Global Romans (3) – A Roman Bead from Bali

If the evidence from early first millennium CE West Java discussed last week leaves no doubt that parts of the island were integrated into the larger regional maritime networks of the era, there was no unequivocal evidence of stuff from beyond India arriving in Java – there is a clear possibility that some of the artifacts discovered at Batujaya came from the Far West, but no direct proof. Yet over the course of the last two decades, more archaeological work has been done elsewhere in Indonesia, and most of these projects have equally been interested in the long-distance contacts between the Indonesian archipelago, Asia, and the rest of the ‘old’ world. An interesting case is that of Sembiran and Pacung on Bali. Bali, of course, lies immediately east of Java, but in the larger scheme of things that means that it is further away from the main trans-Asian seafaring routes, and therefore, its integration in ‘global’ networks of exchange was a bit more complicated. To put it a bit more bluntly: while North-West Java is relatively well-connected to a variety of places simply because of its location, Bali had mostly one claim to fame, and that is that it was (roughly) en route to the Maluku Islands, where unique spices could be obtained, and one of the debates amongst scholars is how intensive this spice trade had become in the early first Millennium CE.