Taiwan Archaeology

Contemporary impressions of Taiwan’s relations with Southeast Asia tend to focus on flows of labor, capital, tourism, and marriage. Countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand carry the impression that they are the origins of cheap, sometimes easily exploitable, migrant labor for employers in Taiwan. Many people in Taiwan also see the former two countries as sources of brides for lower-income men. These same countries, along with Cambodia and, to a lesser degree, Malaysia, are locations where Taiwanese capital is invested in factories for low-cost labor, proximity to Taiwan and China, and the relative absence of political contentiousness for being Taiwanese. With the advent of cheap air travel, Taiwan and Southeast Asia also offer the middle class in these areas options for quick holiday getaways. These interactions and the condescension toward Southeast Asia that sometimes accompany them belie the rich history of interactions that Taiwan and Southeast Asia share.

http://www.nbr.org/research/activity.aspx?id=831

Taiwan presents a puzzling anomaly in the development and expansion of South and Southeast Asian trade routes. The lack of historical records from the island emphasises the value of archaeology for understanding the establishment of trade and the transmission of people, ideas and knowledge. Recent research focusing on newly excavated sites such as Jiuxianglan shows that the Metal Age in Taiwan began around 400 BC, much earlier than was previously thought. Furthermore, it seems that early trade predominantly prioritised links to the south, and not,
curiously, with Mainland China to the immediate west as had traditionally been supposed.

Regarding the jade and jade-like artefacts unearthed from Khao Sam Kaeo, new research has explored the use of different raw materials and relations with inter-regional trade networks. Geochemical analysis offers a way to identify the geological sources of the stone materials, potentially involving long-distance movements. In conjunction with those findings, studies of workshop debris provide information about how the artefacts were produced and how the evident crafting styles may have been linked across the regions of Mainland and Island Southeast Asia.

Local craft production is evident in workshop debris at the site. The unearthed artefacts include complete objects and related worked fragments such as drilled-out cores, cut square blanks, and small cut fragments. Most of these materials were used for manufacturing ornaments such as the lingling-o penannular earrings, the double animal-headed ear pendants, bracelets, and pendants. In order to learn the geological sources of the green stones used to make these ornaments at Khao Sam Kaeo, 28 artefacts were examined through a series of non-invasive analyses by a low-vacuum scanning electron microscope (LVSEM) equipped with an energy dispersive X-ray (EDS) spectrometer. The results show those objects and worked fragments can be grouped into three major categories of nephrite jade (17 samples), green mica (8 samples), and quartzite (2 samples). The geological sources included nephrite from Taiwan, mica from the Philippines, and quartzite from an unknown source. Among 17 specimens of nephrite, 12 of them are comparable to the Fengtian nephrite source in Eastern Taiwan. However, another 5 nephrite specimens were too weathered to analyze for making a final conclusion of their geological source. In addition to the nephrite from Taiwan, some of the artefacts were made of mica similar in chemistry to that from Mindoro Island in the Philippines. Khao Sam Keo became the first prehistoric jewellery workshop in Southeast Asia with a significant amount of mica-ornament production. Moreover, quartzite was used to produce a bracelet here.

This study indicates that the stone jewellery production at Khao Sam Kaeo can be situated in a larger regional network or perhaps a number of such networks. Multiple overseas sources are evident in the raw materials. Additionally, the similar production method and ornament style of jade and mica link these findings to the contemporaneous traditions as documented at production sites distributed all around the South China Sea, such as in Southern Taiwan, the Philippines, and Southern Vietnam.

Based on the new findings, two hypotheses are developed about the origins of the responsible craftsmen and production techniques. The first hypothesis proposes different backgrounds in origin or training for the craftsmen of jade versus the craftsmen of mica objects. Each group owned the raw materials or could access the raw material. For nephrite, perhaps a group of specialised craftsmen from Eastern Taiwan, Southern Vietnam, or the Philippines migrated into Khao Sam  Kaeo. The second hypothesis proposes that local craftsmen at Khao Sam Kaeo knew the necessary  skills for nephrite and mica production from other regions, but several points remain uncertain,  such as how the skills were learned and how people obtained the raw materials from overseas. According to the archaeological findings at Khao Sam Kaeo, the site was strongly connected in extensive maritime trade networks, linking with Taiwan, the Philippines, Borneo, coastal Southern Vietnam, Cambodia, and beyond at approximately 400 through 100 BC. Future  studies will be needed to understand how those overseas raw materials, techniques, and perhaps craftsmen reached to Khao Sam Kaeo.

With more published chemical analyses of glass beads in Southeast Asia and southern China in the last decade, it is becoming possible to discuss the regional and temporal patterns of prehistoric glass in these areas. This article focuses on the late 1 st millennium BC to the 1 st millennium AD, reviewing the chemical compositions of glass in Taiwan, Southeast Asia and southern China, in an attempt to understand the potential relationships between the three regions.

Archaeological research has revealed a long history of glass bead exchange and use in Taiwan, yet it has seldom been discussed in the literature. This paper provides an introduction to this exchange from the Iron Age (ca. late 1st millennium BC - mid-2nd millennium AD) to the early modern period (ca. AD 1600-1900) by revisiting the archaeological and historical records. It is suggested that changes in bead styles and chemical compositions over time reveal the transition of bead supply in Taiwan, which further reflects two broad phases of bead trade: Phase I) the earlier involvement of Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific bead exchange (1st millennium AD) and Phase II) the later cultural and economic contacts between the indigenous people, Chinese merchants, and Europeans (2nd millennium AD).

Recent multidisciplinary research on the Palaeolithic to Neolithic transition has confirmed several stages of cultural development dated between 20,000 BC and 1500 BC in southern China, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. The patterns of habitation, settlement, subsistence, and material culture underwent remarkable changes at certain points during this long time sequence, and even whole populations were replaced or massively transformed. This updated synthesis of new research findings will focus the discussion on the archaeological evidence from Taiwan and its neighboring regions, especially from northern Luzon in the Philippines, and the Marianas of western Micronesia.

This study aims to clarify the characteristics of early coastal peoples in Southeast China and their relationship to the emergence of a Neolithic transition in this region. In prior decades, the region’s pottery-bearing Neolithic sites were thought to reflect rice farming societies (which were identified as an “Early Neolithic Culture”) linked to ancient Austronesian language groups. However, these beliefs may need to be revised now that archaeological findings have revealed an ongoing reliance on coastal and maritime resources, rather than rice agriculture, in this region since about 5000 BC, or even much earlier. More specifically, the evidence suggests that mixed-origin complex foragers successfully occupied the coastal zones of Fujian (福建), Guangdong (广东), Guangxi (广西), Hainan (海南), and perhaps Taiwan (台湾) around 5000 to 3000 BC. Only later did these groups experience variable degrees of cultural transformation and move towards rice agriculture as a result of their contact with migrating farmers from the middle and lower Yangtze Valley.

Glass beads and beadmaking waste have been excavated at the Iron Age site of Jiuxianglan (ca. third century BC–eighth century AD) in southeastern Taiwan. It was suggested that this site may be a production and exchange centre of glass beads in Iron Age Taiwan. This paper presents the analysis of 44 samples, to explore the relationship between glass beads and waste and the nature of bead production at Jiuxianglan. The analysis combines data on style, chemical composition, microstructure and distribution of glass beads and waste. The results do not show a compositional or structural match between the glass beads and glass waste, suggesting that the glass beads may not have been produced at this site.

Malcom Ross’s new theory of early Austronesian phylogeny is examined. Idescribe evidence that *-en served to mark verbs in undergoer voice, patientsubject, in a language ancestral to Puyuma, as well as evidence that *<in>occurs in some verbs in undergoer voice, patient subject perfective, in one socio-lect of Nanwang Puyuma. This evidence falsifies the claim that Puyuma reflects an early Austronesian stage at which *-en and *<in> had not yet been reinter- preted from nominalizers into voice markers. It also falsi
fies the phylogeny thattakes that putative innovation as its central event. A hypothetical scenario isoffered to account for the replacement of the *-en, *-an, and *Si- (or *Sa-) seriesof voice markers by the series now found in Puyuma independent verbs.

In this paper we focus on the column-shaped tombstone as an obvious relict of Taiwan's colonial history under the Japanese. The column seems to have been introduced in Taiwan and Penghu by the Japanese themselves, for their own people or for Taiwanese who had died while serving the Japanese empire. This tombstone form is thus mostly found in the years of WWII, but even before the column developed in some regions into a local tradition, e.g. in Penghu, or into a family tradition, e.g. in Tainan. This tradition was traded even after KMT arrived and chased the traces of Japanese culture.

This study reports a cranio-morphometric analysis of female human remains from seven archaeological sites in China, Vietnam and Taiwan that date between 16,000 and 5300 BP. The aim of the analysis is to test the "two-layer" model of human dispersal in eastern Eurasia, using previously unanalysed female remains to balance the large sample of previously-analysed males. The resulting craniometric data indicate that the examined specimens all belong to the "first layer" of dispersal, and share a common ancestor with recent Australian and Papuan populations, and the ancient Jomon people of Japan. The analysed specimens pre-date the expansion of agricultural populations of East/ Northeast Asian origin-that is, the "second layer" of human dispersal proposed by the model. As a result of this study, the two-layer model, which has hitherto rested on evidence only from male skeletons, is now strongly supported by female-derived data. Further comparisons reveal that the people of the first layer were closer in terms of their facial morphology to modern Africans and Sri Lankan Veddah than to modern Asians and Europeans, suggesting that the Late Pleistocene through Middle Holocene hunter-gatherers examined in this study were direct descendants of the anatomically modern humans who first migrated out of Africa through southern Eurasia.