The first wave of visitors hit the beaches of Bali around three to four thousand years ago. These seafaring Austronesians made their way through the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, eventually landing on Bali’s silvery shores. Migrating inwards from the coasts, they spread across the island, leaving rough stone tools and several burial sites for later generations to find.
The picture of Bali’s prehistoric past is still incomplete, for only a few clues have been found by archaeologists. But from what evidence has been unearthed, we know that by the first centuries A.D. the people who populated the island already possessed many of the cultural traits that distinguish today’s Balinese. They grew rice in both dry fields and irrigated paddies; they harnessed water buffalo to the plow, and they kept pigs and chickens for food. They structured their society into small villages and held community meetings using large stone ceremonial platforms. Their religion appeared to have combined ancestor worship with a fertility cult centered around the rice goddess, now known as Dewi Sri. Tantalizing glimpses into Bali’s long-ago past are available to history buffs at a number of spots around the island. Denpasar’s Bali Museum boasts among its collections a number of artifacts from the Bronze Age and before, including stone sarcophagi used in ancient Bali to bury the dead and metal and stone implements and ornaments.
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