Iban

The Iban are a Dayak people of north-western Borneo, spread across Sarawak, Brunei and upper Kapuas lands, speaking a Malayic language in riverside longhouses called rumah panjai. Their name began as an exonym, the Kayan hivan, meaning wanderer; before the nineteenth century they called themselves after the rivers they settled. Oral traditions place their first home at Tembawai Tampun Juah in Sanggau.

From the 1550s, driven by war and the search for rice land, they crossed into Sarawak, first settling the Batang Lupar; over five generations their longhouses spread along several rivers. Earlier peoples like the Bukitan were absorbed by intermarriage; clashes with the Ukits and others nearly destroyed those groups.

By the early 1800s Iban migrants were entering the Rejang basin. Their mobile warring society was famed for headhunting, tied to the war god Sengalang Burong's rites, and shifting hill-rice cultivation.