Melanau - Settlements



Modern villages vary in size from 300 to 1,000 inhabitants. Houses, averaging 7 by 10 meters, are built on durable wooden frames in a ribbon pattern along both banks of a river and stand some 3 meters above ground. Walls are of plank or sago bark, and roofing is of palm thatch or wooden shingles. In some areas, notably on the River Tillian at Mukah, villages were closely adjacent, and today the banks of the river are a continuous line of housing with several thousand inhabitants. Administratively the villages are still separate. Traditionally a village was made up of two, sometimes three longhouses, each with a population of about 300 people. A longhouse, consisting of separate apartments with a common veranda in front, facing the river, was essentially a fortress on ironwood piles, some 10 meters above the ground. They were often sited on the bank of the main river opposite the mouth of a tributary stream, which allowed them to see enemies approaching on the water. At the mouths of the main rivers, where representatives of the sultan of Brunei nominally held suzerainty over the river to its source, villagers had by 1830 already begun to build small separate houses, but still retained longhouses for defense. By the beginning of the twentieth century the rajah of Sarawak had successfully put an end to intertribal warfare and most longhouses were abandoned. Sago gardens were cultivated as near the village as possible, and a communal rice field was organized annually by village elders, with a strip allocated to each household.


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