Reconstructions

Note

Also Thao kudun ‘clay cooking pot’, apparently a loanword from Bunun, Subanen/Subanun gulen ‘a large jar’, evidently a loan from Tboli, Tiruray kureŋ ‘a ricepot; the nuclear family’. This widely, if somewhat sparsely distributed comparison, provides the key linguistic evidence that a continuous tradition of pottery-making connects speakers of Proto-Austronesian, c. 5500-6000 BP with Pacific populations as far east as western Polynesia, about three millennia later. In many areas pottery has been lost, and with it a term for ‘clay cooking pot’. This is particularly true in the Pacific, including scattered areas in Melanesia and all of Polynesia, although it is clear that Proto-Polynesian speakers had pottery, and lost it within a few centuries of settling western Polynesia. Pottery-making was also lost occasionally, but much less commonly, in insular Southeast Asia.

For Formosan aborigines, Chen (1988:110) reports the manufacture of pottery among the Bunun, Tsou, Paiwan, Amis and Yami, adding that only the last two groups still made it in the late 1960s, but he does not distinguish cases in which there is positive evidence for its absence from cases in which it simply unreported. Although pottery leaves perhaps the single most salient signature in the archaeological record of any item of material culture, owing both to its durability and its sheer quantity, the available linguistic evidence sheds no light on such centrally important archaeological topics as the origin of the Lapita decorative style.

In several Western Malayo-Polynesian languages, including Tiruray, Old Javanese, Balinese, Southern Toraja and Makassarese, a reflex of *kuden, either simple or affixed, refers not only to clay cooking pot, but also to such concepts as spouse, household, and the nuclear family. These forms suggest that the clay cooking pot – almost certainly the vessel in which rice was boiled for the daily meal – became a metaphor of commensality, and hence of the union of man and wife in the nuclear family unit.