14. POTTERY, TOOLS AND TECHNOLOGY

By far the most elegant, beautiful if brittle vessel used by the Andamanese was and still is made by Mother Nature herself: the nautilus shell. Along with the refuse of modern civilization, this shell is washed up on Andamanese coasts by the sea. Unfortunately, the shells are rarely found intact because of their fragility. Less elegant but much sturdier were containers made of bamboo or blocks of wood. Bamboo large enough to be cut into suitable containers does not grow in the archipelago so that this raw material has always been limited to an occasional pole of the giant bamboo from the Asian mainland drifting into local waters. Wood suitable for containers was plentiful but difficult to carve into a useful shape without the help of iron.

Iron was acquired in small quantities in the Andamans from plundered shipwrecks, almost certainly the main if not the only source. That the metal was known in the islands for a long time has been demonstrated by its presence in all levels of the Chauldari kitchen-midden. Iron became widely available, however, on Great Andaman only after 1858. A characteristic noted as early as 1771 by the British surveyor Ritchie was the Andamanese greed for iron. When four Andamanese visited Ritchie's ship at anchor in Diligent Strait near the archipelago that today carries his name

I [Ritchie] gave them some nails, and bits of old iron, which pleased them much; and about 3 in the afternoon, they went into the canoe, and tried hard to pull the chain plates from the vessel's side. They went astern when this would not do, and dragged strongly, and long, at the rudder chains; but these were too well fixed; and at last, they went towards the shore at an easy rate, looking at their nails, and singing all the way.

When they first acquired iron, the islanders did not adapt their shell-and-bone- technology to the new material. They simply applied their working skills to the new material without change. Hammering with stones, lumps of iron could be broken into pieces and further cold-hammered into shape. Fine-shaping was done by grinding on whetstones (Schleifstein). Jarawa and Sentineli today still make arrow-heads in this way. The thought of using the heat of fire to make the iron more malleable seem never to have occurred to them.

New words must be said here on the use of stone among traditional Andamanese. It is quite wrong to call the Andamanese "pre-lithic," i.e. a people in a state of development before the invention of stone tools. The Andamanese did use pebbles of a suitable shape as hammers, anvils and whetstones; they used chipped quartz as shaving knives. They did make stone tools. The archaeological evidence shows that predating intensive contact with the outside world, the use of stone tools was widespread. However, the Andamanese stone technology never reached the sophistication of the standardized tool kits common in many parts of the world hundreds of thousands of years ago.

There is an explanation for the Andamanese reluctance to make better use of stone as a raw material. Nature has scattered a conveniently pre-shaped alternative raw material on Andamanese beaches: sea shells in all shapes and sizes, some naturally as sharp as knives. Such shells could be chipped, shaped and sharpened with much less effort than would have had to go into stone tools. Split bamboo, bones, animal teeth and the grates of large fish could all be used to make or shape tools for which other cultures in less favored environments had to develop laborious stone chipping technologies.

Shells were not a perfect raw material, however. Their most serious drawback is their brittleness (Brüchigkeit). The advantages of iron in this respect is so obvious and so overwhelming that even the most conservative Andamanese threw out traditional materials in favor of iron as soon as it became available in sufficient quantity. Stone and shell was replaced by iron, quartz by shards of glass (Glasscherben). The bases of broken bottles made much better chips for shaving than splinters of quartz. This change of materials is clearly reflected in the archaeological record. Iron also revolutionized canoe-making: much larger vessels than the traditional ones became feasible only after adzes with iron heads had become available.