Timeline (300 BC - 1 AD) (Tongkoko)

''By 300 BC, trade contact between Southeast Asia and India had folded the Malay-inhabited islands of Java and Sumatra into a larger Hindu-Buddhist, Sanskrit-speaking cultural universe. Wet-field rice cultivation had long since taken hold, allowing the development of petty kingdoms in the river valleys which were now conglomerating into larger principalities. Passed along through the more remote chiefdoms of Sulawesi and Borneo, small quantities of a little-known spice, cloves, were provoking wild interest in China, India, and as far away as Rome and Arabia, provoking the coastal kingdoms of Java and Sumatra to try to cut out these middlemen and reach the source of the spice themselves...''

Initial Contacts
Historians, lacking inscriptions, know few of the precise details of this period of history in insular Southeast Asia; they do know, however, that although the petty kingdoms of Kutai in southern Borneo or Bima east of Java likely spearheaded the eastward search for the source of increasingly valuable cloves, exploring the coasts of Sulawesi and Halmahera in the early 200s BC, the flow of cloves northwestward fell into the hands of Kedah, a powerful mercantile state on the Malay Peninsula.

There is strong archaeological evidence that Malay mariners from Borneo had established relatively firm trade contacts on Papua, including the construction of at least seasonal settlements, by 270 BC. Although cloves alone were insufficiently valuable to sustain this contact, initial trade links with the Papuans of the Bird's Head Peninsula gave rise to the realization among the Malay merchants that Papua contained a multiplicity of potentially valuable trade goods, from birds of paradise feathers, to rare woods such as ebony, to pearls. They pushed south along the coast of Papua to the Merauke River, trading with a diversity of tribes, and often establishing semi-permanent settlements. This initial period of contact lasted for perhaps 50 years, until around 220 BC, when archaeological evidence of the Malay presence disappears abruptly. Historians theorize that this withdrawal occurred due to shifting trade relations; most of the goods available in Papua were also available from Borneo, and with extended contact reducing the value of metal tools, Malay livestock, and other trade goods, the longer voyage was no longer justified. The Malays also simply transplanted clove trees to a number of the Moluccas and to Sulawesi around this time, obviating any especial need to sail to Papua.

Yet the relatively brief Malay presence left behind an array of changes. Most importantly, it left behind wet-field rice cultivation, something easily adapted to Papua's high rainfall, swampy terrain, and long tradition of building terraces, which would give rise to a lowland population explosion. Along with rice came less important crops, like millet, barley, wheat and cotton, along with cattle, water buffalo, horses, donkeys, goats and sheep, all of which would transform cultural and economic life across the island. Finally, Malay contact had established metallurgy among a number of tribes on the southern coast, which would have its own sweeping consequences.