Stone Age in Singapore

[Music playing]

Jimmy
You’re listening to BiblioAsia+, a podcast produced by the National Library of Singapore. At BiblioAsia, we tell stories about Singapore’s past: some unfamiliar, others forgotten, all fascinating.

Hi, everyone. My name is Jimmy Yap and I’m the editor-in-chief of BiblioAsia, a publication of the National Library of Singapore. In this episode of BiblioAsia+, we’re going to talk about stone-age Singapore. Is that really a thing? It’s not common knowledge, but stone tools have been found in what is now Tuas and on Pulau Ubin. Some of these tools might be around 6,000 years old. This estimate, however, is based on the type of tool found rather than from radiocarbon dating. Do these stone tools mean that Singapore was inhabited during the Neolithic period? Turns out, this is not an easy question to answer. Here to talk about this with me is Foo Shu Tieng, a librarian of the National Library. She’s taken part in archaeological digs around Cambodia and in Singapore. Here, she was part of the team that excavated Fort Tanjong Katong. Shu Tieng has written a fascinating piece on Singapore’s stone tools in BiblioAsia. And she’s here today to tell us all about them. Hi, Shu. Welcome to BiblioAsia+.

Shu Tieng
Hi, Jimmy. It’s great to be here. Thanks for the invite.

Jimmy
No, we’re very happy to have you. So, tell me, what exactly has been found in Tuas and Pulau Ubin?

Shu Tieng
The first director of the Botanic Gardens, Mr Henry Nicholas Ridley, first reported the discovery of something called a round axe at Tanjong Karang in the northwest of Singapore in 1891. If you want to imagine what the stone tool would have looked like, think of the head of an axe and just take out the handle. So that is similar to what you would actually see on the actual photographs. Sometimes for the later ones, it would be hafted, like you would basically wind twine around it and then affix it to a wooden handle, things like that. So you can use it to chop wood or do other things with it. So it depends on what the tool looks like.

Jimmy
And where was this found?

Shu Tieng
This was in Tuas.

Jimmy
You said Tanjong Karang, the round axe was found in Tanjong Karang.

Shu Tieng
That’s right.

Jimmy
What else has been found here?

Shu Tieng
That’s the only one that we’ve discovered so far. But there’s actually more in his notes that we think. We don’t know exactly the circumstances because it was never published. He just said, okay, I found it. A couple of years ago, some Malaysian archaeologists actually emailed me and asked me, do you know where this location might be? Or even in Tanjung Bunga in Johor, where that location might be? But, unfortunately, a few years ago I did not realise there would be so many materials at the library. And so when I joined, I realised, hey, there’s actually possible clues as to how they were excavated, the location and things like that, but might not be found in the publications themselves.

Jimmy
Oh, so we actually have his notes in the library.

Shu Tieng
Oh, yes, we have his notes. It’s pretty interesting.

Jimmy
Have you had a look at them?

Shu Tieng
Yes, I’ve had a look at them. There are actually quite a few volumes.

Jimmy
Volumes?

Shu Tieng
Volumes of them. Because he was the first director of the Botanic Gardens, some of them deal with botanical notes, but they also talk about his voyages in other areas of Southeast Asia, even to places like New York and things like that. So it’s not just research. What’s interesting for me was that in this particular one of his volumes, I think volume five, in 1907 or 1908, there was actually something that I found that was pretty interesting. He visited Walter William Skeat. He’s a famous author who wrote about Malay magic. Apparently, he found out that Skeat’s house in Kuala Lumpur… that a couple of his houses were pretty haunted. There were, shall we say, hauntings? Basically, he found out that the house had been bewitched by a pawang. So in English the closest equivalent would be like a wizard or something like that. Maybe in Malay it would be like a bomoh or something. So no one but those of the family of the man who bewitched the house in the first place could live there. So he had to get rid of it somehow. And so if you look at the notes, wow, there’s actually all kinds of stuff.

Jimmy
Okay, so a round axe has been found in what is now Tuas. And what’s been found in Pulau Ubin?

Shu Tieng
In Pulau Ubin, they’ve also found a couple of other round axes, but also something called a chip. What happens is that when you have a stone tool, it was actually a rock, then you try to make it and shape it into a stone tool. Basically you break pieces off it. Parts of those pieces, depending on what they are, they are called chips, stone chips. They found bits of that in Ubin, on the northwest point.

Jimmy
So they were found in Tanjong Karang and on Pulau Ubin. But Singapore is a small island, so actually around Singapore there have been significant finds as well.

Shu Tieng
That’s right. During that same period, they actually found some tools of a similar nature across the straits, in Johor. In Malay, it’s called Tebrau Straits, at a place called Tanjung Bunga. Some researchers actually found some stone tools there too. And it’s located very close to the one in Tanjong Karang, in Tuas. So there was one author, Roland St. Braddell, he actually thought there might be a connection between these two. But honestly no one’s really written about or tested this theory before. So if somebody is interested in writing or learning more, the materials are out there for people to do it.

Jimmy
Why aren’t you writing about them?

Shu Tieng
Well, maybe if I have the time.

Jimmy
Yeah, too busy doing other fun things. So we found stone tools in Tuas, we found stone tools on Pulau Ubin, we found stone tools in Johor, near the site in Tuas. It’s great. Isn’t this a sign of Fred Flintstone walking around Singapore?

Shu Tieng
Not exactly. We’re not sure how old these things are, actually. Because back then, I think radiocarbon dating was only done in Malaya in the 1960s. Before then, because these stone tools were found in the 1920s or before, a lot of them can’t be carbon dated. Because they’ve already been found, there’s no carbon materials associated with them. So how can we date them?

Jimmy
Okay, so this is what I didn’t realise: you cannot do radiocarbon dating on stone tools. Is that right?

Shu Tieng
Basically, radiocarbon dating is dating things that have carbon in them. So anything that was living has carbon, is carbon-based. You can basically study the half-life of the carbon. So it’s like 1,280 years, every 1,280 years, then basically the amount of carbon and the organism is halved after it dies. So you basically calculate the difference between when the organism was alive and when it’s dead. That’s how you derive a carbon date. But because stones are not carbon, you can’t do it.

Jimmy
I was like, why can’t we just… Oh, well, you know, it’s stone, they don’t have carbon.

Shu Tieng
Yeah. There are also other ways to date stone. There’s something called potassium-argon and argon-argon dating for dating materials that are older. They don’t rely on carbon necessarily. But because basically they date formulation dates, like when the stone tool was created, they don’t actually show you when it was being used, when it was being shaped. We have to rely on other materials to actually help us pinpoint a date.

Jimmy
How do archaeologists then pinpoint a date de décès of a stone tool? What do they have to do?

Shu Tieng
Okay, so I’ll just give you an example of a site in Bintan. They found one site recently. There’s a shell midden, and so what happens is that there’s a…

Jimmy 9:43
Let me stop you there: what’s a shell midden?

Shu Tieng
Think of a large mound, maybe about 3 to 5 m high. And it’s all majority. Yeah, 3–5 m in height. and majority of the materials are shell. That’s what a shell midden is. Sometimes maybe it’s the remnants of people eating all this shellfish and things like that and throwing it in a pile. That’s what you think of it. But somehow we found stone tools in it. When they dated this particular thing, you can actually see layers and levels. And you can date because let’s say this particular shell midden. Shell, of course, is carbon-related, so you can actually date the shell. So depending on what layer it was found in and how much further down, you can estimate a date based above and below the stone tool.

Jimmy
So you get the age of the shell nearby that tool, and then you get an idea of how old that tool is. We don’t actually know how old the ones from Singapore and in Johor are because there were no carbon-based life forms that died nearby that we’ve preserved. But can’t we just say, well, this piece looks like it’s 3,000 years old or something. You know, this is a stone tool, it must be like thousands of years old. Can’t we just make an educated guess?

Shu Tieng
Yes, actually. There are different methods of trying to find out the dates. What you are trying to say is that maybe there is something that. Maybe what you’re saying is something like, maybe there are other stone tools that are very similar to this one. So when those have dates, radiocarbon dates, then you can actually figure out, hey, you know, maybe this was actually during, let’s say, the Mesolithic period or the Paleolithic period or the Neolithic period. So these periods I’m talking about are when people think that, hey, this is like the age when man first started walking. Or when, for example, people started having agriculture. Neolithic was associated with that. For a lot of these tools, they think it might be pretty late – Neolithic period, the beginning of agriculture, the invention of pottery. There was one researcher who thought that one of these was about 4,000 BCE, we don’t know for sure. Maybe with further research and better dates, we’ll find out more for certain. But I think what’s most exciting is that there’s potential for other people finding the same thing. What most people don’t realise is that a lot of the archaeology is not actually found by archaeologists.

Jimmy
Really? What do you mean?

Shu Tieng
People look at these weird things and they’re like, hey, what is this thing? It doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen. A lot of times people will actually come to libraries or museums, and they’re like, hey, is this something special? So if you have seen the articles, you’ve seen the images, you’re like, hey, that looks like a stone tool. Usually that’s how people find them. Or, for archaeologists, they go to particular sites where they think it might be possible. But for the most part, this is how people find archaeological sites – people coming up to them and say, hey, I found this at the back of my house, do you think it’s important?

Jimmy
Can I ask: are the stone stools that have been found necessarily very old?

Shu Tieng
There’s a potential to be very old. In Malaysia, for example, there is one site called Bukit Bunuh in, I think, Perak. They’ve claimed that one of the stones tools there might be 1.8 million years old.

Jimmy
Mind-blowing.

Shu Tieng
Mind-blowing. There are some people who are a bit doubtful. They say, oh, yeah, it’s the site of a meteor crash or something like that. So, not quite sure, they’re still obviously discussing it. But it’s quite interesting that potentially our region might have something that old.

Jimmy
But could it be much younger?

Shu Tieng
It could also be much younger.

Jimmy
Like how much younger?

Shu Tieng
There’s a site called Bukit Kerang Kawal Darat in Indonesia in Bintan that I was talking about. There’s a radiocarbon date that suggests that it was in use between the 5th and 10th centuries, as late as that. It’s pretty old, but not that old. It’s like the metallic age, I think.

Jimmy
We’re not talking about Fred Flintstone anymore.

Shu Tieng
Yeah. I suspect that they were actually in use until pretty late, and they could have had a secondary use as well. For example, you find it but then you keep using it again. Or it could be an heirloom or things like that. It could also be used for rituals. I found evidence, for example, that it could have been used as a charm, that kind of thing. There are a lot of reasons why people would keep this sort of thing around.

Jimmy
So just because you found a stone tool, it doesn’t mean that it’s thousands and thousands of years old. It could just be a few hundred years old, which is still pretty old, but not thousands of years old.

Shu Tieng
There are a lot of possibilities. I think it’s a good field to go into, and if you’re interested. I mean, they’re there for people to research, and hopefully the library can provide some resources for people to do that.

Jimmy
Is it true to say that despite the stone tool that’s like 1.8 million years old, not very many stone tools have been found in this region, in comparison, say, to Europe?

Shu Tieng

In Europe, every time they do construction, they have to do some sort of impact assessment. That’s why they are able to find that many more stone tools and many more archaeological sites. In Singapore, for the Civic District especially, there’s been an effort by archaeologists to pinpoint and say, hey, we think there might be 14th-century materials here. But, for stone tools, I don’t think there’s an impact assessment sort of formulation for that yet. I suspect now that we know the size of these areas, people might be asked to just look out: if you see it, report it – that kind of thing. So at least people will be in the know and to leave it alone, I suppose.

Jimmy
There’s this thing called the bamboo hypothesis that archaeologists use, and you talk about it in your article. What is the bamboo hypothesis?

Shu Tieng
In Singapore, or actually in Southeast Asia, the development of stone tools was actually quite different. When you actually use stone tools, you spend more and more man-hours to make them smaller. They they become basically what you call microliths. Think of it as… you know how an axe or a chainsaw has many teeth, right? Basically, you create stones that can mimic that. In a certain period in Europe, they started creating stone tools small enough, maybe between one to four centimetres, to be hafted into a larger wooden platform. Then you can actually use them as a saw, things like that. Some of them are also small enough to become like arrow points and things like that. Instead of having larger objects where they’re like the size of your fist, or your palm, they become much smaller. In Southeast Asia, there seems to be a difference. We’re not sure why.

Jimmy
Difference in what?

Shu Tieng
Basically, it didn’t go that way. There’s a lot less incidences of smaller stone tools being reported. What happens is that in Southeast Asia, they’ve actually kept using the old fist-sized stone tools for a very long time. We’re not sure why that is. People said, hey, maybe they were using other different media. For example, they’re not using stone because stone is not necessarily very ideal. Maybe they were using wood, and that doesn’t actually leave a trace in the archaeological record. That’s why there’s this bamboo hypothesis – because bamboo grows very quickly, it’s very handy, you can use it for all kinds of things. You can use it as utensils like a bowl, things like that. People use it for steaming and things like that. It has a lot of uses in Southeast Asia that maybe in Europe, in other places, they don’t. So there’s this idea. Because of this bamboo hypothesis, that’s why the development of stone tools in Southeast Asia was a bit different.

Jimmy
It was replaced by bamboo.

Shu Tieng

Yeah, but it’s not clear, because there’s this tendency to really focus a lot of research in very good conditions. For example, they focus a lot of prehistoric research on caves. They can’t just focus on caves because obviously they don’t spend all that time in caves. If you’re in winter and you need to place a shelter, maybe caves are a good thing because you can last the winter in caves. But if you have really good weather, why would you spend so much time in caves, right?

Jimmy
Yeah. It’s dark, there are bats.

Shu Tieng

Yeah, so in Southeast Asia sometimes it doesn’t make sense. Not sure if this is really like a overstatement of what you actually find in the archaeological record. We don’t know. So what we need is actually more materials, more evidence from non-caves basically.

Jimmy
Okay, we’ve had archaeological digs done in Singapore, haven’t we? Can you tell us a little bit about some of the more interesting ones that have happened recently? When I say ‘recently’, in archaeological terms I mean in the last three decades, not like yesterday.

Shu Tieng
There were a lot of opportunities that I had. I did my undergraduate at NYU, New York University, in anthropology. And I was looking for a programme. I actually decided to choose a master’s programme here in NUS in Singapore, because I realised that they wanted to focus on Southeast Asian archaeology. And I felt like I wanted that particular focus. One of the people who actually worked on Singapore, on Singapore archaeology, was Professor John Miksic. He’s now retired, but he still occasionally works with students in NTU, Nanyang Technological University. He’s working on a few sites in Singapore, but primarily at Fort Canning. If you’ve never been to Singapore before, it’s actually a hilltop site that people thought was the site of the royal palace.

Jimmy
So John Miksic is now focusing a lot of his digs on Fort Canning – is that what you’re saying?

Shu Tieng
Yes, so basically since the 1980s, him and many of his research assistants have actually focused a lot of work on excavating one particular site in Fort Canning. This is called ‘FTC’, that’s the site code. What they found is actually a glass workshop, and also some very interesting, very high-quality materials that were probably for the elite. They think that it might be actually the site of a workshop for the royal palace.

Jimmy

What kind of things have they found?

Shu Tieng
I’ll just tell you something that is very rarely found – I think this is the only piece in Southeast Asia that they found. They found a piece of plate that has a compass, a Chinese compass, on it. This is actually quite unique. They think it might have been used for geomancy. Usually in Southeast Asia the use of geomancy is used by people in power and things like that. For glass, they didn’t have the ability to actually create glass in the 14th century themselves. So what they would do is actually import glass from, say, China or India, and actually melt it. This was a very important site. They could create bangles, workshop and things like that. So, quite interesting.

Jimmy
Wow. Okay, I did not know this.

Shu Tieng

If you want to see the artefacts, there’s actually a heritage gallery now on Fort Canning itself. I think it’s on Level 3. You can actually go see the artefacts and the new exhibit that’s there. They’ve recently refurbished it.

Jimmy
Those are the digs that are currently taking place. Have you yourself been involved in any any expeditions?

Shu Tieng
I’ve been involved in a few. Some of my major ones are mostly in Cambodia, but I’ve actually taken part in one in Indonesia. One of them – I’ll just explain first. For the Indonesian one, I was looking for Srivijayan sites. I was part of a team from the Asia Research Institute and we basically explored the Batanghari River. It’s close to Jambi in Sumatra. We were looking for Srivijayan sites along the river. We visited very, very famous sites like the Buddhist university of Muara Jambi, things like that. It’s really amazing. I was very lucky to have the opportunity. I’ve also excavated at the 10th-century capital city of Koh Ker in Cambodia. If you think of a stepped pyramid, I’ve excavated at the only stepped pyramid in Cambodia. We were looking for a settlement site there, evidence of settlements and things like that.

Jimmy
What does it feel like when you’re excavating something and you make this discovery? Have you found anything really amazing?

Shu Tieng
Ah, I would say that I have. Well, our team has. I’ll just put it that way; it’s a team effort, right? In archaeology, it’s always a team effort. When we were excavating the site called Tonle Snguot, which is basically just maybe 10 minutes’ walk north of the gate of Angkor Wat on the left. It’s basically an 11th- or 12th-century hospital site. We accidentally discovered a six-foot garden statue. It sort of made the news rounds in The Guardian and things like that. We were quite surprised. Pleased, but very surprised.

Jimmy
When was this?

Shu Tieng

This was… I can’t remember. It’s like 2017, 2018. It feels like a lifetime ago, especially after Covid.

Jimmy
Now with travel restrictions lifted, are you planning to go on any digs?

Shu Tieng
I did promise to go to Penang because, for my master’s, I was also studying stone tools. The stone tools, even though they’re in Singapore, they’ve actually done more research on the actual site itself. So there’s a site museum now in Penang, on the mainland side. It’s called Guar Kepah. They found a lot of really cool stuff, and I want to do a little bit more research there. But it’s hard to say when I’ll have the time, so hopefully, the powers-that-be.

Jimmy
There are far more interesting things to do at the library. Actually, that reminds me: you have a background in archaeology. What are you doing in the library?

Shu Tieng
People might not understand the shift, but actually excavation is a very, very small part of the whole process. At the very beginning before you excavate, you have to find a lot of information. At the end, when you find the materials, and you’re like, What the heck is this? And so you have to really find information. There are some things from our excavations that we still don’t have answers for. So here I am, to look for them. That’s on my own time, obviously. I didn’t join the library just because of that. But if I can help in efforts and things like that, then I’m happy to as well.

Jimmy
Fantastic. What would you say to someone, based on all your experience, who thinks they found a stone tool? Because you mentioned earlier that quite a lot of stone tools were actually found by regular people who are digging up their garden or something. If someone in Singapore came across what they thought might be a stone tool, what would be your advice to them?

Shu Tieng
My advice would be take a picture of it. Try not to move it around so much, because sometimes contact is really important. Take a picture of the surrounding area – is it a disturbed area? Has there been a lot of construction in the area? If there’s been a lot of construction, it might not actually be a stone tool. If it’s in a pristine area, there’s greater likelihood. Most of the people who actually find stone tools are actually construction people or people digging. There’s no more gardeners necessarily in Singapore anymore. But people who work in that kind of field, they’ve dug up stuff before: this doesn’t look like anything natural, it’s probably a stone tool. But it depends on…

Jimmy
So what you’re saying is take a picture and…

Shu Tieng
Maybe just report it to NHB, see what they think. Maybe they have experts on hand to help.

Jimmy
Okay. I’ve always wanted to be an archaeologist, but it always seemed like a lot of work, digging in the hot sun. If someone actually wanted to be an archaeologist or join in an archeological dig, could they do it in Singapore?

Shu Tieng
They could.

Jimmy

What would they need to do?

Shu Tieng
I would probably just say, especially I think if you’re in NTU, there’s a professor there, Dr Goh Geok Yian, she has some students studying pottery from Fort Canning. So if you want to do that route, you can actually do that. Occasionally there will be people who are asking for help during certain excavations, so if you are in contact with her, usually you will find out.

Jimmy
What kind of qualifications do you need to be an archaeologist?

Shu Tieng
I used to be fit.

Jimmy
That’s me, clearly not. But beyond that do you need academic qualifications?

Shu Tieng
To be an archaeologist – well, to be a professional archaeologist, you often have to have either an anthropology or an archaeology degree. That’s usually the case. But there are many people who have joined the profession with other degrees, so it’s not necessarily the end of the world if you don’t have one. I think the passion really matters. And all the better if you have something that you’re really, really interested in and don’t mind hours and hours of washing potsherds. Very, very menial tasks. But if you have very good patience, I think that’s the one thing. It’s one thing to wash potsherds for a week, it’s another thing to wash it for six months at a time. I think I’ve washed enough of potsherds in my time.

Jimmy
But have you found anything in the potsherds that you’ve washed?

Shu Tieng
Yes, obviously. We found maker’s marks and things like that. So hopefully everybody’s hours are counted and things like that. So we’ll be thanked hopefully at the end of the book as one of the excavation team. That’s our hope. That’s usually the hope.

Jimmy
Okay, what are you working on now?

Shu Tieng
Right now, for the library or?

Jimmy
For the library and for your archaeological stuff.

Shu Tieng
I’ll just talk about the library first, because I think maybe people are not sure what I do at the library. At the library, I do counter services. So if you ask me a question, I’ll help you look for the answers. But I also work with the Singapore digital resources team. I try to help find resources that are overseas about Singapore and try to help bring them back to Singapore.

Jimmy
Oh, that’s interesting. Like what?

Shu Tieng
For example, we’ve recently worked with the Royal Belgian Library. It’s basically the National Library of Belgium. It’s called the KBR for short. We’ve asked to recover some digital manuscripts and bring them back. Because sometimes they are so fragile, and we want to make them available to the general public. Eventually, what they’ll do is put them up on something called BookSG, and so you’ll be able to browse that manuscript.

Jimmy
So this manuscript currently resides in an archival library in Belgium?

Shu Tieng
That’s right. So you don’t have to actually travel to Belgium itself. You can just click a couple of buttons on the website and, there you go, the whole manuscript.

Jimmy
What else do you do at the library?

Shu Tieng
I think those are my main tasks. But I also helped write encyclopedia articles for Infopedia. I also write BiblioAsia articles. I mean, this is BiblioAsia+, so I try to give a bit more.

Jimmy
Thank you very much, Shu Tieng. We’ve covered quite a lot. If anyone is interested in learning more about stone tools in Singapore, they should check out Shu Tieng’s article on BiblioAsia. Shu Tieng, right now we come to the part of the podcast where we ask questions, and we want you to reply very quickly. And it’s not necessarily related to archaeology. Actually it’s not related to archaeology. My first question: who is the coolest person that you know of in Singapore history?

Shu Tieng
There are so many, I can’t choose one.

Jimmy
Okay, I’m gonna let you off the hook on that one because being an archaeologist, there must be millions of people that you could think of. Is there a historical figure anywhere in the world that you would like to have dinner with?

Shu Tieng
Okay, I can think of one person: Madeleine Colani. She was one of the first female archaeologists in Southeast Asia. She’s French, she worked on Vietnam. Well, since this podcast is about stone tools, I thought she would be appropriate. She basically invented this descriptive category called Hoabinhian. She’s very, very influential. They just recently, I think, yesterday or the day before, named a street after her, they even have a statue of her in Vietnam.

Jimmy
Oh, wow. What’s her name again?

Shu Tieng
Madeleine Colani.

Jimmy
Madeleine Colani. Okay, let me ask you: what book is on your nightstand?

Shu Tieng
Recently I haven’t really read that many books, but maybe I’ll talk about something that I recommended to the library recently. Philippe Beaujard’s The Worlds of the Indian Ocean, volume 2.

Jimmy
The Worlds of the Indian Ocean. Why would you recommend this book?

Shu Tieng
It looks at non-Eurocentric world history view of the Indian Ocean. It’s very, very interesting. It was written by Philippe Beaujard, who used to be the director of research at CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique). But I find that sometimes he’s a bit of a lazy citer. I’m not sure if it’s the English translation. It’s published by Cambridge University, but it’s at the library. So if you want to see it…

Jimmy
How do I spell his last name?

Shu Tieng
BEAUJARD.

Jimmy
Très bien. Complete the sentence: history is…

Shu Tieng
Contentious.

Jimmy
Okay, I like that. BiblioAsia is…

Shu Tieng
Noteworthy.

Jimmy
Reply very quickly without thinking: I’ll say something to you, and I just want to get your immediate response. Indiana Jones!

Shu Tieng
Tomb raider.

Jimmy
You’re an archaeologist! Do you think Indiana Jones has been a plus or a minus for archaeology?

Shu Tieng
Indiana Jones has been a plus. It has popularised the field, I would say, more than it has detracted. But technically he was a very bad archaeologist. I mean, you kind of want to preserve it, right?

Jimmy
I got to say that the Indiana Jones movies are still my favourite movies. But thank you, Shu Tieng, for joining me on BiblioAsia+. To learn more about the mysterious stone tools of Singapore, check out Shu Tieng’s article on the BiblioAsia website at BiblioAsia.nlb.gov.sg. Thanks, Shu Tieng!

Shu Tieng
No problem, Jimmy.

Jimmy
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Foo Shu Tieng, “Singapore's Stone Tools,” BiblioAsia 18(4), 2023.

John N. Miksic, Singapore & The Silk Road of the Sea: 1300–1800 (Singapore: NUS Press and National Museum Singapore). (From National Library, Singapore, call no. RSING 959.57 MIK-[HIS])

Henry Nicholas Ridley, HN Ridley’s Notebooks, vols. 2–6, 1880–1909, National Library of Australia. (From National Archives of Singapore, accession no. M771)

Alexandra Avieropoulou Choo, Archaeology: A Guide to the Collections, National Museum Singapore, ed. Jane Puranananda (Singapore: National Museum of Singapore, 1987). (From National Library, Singapore, call no. RSING 934.1074095957 CHO)

Michael Gurven and Kim Hill, “Why Do Women Hunt? A Reevaluation of ‘Man the Hunter’ and the Sexual Division of Labor,” Current Anthropology 50, no. 1 (February 2009), 51. (From EBSCOHOST via NLB’s eResources website)

This episode of BiblioAsia+ was hosted by Jimmy Yap and produced by Soh Gek Han. Sound engineering was done by Gibson Analytics. The background music "Di Tanjong Katong" was composed by Ahmad Patek and performed by Chords Haven. Special thanks to Shu Tieng for coming on the show.

The BiblioAsia Podcast by the National Library Singapore tells stories about Singapore history.