PLAITING AND BASKETWARE
The plaiting of leaves or reeds is one of the earliest crafts practised by mankind. It may have begun when leaves were piled up to sleep on, or used to protect from the cold and rain. It was found that interlaced leaves provided more efficient protection against the elements. Leaves and reeds were also easier to obtain than animal skins. Prehistoric evidence of mat-making in Malaysia is scanty; vegetable artefacts do not last in an equatorial climate. Nevertheless, impressions of plaited wrapping materials were identified in some Neolithic burials in the Niah Caves, Sarawak. These traces of pandanus mats date back to 200 BCE–400 CE––not very old in a site where human occupation goes back 35,000 years.
In the Malay Archipelago, the basket-weaving, mat-plaiting people, primarily women, worked fibres mainly for domestic consumption; selling only surplus production to itinerant traders. Explorers, adventurers and colonialists of the past 200 years seldom mention the homely art in their writings. Instead, they noticed the splendid songket worn at the Malay courts, and few omitted descriptions of artistically finished, but deadly, weapons. But local traditions then did not permit a strange man much access to an ordinary family’s living quarters—the soldiers and traders who travelled in the Malay Peninsula hardly glanced at the mats that must have been spread for them to sit on. However, Hugh Low, a colonial administrator whose career started in Sarawak in 1846 and ended in Perak in 1889, noted the plaiting traditions. The women of Sarawak, he wrote in 1848, sometimes embroidered the corners of mats bought from the Natuna Islands (located between Terengganu and the Borneo coast) with a ‘border of open work of pretty patterns round the edges, and which is larger as the mats decrease in size, they being always made in sets, until the smallest one, which lies above, is formed entirely of open work.’ This description also fits some mats made in Terengganu.
Mats were not the only objects woven from leaves and reeds. In the days of open boats, travellers wore hats made from palm leaves on a rattan frame and carried their personal belongings in baskets, for example, a small basket to hold their smoking and betel-chewing ingredients. Pandanus mats were used to wrap goods, to line the floors of boats for people to sit on, and to spread over the heads and outstretched arms of deck passengers if a squall sprang up. Until the early 20th century, rural households owned very little wooden furniture. Mats were used for sleeping and sitting on, for covering and wrapping things, and for partitioning dwelling space. Goods were gathered, carried and stored in baskets, some of them fitted with lids. Maybe a sandalwood storage chest stood against the wall, or a wooden rack beside the clay hearth held dishes, but generally only the rich and members of the nobility patronized the cabinetmaker’s art. The common man and his family lived on mats.
