Spice Trade in Sundaland

Southeast Asia is famous for its spices which were traded as far as Rome, Egypt, India, China and Japan over land and sea. Later in the colonial era Europeans set up businesses such as the Dutch East India Company which went as far as funding their own private navies and armies in order to acquire these spices.

As with one of my previous posts: How to Start a Bronze Age: Metal Resources in Sundaland, having an idea about how resources are distributed can give you inspiration for the creation of cultures, factions, cities and kingdoms. You can use those as springboards for creating adventure scenarios.

Although many of these spices are now found all over the area I tried to find out where they were originally growing. It seems some spices like Nutmeg and Cloves were only found on a couple of small islands in what are now known as the Maluka Islands. The people who lived there became very wealthy as a result.

It's been really interesting to read about how this area of the world supposedly started the cultivation of sugarcane and that ginger was first cultivated in this region as well.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to come up with some new spices or plants that are only found in the central areas of Sundaland. These don't have to be limited to those for use in cooking. As you can read below the Areca Nut and Betel leaf are used for psychoactive effects (with horrible side-effects).

A natural resource that was very important in ancient times that I haven't covered in either of these two resource posts is salt. I haven't found any sources that speak specifically about salt mining in this area and as this paper (Empire Building in Southeast Asia The Importance of Salt) mentions many salt extracting activities would have taken place by the sea, so evidence of salt extraction from water is now also under water. Salt was historically a very important commodity, sometimes even used as currency, so it's worth thinking about how to include it.

Areca Nut
Betel
Candlenut
Cinnamon
Clove
Eucalyptus
Ginger A cultigen, non naturally occurring plant that originated in this area.
Kencur
Lengkuas
Long Pepper
Mace
Nutmeg
Sugarcane
Piper Cubeba
Turmeric

I've added two natural resources to the map that are not spices but were considered valuable:

Bird of Paradise for their feathers.
Sperm Whale for their meat and the oily / waxy substance Spermaceti.

Here's an interesting article about old whale hunting techniques that are still practiced in Indonesia today: Hunting Whales With Rowing Boats and Spears