Introduction

Quaternary research in Indonesia developed rapidly beginning in the late 1970s because of the activities of Indonesian, French, Dutch, and Japanese teams (e.g., Saint-Marc and Suminta, 1979; Sémah et al., 1980; De Vos et al., 1982; Sartono, Sémah, and Djubiantono, 1984; Watanabe and Kadar, 1985; F. Sémah, 1986). Understandably, research focused mainly on Java, where sites with human remains have been known for more than a century. Comparable information on the Plio–Pleistocene strata in other areas of Indonesia is not yet available to give a complete synthesis of the region, and this chapter is therefore restricted to the island of Java.

The manuscript for this chapter was initially submitted in 1984, with revisions to certain essential points in 1991. The time-scale values have been corrected in the text according to orbitally tuned calibration, as discussed in the editor's Preface. It was not possible, however, to include a balanced review of all the work that has been published in the past decade, and this report must therefore be considered as a reflection of the state of the art in the mid-1980s.

Geological background

Exhaustive field work by Dutch geologists during the first half of the century was fairly well summarized by Van Bemmelen (1949) and Marks (1957). This report follows the standard terminology of Marks (1957) for Javanese formations, in order to maintain a connection with previous works, without implying acceptance of the chronostratigraphic meanings and correlations proposed by earlier authors. In our view, the assignment of formation names has been overdone in publications dealing with Javanese stratigraphy, particularly with regard to the Plio–Pleistocene.