Austronesian cultures played a major role in Taiwan's prehistory,
which lasted until the early seventeenth century. With clues
uncovered in excavations, archaeologists are slowly piecing together
a picture of Taiwan's history before the arrival of record keepers.
Recorded history pales in comparison with the vast unknown of prehistory. It is chronicled in decades and centuries, while prehistory represents millenniums of unknown doings. But nothing peaks the curiosity like a mystery, and over the past hundred years scientists armed with hoes and sifters have been turning up evidence of Taiwan's rich prehistory. To date, around 1,300 archaeological sites on the island have been slated for study or are currently being excavated, according to Tsang Cheng-hwa, director of the National Museum of Prehistory, located in Taitung, a city on the eastern coast of Taiwan. So move over Han Chinese immigrants, Dutch invaders, and Japanese colonialists, Taiwan's earliest dwellers are finally getting some attention.
Evidence of prehistoric man from the Paleolithic Age has been located at a number of sites around the island. In 1971, fossils of human teeth and skull fragments were unearthed in Tainan County's Tsochen Township. These remains are believed to belong to the earliest human inhabitants of Taiwan, the Tsochen man, an example of homo sapiens that lived between 20,000 and 30,000 years ago. Tsochen man so far holds the record as the earliest form of human species on Taiwan, but fossils of human bones found several years ago in Dagongshan in Kaohsiung County's Ahlien Township might predate Tsochen man. Scientists are still researching the possibility.
One of the intriguing questions that arise from the discoveries is where did these prehistoric humans come from. Some believe that geology holds the answer. Formed by friction between the Eurasian plate and the Philippine Sea plate, Taiwan island was separated from the mainland only by a gash cut into the earth's surface by glaciers during the Ice Age. Prehistoric humans could have made their way to Taiwan and then been cut off by the waters of the melting glaciers, which formed the Taiwan Strait. Accordingly, Taiwan's earliest dwellers might well be part of the prehistoric cultures known to have flourished on the mainland.
The first culture believed to have taken root in Taiwan is the Changpin Culture, named for the discovery of its remnants around Taitung's Changpin Township. The Changpin flourished, it is believed, until 5,000 years ago, when the Neolithic Age started on the island. Evidence suggests that another group of people, the Austronesians, reached Taiwan sometime around the end of the Paleolithic Age or the beginning of the Neolithic Age. Descendants of the Austronesians have created various myths regarding their ancestry, but archaeologists and anthropologists believe that they are related to peoples on the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean. Austronesians are thought to have inhabited an area stretching from Taiwan in the far north to New Zealand in the south.
If these people are the ancestors of Taiwan's early inhabitants, did they move southward from Taiwan or arrive from points south of the island? The debate is unsettled, but the view that the migration flowed southward has gained the upper hand, according to Tsang Cheng-hwa of the National Museum of Prehistory, an institution established in 2001 to collect and exhibit the remains of Taiwan's earliest cultures. He himself believes that the evidence puts the origin of the Austronesian peoples of the Pacific in China, whence they migrated south to Southeast Asia and east to Taiwan. "You can find cultural similarities between Taiwan's Austronesian peoples and the now extinct Hundred Yueh people that used to exist in China's southeast coast," Tsang remarks.
The argument for the southward migration also has the support of Paul Li, a research fellow at the Preparatory Office of the Institute of Linguistics at Academia Sinica. The linguist points out that in an attempt to trace Austronesian peoples to an earlier origin, many scholars agree that pre-Austronesian peoples most likely originated in the north of Myanmar, moved along China's Yangtze River before reaching the mainland's southeast coast, and then migrated to Taiwan where they became known as Austronesians.
Whatever their origin, these Austronesian peoples are generally believed to have developed indigenous cultures in Taiwan since the Neolithic Age, between 2,000 and 6,500 years ago. Around 80 percent of Taiwan's archaeological sites belong to this period. Neolithic Age cultures are marked by the cultivation of plants, the domestication of wild animals, and the making and use of pottery. Taiwan's earliest known culture in this period is called Tapenkeng, evidence of which is mainly seen in the north of the island. Later Neolithic cultures in Taiwan include Yuanshan in the north, Niumatou in the central region, Niuchoutzu in the south, and Peinan in the east.
Around 2,000 years ago, Taiwan entered the Iron Age, the last stage in the prehistoric timeline and a period characterized by the general use of iron as the basic material for implements and weapons. It is believed that during this time prehistoric cultures in different areas of Taiwan may have come to resemble the cultures of aboriginal tribes recorded in historical documents. Iron Age cultures in Taiwan include the Shisanhang in the north, Fantzuyuan in the central region, Niaosung in the south, and Chingpu in the east. The last one is also known as the Ami Culture, since some archaeologists believe it to be the direct cultural ancestor of the Ami, the most populous of Taiwan's extant indigenous tribes.
Taiwan's prehistory ended in the first half of the seventeenth century, when writing first appeared on the island. The invading Dutch not only kept written records about their time on the island, but also taught the Siraya tribe, a branch of the Pingpu people, to write its own language in a romanized script. Meanwhile, a steady flow of Han people emigrated to Taiwan to avoid war, famine, and piracy along the coast of the mainland. Before long Cheng Cheng-kung, a Han Chinese sea captain, held sway over the Taiwan Strait with his powerful fleet of ships. In 1662 he drove the Dutch from Taiwan and established a base from which to launch attacks against the Manchurian rulers who had founded the Ching Dynasty on the mainland. Under Cheng's brief rule, the Chinese extended political control over the coastal plains, and local indigenous peoples were either drawn further into the Chinese fold or driven into the central mountains.
At about this time, the name of Taiwan started to show up in records. Many believe that the name entered Chinese from the Pingpu language. In the reign of Ming Dynasty's Wan Li Emperor (1573-1620), fishermen from the coastal province of Fujian sailed to Taiwan's southwest coast, around the area of Tainan. When they asked the Siraya people what they called the region, they were told that they were in "Taywan." Once referring to the Tainan area only, the name Taiwan has been applied to the entire island at least since 1683, when the Ching Dynasty officially incorporated it into its territory.
Today, the Siraya language has already fallen into disuse, and the plains-dwelling Pingpu people, once organized into more than ten tribes, have nearly disappeared. Even aborigines living in remote mountain areas were gradually affected by the spreading of Han civilization. As the Chinese exerted control over more and more of the island, some indigenous peoples vanished altogether while others clung to an ever-shrinking area not under Chinese control.
Modern technology accelerated the process, for along with electricity came radios and televisions. And through them the aboriginal peoples were further exposed to outside cultures that slowly reshaped their own linguistic and cultural practices. Paul Li recalled taking scholarly surveys among Taiwan's aboriginal groups over thirty years ago when electricity was rarely used among aborigines. "The aborigines were not affected by the mass media at the time, so it wasn't difficult to preserve their languages and cultures," notes the linguist. But now even the Internet is used among the aboriginal peoples, further enhancing the influence of mainstream cultures and languages.
Numbering around 413,000, a mere 1.85 percent of the whole population in Taiwan in 2001, the Austronesian-speaking peoples are currently categorized into ten indigenous groups, who now receive official recognition and encouragement from the government. Over the past few decades, aborigines have struggled for greater recognition, and by the 1990s a movement, sometimes called "nativism," sought to revive and promote Taiwan's oldest cultural heritage. Both the Han Chinese and the aborigines became interested in rethinking and preserving the indigenous cultural legacies.
Aboriginal teachers, for example, began to teach the outside community some of their traditional crafts, such as the making of canoes, pottery, and weaving. Traditional dances and religious festivals were promoted and the government often invited the aborigines to take part in national ceremonies and festivals. In 1998, even the Atayal custom of tattooing faces gained attention when a small movement began calling for respect for the practice, long frowned upon by the Han Chinese. And the Pingpu, who had nearly disappeared altogether, also drew the attention of people who wanted to study their history and cultural legacies.
A culture, however, is not an object that can be preserved in a glass viewing box in a museum. Cultures by definition are living entities--adapting and evolving. The new interest in Taiwan's aboriginal past has given the aborigines a more prominent place in Taiwanese society, but it is uncertain whether or not it will help preserve the vanishing cultures. "When faced with more powerful cultures, comparatively weaker ones usually don't survive," notes Tsang Cheng-hwa. "It's just a matter of time. And the phenomenon is happening worldwide."
There might be little likelihood of sustaining aboriginal cultures as they were in the past, but their history is being pieced together through the many archaeological sites in Taiwan. Fieldwork, according to Tsang, is in fact becoming more common. He notes that Taiwan's archaeologists were more interested in pure science until about twenty years ago, when large-scale economic development became a major threat to Taiwan's archaeo logical heritage and prompted archaeologists to take an active interest in preserving the sites. Growing awareness of local cultures and government encouragement through legal protections also helped. Tsang points out that the promulgation of two laws in particular--the Cultural Heritage Preservation Law (1982) and the Environmental Impact Evaluation Law (1994)--provided a good legal framework for the protection of archaeological sites.
Many such sites are uncovered during the excavation of land for building. The laws give archaeologists the legal assistance to halt building projects and excavate the sites. Tsang himself led one of these rescue efforts when ancient artifacts were unearthed during the construction of the Tainan Science-based Industrial Park in southern Taiwan. Tsang and a team of archaeologists got permission to halt building temporarily and proceed with excavation.
A similar scenario led to the creation of the National Museum of Prehistory. In 1980 archaeological artifacts in large quantities belonging to the Peinan Culture were unearthed at a site in the north of Taitung City during the construction of a railway station. A National Taiwan University (NTU) rescue team was soon organized to save these artifacts and voices arose for the establishment of a museum with a mission to house these artifacts under a single roof. Today, the National Museum of Prehistory, which was open to the public two years ago, is situated near the eighteen-hectare Peinan Cultural Park. Close by the park is the Peinan archaeological site, which was declared a grade-one archaeological site in 1988.
Through the efforts of archaeologists and anthropologists, Taiwan's prehistory is slowly emerging from obscurity. "Archaeological research is especially significant to Taiwan. Unlike the earliest civilizations, we don't have written documents for reference until very late, so we must rely heavily on archaeological studies to learn about Taiwan's past," says Chen Yu-pei, an assistant professor at NTU's Department of Anthropology, who is directing current efforts to save an archaeological site in Ilan County revealing the culture of Kavalan people, a branch of the Pingpu.
Archaeologists in Taiwan are slowly piecing together Taiwan's prehistory, but it takes time to make discoveries and formulate a picture of the distant past. "The general public should drop the bias that Taiwan's archaeological legacies are not worthy of study just because they're not so exquisite as those found in other civilizations," Chen says, "I think what matters most is that archaeologists can objectively present people with a picture of prehistoric cultures resulting from the interaction between man and his surroundings." The unknown could turn out to be as significant as the known. Such an understanding is perhaps a starting point from which those who came to the island later in its history can learn about aboriginal cultures and gain a new respect for the early history of their homeland.