluan: firstly, a megalithic cemetery containing stone slab graves, and secondly a cemetery containing 'dragon jars'. The people living in Long Peluan came to live there from the longhouse community of Batu Patong in the Kelabit Highlands in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and they established and used the dragon jar cemetery for their dead. Balang Tau shows us his wife's father's grave there. The megalithic cemetery is much older, although it has not yet been dated, but the people of Long Peluan believe that long ago their ancestors once lived in this area and that they established and used this cemetery at that time. Baye Ribuh and Balang Tau speculate here about how the dead may have been placed in the megalithic cemetery.

Monica Janowski

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• Peluan
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