{"it":{"id":"ASI-010","kind":"site","sub":"Asia","name":"Lore Lindu National Park","place":"Indonesia","lat":-1.467,"lon":120.183,"date":"In addition to its rich wildlife, the park also contains megaliths dating from between…","mat":"granite","nfacts":7,"tags":["Asia"],"sum":"Hundreds of stone figures stand in the valleys of Lore Lindu, a rainforest park in central Sulawesi, Indonesia, many with huge round faces and little else carved below them.","why":"Thousands of megaliths, a culture dated by archaeology rather than records, and living communities that may descend from the carvers.","src":[341],"nsrc":2,"yt":"Who were they watching for?","rel":["RAP-MOA"],"hook":"The largest ancestor statue in Sulawesi's Lore Lindu stands 380 cm high."},"S":{"341":["Wikipedia: Lore Lindu National Park","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lore_Lindu_National_Park"]},"rec":{"id":"ASI-010","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"The Indonesian national park is","a":"area","v":"2180","u":"km2","o":"The Indonesian national park is 2,180 km2 covering both lowland and montane forests (200 to 2,610 meters above mean sea level).","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lore_Lindu_National_Park&oldid=1362850763","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1362850763 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0797"},{"f":"covering both lowland and montane forests 200 to","a":"dimension (unspecified)","v":"2610","u":"meters","o":"The Indonesian national park is 2,180 km2 covering both lowland and montane forests (200 to 2,610 meters above mean sea level).","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lore_Lindu_National_Park&oldid=1362850763","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1362850763 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0798"},{"f":"Due to up to","a":"dimension (unspecified)","v":"4000","u":"mm","o":"Due to up to 4,000 mm of rainfall per year in the southern part of the national park, the best time to visit is from July to September.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lore_Lindu_National_Park&oldid=1362850763","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1362850763 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0799"},{"f":"The altitude ranges from 200 to","a":"dimension (unspecified)","v":"2500","u":"m","o":"The altitude ranges from 200 to 2,500 m above sea-level.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lore_Lindu_National_Park&oldid=1362850763","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1362850763 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0800"},{"f":"6 nbsp C 11 nbsp F with every","a":"dimension (unspecified)","v":"1100","u":"m","o":"The temperature drops in the highland areas about 6 °C (11 °F) with every 1100 m rise in altitude.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lore_Lindu_National_Park&oldid=1362850763","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1362850763 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0801"},{"f":"as well as sub-alpine forest at altitudes over","a":"dimension (unspecified)","v":"2000","u":"m","o":"Lore Lindu National Park stretches over multiple ecosystem types, including lowland tropical forest, sub-montane forest, montane forest, as well as sub-alpine forest at altitudes over 2000 m.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lore_Lindu_National_Park&oldid=1362850763","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1362850763 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0802"},{"f":"While in 1982 an area of","a":"area","v":"2310","u":"km2","o":"While in 1982 an area of 2,310 km2 has been \"declared\" for the national park, when the park has been officially designated in 1999, its size was reduced to 2,180 km2.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lore_Lindu_National_Park&oldid=1362850763","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1362850763 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M0803"}],"lab":[{"k":"Materials","mat":"site material (as stated in article)","m":"documentary mention (Wikipedia, auto-extracted)","v":"There are over 400 granite megaliths in the area, of which about 30 represent human forms.","by":"no inline ref in article","b":"S","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lore_Lindu_National_Park&oldid=1362850763"}],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"In addition to its rich wildlife, the park also contains megaliths dating from between 3000 BC to 1300 AD.","dm":"[see dating_excerpt; method not extracted]","lab":"NO: inference only (style/context/king list/textual)","weak":"no direct lab result on the structure in our records; date from stylistic, contextual or textual inference","unesco":"","dens":"CENSUS"},"co":{"lat":"-1.46666667","lon":"120.18333333","src":"Wikidata P625 only","agree":"not a valid check","b":"S","note":"wave8: KEPT: both values are area centroids of a ~2,180 km² park (delta 0.052 deg); no point-feature second source, so agreement is not a real check (delta 0.0524 deg)","osm":"https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/ui/details.html?osmtype=R&osmid=8767277"},"src":[{"id":"S0328","t":"no inline ref in article","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lore_Lindu_National_Park&oldid=1362850763"},{"id":"S0524","t":"Wikipedia: Lore Lindu National Park","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lore_Lindu_National_Park"},{"id":"VASI-010-3","t":"UNESCO tentative list: Megalithic Cultural Heritage of Lore Lindu Area","u":"https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/6826/"},{"id":null,"t":"“Stone vats (kalambas) as one of megalithic remains in the Lore Valley, Central Sulawesi,” Berkala Arkeologi 30(2).","u":"https://ejournal.brin.go.id/berkalaarkeologi/article/view/4604"}],"sum":"In the southern hills of central Sulawesi, as much as four metres of rain can fall in a single year. The forest that drinks it is dense, steep and loud with life found nowhere else: seventy-seven kinds of bird live in this park that are native only to the island. Then the trees open onto a grassy valley floor, and you meet them. A stone figure stands alone in the grass, its face enormous and round, its arms reduced to a few lines that bring the hands together over the belly. Below the face there is almost nothing, as if the carver had decided that only the face mattered. It has stood watching this valley for longer than anyone can say.\n\nThis is Lore Lindu, a national park in the highlands of Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, and the figures are its stone ancestors. They belong to one of the richest clusters of megaliths in Southeast Asia. A megalith is simply a monument made of large stones, and here they are spread across a highland basin about 1,100 metres above sea level, ringed by hills that rise to 2,800 metres. The park covers about 2,180 square kilometres of lowland and mountain forest and has been part of UNESCO's world network of biosphere reserves since 1978.\n\nHow many stones are there? It depends who is counting, and what. Indonesia's file for UNESCO's tentative list, submitted in 2025, counts no less than 2,000 megalithic remains at 118 sites across four valleys: Napu, Behoa, Bada and Palu. An older count used in general references gives over 400 granite megaliths, about 30 of them in human form. The difference is mostly one of scope: the larger figure includes every jar, lid, mortar and carved stone across a wider area. Either way, this is not one monument but a landscape of them.\n\nThe statues are the most arresting. The file says they stress the face and body, hold their hands toward the stomach, and usually show whether they are male or female. The tallest stands 380 centimetres, more than twice the height of a grown man; other accounts give sizes up to about four and a half metres. Beside them lie the great stone jars called kalamba, some still with their heavy stone lids. Excavation shows that the jars held communal secondary burials. The dead were first left to decay elsewhere, then their bones were gathered and laid together in the stone, sometimes many in one jar. Smaller earthenware jars served the same purpose. Around them are dolmens, upright stones carrying a flat slab, stone circles, mortars for grinding, troughs, and stones engraved with human faces, geometric patterns and ribbon-like designs.\n\nThe people who made them lived in houses raised on stone pillars, farmed, herded and hunted. They left no writing. Everything known about them comes from the ground, the stones and their descendants.\n\nWhen were they here? The tentative-list file places the beginning about 3,000 years ago, a peak in the Early Metal Period roughly 2,500 to 1,500 years ago, and an end about 500 years ago. General references give a wider span, from about 3000 BC to 1300 AD. The firmest laboratory evidence so far is younger. Radiocarbon dating, which measures the decay of carbon in once-living material such as charcoal, shows that the Entovera site in the Besoa valley was lived in from 2170 years before present, counted back from 1950. That alone makes it one of the oldest megalithic sites in Indonesia. The longer timeline is an overall reading of the culture; the single lab date is one site. A careful reader should hold both.\n\nWho were they? Here Lore Lindu becomes the meeting point of a great human migration. Austronesian is a family of languages that spread out of Taiwan and southern China across the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, eventually reaching from Madagascar to Easter Island. The file argues that two branches of that movement met in these valleys. The stone burial jars belong to the western branch, shaped by mainland Southeast Asia, and have never been reported east of Sulawesi. Similar jars are known in Sarawak, around Lake Toba, at Donggo, and in Laos and Assam. The statues and their ornament belong to the eastern branch that spread through the islands of Wallacea and out into Oceania. The carved designs recall the Lapita culture of Melanesia and Polynesia, roughly 3,500 to 2,700 years ago. Both kinds of pottery, paddle-impressed from the west and red-slipped from the east, turn up at the same sites. Genetic studies of bones from the jars link the buried dead to early Austronesian speakers, a marker shared today by Sulawesi peoples such as the Kaili and Toraja.\n\nThat is the mainstream picture: a farming people, part of the great Austronesian expansion, honouring their ancestors in stone, burying their dead in communal jars, and passing their customs down to the communities who still live nearby. It is a strong and well-supported account.\n\nYet the most important thing about the statues is not written anywhere. What they stood for is not recorded. Ancestor honour is the scholarly reading, not a fact anyone left behind. The general accounts say it plainly: the original purpose of the megaliths is unknown. Why give a figure an immense face and almost no body? Why point the hands to the stomach? Why set them out across the valleys at all? The file compares them with the statues of Rapa Nui, Easter Island, at the far eastern end of the same migration, which are also giant faces on reduced bodies, though larger and without marked sex. Two islands, thousands of kilometres apart, settled by the same seafaring family of peoples, both chose to show their great stone figures as immense faces on reduced bodies.\n\nThe land itself has changed too. Several of these valleys, Palolo, Napu, Lindu and Besoa, were once lakes, now partly filled with sediment, and Lake Lindu is the only large one left.\n\nAnd one thread may run unbroken to the present. The Bada people of the southern valley still use pitted stones to work out the farming calendar, reading the seasons from marks in rock. Whether that was what the stones were first made for is unknown; it may be a later use of an older object. But it means that in at least one valley, people still turn to the stones for knowledge of time, and the planting still waits on what they say.\n\nSo the figures keep watching over the grass, faces turned to the open valley and the hills beyond. The makers left no words. Perhaps they believed none were needed, and that anyone who stood before those eyes would understand.","qs":["How much of an ancient culture can survive without a single written word?","If local people still use the stones, whose heritage are they?","Why might the statues stress the face and stomach?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ee/Danau_Lindu_w_bird_2007.jpg/1280px-Danau_Lindu_w_bird_2007.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Danau_Lindu_w_bird_2007.jpg","title":"Danau Lindu w bird 2007.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 2.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0","by":"Aidenvironment, 2007","cap":"Danau Lindu in Lore Lindu National Park, Central Sulawesi, Indonesia"},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0a/COLLECTIE_TROPENMUSEUM_Megalitisch_beeld_in_een_rijstveld_TMnr_20018337.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:COLLECTIE_TROPENMUSEUM_Megalitisch_beeld_in_een_rijstveld_TMnr_20018337.jpg","title":"COLLECTIE TROPENMUSEUM Megalitisch beeld in een rijstveld TMnr 20018337.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"Drs. F.A.M. (Frans) Welman (Fotograaf/photographer).","cap":"Megalithic stone in a rice field"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6c/Macaca_tonkeana_groupe.jpg/1280px-Macaca_tonkeana_groupe.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Macaca_tonkeana_groupe.jpg","title":"Macaca tonkeana groupe.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"No machine-readable author provided. Janekvorik~commonswiki assumed (based on co","cap":"Un groupe de macaques de Tonkean. Photographie de Christophe Chauvin."}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":null,"hs":{},"lh":{"s":"img/h/ASI-010.webp","w":1280,"h":853,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ee/Danau_Lindu_w_bird_2007.jpg/1280px-Danau_Lindu_w_bird_2007.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}