Van Bemmelen's The Geology of Indonesia (1949)

Properties2
tagsevent, source-document, dutch, colonial, geological-survey
aliasesThe Geology of Indonesia (1949), Van Bemmelen 1949, Geology of Indonesia Vol. II, Van Bemmelen's Economic Geology

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Van Bemmelen’s The Geology of Indonesia (1949) is the standard two-volume colonial-era survey of the geology of the Netherlands East Indies, written by R. W. van Bemmelen — former member of the Netherlands Indies Geological Survey and head of the Netherlands Indies Volcanological Survey — and published as a Special Edition of the Bureau of Mines in Indonesia by the Government Printing Office at The Hague, with Martinus Nijhoff as sole agents. The second volume, Economic Geology, is the most comprehensive printed survey of the mineral wealth of the East Indies and is the principal source for the colonial mineralogical record of Atjeh and the rest of northern Sumatra. The work is treated as a single-event source-document in this wiki because nearly every mineral-locality entry for Atjeh draws, directly or indirectly, on the data Van Bemmelen compiled.

Publication details

The Geology of Indonesia was published in 1949 by the Government Printing Office (Algemeene Landsdrukkerij) at The Hague, with Martinus Nijhoff as sole agents. The work was issued as a Special Edition of the Bureau of Mines in Indonesia, under the authority of the Departement van Verkeer, Energie en Mijnbouw (Department of Transport, Energy and Mining) of the Netherlands East Indies — a publication context that places the work firmly within the institutional output of the colonial mining service, despite its post-war publication date. Van Bemmelen’s authorship is identified on the title page as “Former Member of the Netherlands Indies Geological Survey, and Head of the Netherlands Indies Volcanological Survey”.

The work is divided into two volumes:

  • Vol. I: the general geology of the East Indies (stratigraphy, tectonics, volcanism, geomorphology).
  • Vol. II: Economic Geology — the mineral resources of the East Indies, organised under four main parts: organic minerals (petroleum, natural gas, coal, asphalt), ores (tin, gold and silver, copper, lead and zinc, manganese, iron, aluminium, nickel, cobalt, antimony, mercury, molybdenite, bismuth), non-metallic industrial minerals (sulphur, phosphate, iodine, limestone, clay, kaolin, quartz-sand, pumice, trass, diamond), and minerals not yet produced at the time of writing.

Atjeh material in Vol. II

The Atjeh material in Vol. II is scattered through every section, but is densest in the chapters on:

Place in the colonial geological literature

Van Bemmelen’s Geology of Indonesia is the culminating synthesis of the colonial geological literature on the East Indies. It draws on the printed reports of the Netherlands Indies Geological Survey (the Verslagen en Mededeelingen series, the Jaarboek van het Mijnwezen, and the various monographs of individual geologists), on the unpublished “Geol. Survey Report, Arch. Bur. of Mines” material, and on Van Bemmelen’s own extensive field-experience as a member of the Geological Survey and head of the Volcanological Survey. The work accordingly consolidates, in a single English-language text, the scattered Dutch reports on the mineral geography of the East Indies — including the Atjeh reports that had previously been available only in Dutch or in unpublished archival form.

The work’s publication in 1949 — in the difficult immediate post-war period, when the surviving archives of the colonial mining service were being reconstituted after the 1942–1945 Japanese occupation — gives it an additional historical significance as the principal printed survivor of the colonial geological literature. Many of the unpublished reports that Van Bemmelen cites (in the form “Geol. Survey Report, Arch. Bur. of Mines 40/ba”) may not have survived the Japanese occupation in their original form, and Van Bemmelen’s citations accordingly provide, in some cases, the only surviving record of their content.

Significance

Van Bemmelen’s Geology of Indonesia (Vol. II, Economic Geology) is significant for the encyclopedia of Acheh history because it is, for the colonial period, the single most comprehensive printed source on the mineral geography of Atjeh. Almost every entry on this wiki that concerns an Atjeh mineral locality, oil field, coal seam, or mining concession draws, directly or indirectly, on the data Van Bemmelen compiled. The work also preserves — in the form of citations, page-references, and footnotes — the names and dates of a generation of Dutch mining engineers and geologists whose own reports often survive only in the archives of the Bureau of Mines at Bandung. The work’s publication in 1949 — after the Japanese occupation and on the eve of Indonesian independence — also gives it an additional historical significance as the principal printed survivor of the colonial geological literature, and as the baseline against which later Indonesian geological work has been measured.

See Also

Source

The Geology of Indonesia, by R. W. van Bemmelen, Vol. II: Economic Geology (The Hague: Government Printing Office; sole agents Martinus Nijhoff, 1949). Special Edition of the Bureau of Mines in Indonesia, Department of Transport, Energy and Mining, Batavia. Pp. 1–267 (with literature references pp. 245–250, list of figures pp. 251–253, and index pp. 255–257).

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