Political dynamics and religious change in the late pre-colonial Banda Islands, Eastern Indonesia Peter V. Lape Abstract Recently completed archaeological survey and excavation, in conjunction with a re-analysis of historical documents and oral histories, brings to light new evidence about the pre-colonial (tenth to seventeenth centuries) society of the Banda Islands, once the world’s sole source of nutmeg. The new data challenge historical assumptions about settlement, Islamization and the nature of trade networks in pre-colonial Banda. They also have implications for the history of conict between Bandanese and European colonizers, which resulted in genocide, enslavement or forced migration of the Bandanese population in the 1620s, and the beginning of the colonial era in what is today Indonesia. Keywords Culture contact; colonialism; Islamization; spice trade; Indonesia; Maluku. Island Southeast Asia was in many ways the ultimate goal of European explorers and traders during the ‘age of discovery’, and the site of some of the earliest European colonial projects. As for other colonial sites in the New World and Africa, historical documents dating from the earliest days of colonialism in Island Southeast Asia are overwhelmingly penned by Europeans. Island Southeast Asia was also a place of unprecedented intensity of long-distance trade and cross-cultural interaction for centuries before the arrival of Europeans, but the pre-colonial documentary record is fragmentary. These factors make the region an ideal, though largely unexplored, place for the archaeological study of culture contact and colonialism. This paper presents a summary of the results of an archaeological and historical investi- gation into culture contact in the Banda Islands of what is today the eastern Indonesian province of Maluku (see Lape in prep. for a comprehensive discussion of the research). These eleven small volcanic islands were once the world’s sole source of nutmeg and mace, the ‘fragrant gold’ that later helped nance the riches of seventeenth-century Holland. While it was historically important as the rst foothold of what became the Dutch empire World Archaeology Vol. 32(1): 138– 155 Archaeology in Southeast Asia © Taylor & Francis Ltd 2000 0043– 8243