Historical Changes of Toba Batak Reburial Tombs

Introduction

 The  homeland of the Toba Batak extends over the central highland of North Sumatra in Indonesia. When traveling in the area around Lake Toba, one encounters a distinctive landscape characterized by Christian churches with crosses on the top of the steeple and a wide variety of tombs which appear to compete one another in splendor. Such tombs are especially numerous in the regions on the southeastern shore of the lake called Toba Holbung and the island of Samosir (Map 1).

     A great many of the Toba Batak have converted to Christianity (mainly Lutheran) as a result of the missionary undertaking by a Gernlan Protestant mission (Rheinischen Missions-Gesellshaft) which established itself in the northern Tapanuli in the 1860s [Pedersen 1970: 47-72]. Nowadays most of the Toba Batak are Christian, although the precise number can not be ascertained owing to the lack of statistics classified according to ethnic affiliations after the Revolution (a war of independence against the Netherlands in the period 1945-1949).

     The custom of reburial, as Metcalf and Huntington [1991] discuss, is found in several ethnic groups in Indonesia, including the Dayak of Kalimantan analyzed by Hertz [1960] in his pioneering study on mortuary practices. As documented, for instance, by Vergouwen [1964: 70-73] and Warneck [1909: 84-85], the Toba Batak also traditionally practiced the reburial ritual accompanied by the slaughter of water buffaloes and cattle whereby the bones of ancestors who had been dead for several years were exhumed and transferred to a reburial tomb. Although the German mission prohibited the custom of reburial for the purposes of ancestor worship in the first quarter of this century, this restriction was not necessarily observed [Schreiner 1994: 174]. Consequently the custom of reburial by the Christian Toba has survived to the present time. A large number of splendid tombs standing together in Toba homeland are reburial tombs in which the exhumed bones of ancestors are deposited.

     There is a considerable variation in the type and size of Toba Batak reburial tombs. Barbier [1983: 113-139] elucidates that traditionally Toba reburial tombs were funerary mounds of earth and stone tombs such as sarcophagi as well as stone urns. He also remarks on another type of the tomb: "the introduction of the powder stone called cement in the nineteen twenties has made it possible to build increasingly gigantic tombs" [ibid. : 113]. In recent decades the Toba themselves became aware that the proliferation of reburial tombs was a phenomenon quite distinctive in Toba Batak society [Gultom 1991: 10; Hutagalung 1986: 185; Lumbantoruan 1974: v; Pasaribu 1986: 175]. As Bruner [1973: xii] points out, most of the funds for the construction of reburial tombs which cost a great deal were provided by Toba Batak urban migrants in the cities who had become economically successful in business, the professions, and government.