"We've done it!" A dozen people shout and dance in excitement as nearby reporters record the scene. It is August 1988, and a team of students and professors from National Taiwan University (NTU) is celebrating the conclusion of an eight-year effort to uncover the remains of one of the earliest known settlements in Taiwan. Called Peinan culture, the site yielded archaeological finds dating back as much as 5,000 years to Neolithic times.
The prehistoric site is near the rural township of Peinan (卑南) in Taitung county along the southeastern coast of Taiwan. Although the area is still relatively underdeveloped, archaeological research shows that it was the island's earliest settled area. Today, the county is home to six of Taiwan's nine main aborigine tribes: the Bunun, Rukai, Paiwan, Ami, Yami, and Puyuma.
The archaeological digs yielded large numbers of potsherds, stone knives and sickles, jade items, funerary objects and sarcophagi. Although the prehistoric site was already known, the extent of its value was not realized until 1980, when workers constructing the South Link Railway between the southern cities of Taitung and Kaohsiung dug up a number of rectangular slabs of stone that turned out to be sarcophagi. Soon after the discovery was reported, the provincial government appropriated funds for further exploration, and asked NTU to send experts to examine the coffins. The university organized a team of thirteen volunteer professors and students from the Department of Anthropology, and they rushed to Peinan to work on the site.
Two experts on Taiwan's prehistoric cultures, Professors Sung Wen-hsun (宋文薰) and Lien Chao-mei (連照美), headed the team. "When we first got there it was a mess," Sung recalls. "The railway workers had not stopped construction in the area, and sometimes we had to wait until they finished before we could get to the site. Later, mainly because of newspaper reports, people began to realize the importance of our work, and the government ordered a halt in construction until the findings could be examined. Thus, a large portion of the site was saved for scientific excavation. "
The team worked for the seventeen days until classes began. But in that first effort alone, they unearthed 128 sarcophagi, 1,284 stone utensils, and a large quantity of jade items, pottery, human bone, and remnants of ancient dwellings. At the time, Sung estimated that the discoveries represented only a small portion of the site's trove. Subsequent digs proved him to be right. Yet the methods of excavation and speed of initial sketching and classification were seriously cramped by the tight schedule of the construction project, the difficulty that professors and students had in getting away from university classes in Taipei, and the shortage of trained personnel. As Lien points out, the teachers and students actually conducted eight "salvage operations" at the site between 1980 and 1982.
The South Link Railway was one of the government's twelve major development projects then underway to improve Taiwan's basic socioeconomic infrastructure. Since the 98-kilometer railway stretch running through Peinan was the last unfinished section of a round the-island railway line, there was intense pressure to complete construction as soon as possible.
Lien and her team had little time to plan a careful, systematic archaeological search project. At first, they even resorted to removing the topsoil with bulldozers in order to expose as many sites as they could before railway construction resumed. "We hated to do that," she says, "but we had no choice."
During two years of intermittent excavations, various university teams carefully explored the two-acre site. Given the constraints of time, as complete a record as possible was kept of all unearthed artifacts and architectural fragments. Then, from 1983 to 1986, with financial aid from the Ministry of Education, NTU's Department of Anthropology systematically cleaned and studied the materials brought back to Taipei from Peinan.
In 1986, at the request of the Taiwan provincial government, the department began a new excavation project at the Peinan site. The goal of this project was to explore the remaining half acre on which railway construction had been temporarily halted to make room for additional archeaological excavation. Five more excavations were conducted, the final one in summer 1988. Altogether, a total of thirteen excavations were carried out, with NTU volunteer students and professors working on the site nearly every summer and winter vacation between 1980 and 1988.
A clear picture of prehistoric life in southeastern Taiwan slowly emerged from the excavations. The site yielded a total of 1,523 sarcophagi, 1,950 important pottery specimens, 9,900 significant stone specimens, 4,400 nephrite items, and 8,800 pottery funerary objects. In addition, the team uncovered the remains of 50 structures and 110 human skeletons.
"So far, the Peinan site is the largest archaeological find in Taiwan," Lien says. She estimates that the settlement once covered close to fifty acres. Because a rather complete village was uncovered, it makes the Peinan culture the most complete of the Neolithic cultural units yet discovered in Taiwan.
Archaeological research in eastern Taiwan dates back to 1896, during the Japanese occupation (1895-1945). The Peinan site was first noted in a survey report on Formosan aborigines published in 1914 by the Japanese. At that time the Peinan site had many tall pillars and other stone objects above ground. But today, Professor Lien points out, "A moon-shaped stone pillar is the only relic of the Peinan culture that re mains above the surface." Other remains were all from one to three meters underground.
"About 30 to 40 centimeters under the surface cut we found remains of recent generations," Lien explains. "And 30 to 40 centimeters below that were plenty of pottery items, many kinds of stone tools for farming, fishing, and hunting, and even some weapons. We also found quite a few grindstones for sharpening knives. Because some of these stones were in fixed locations, we can be sure that this place was a village where many people lived for quite a long time."
The objects found at the site can be divided into three categories: construction materials used for housing; house hold items such as cooking utensils; and human burial sites with coffins, funerary objects, and human bones. In July 1987, after analysis and interpretation of the artifacts and architectural remains, Sung and Lien issued a comprehensive report of the results.
The archaeological evidence indicates that from approximately 5,000 to 2,500 years ago, the people at the Peinan site maintained a permanent village and appeared to have been fully sedentary. Cultivation was the principal mode of subsistence, supplemented by hunting on a rather intensive scale. The architectural pattern of their dwellings, built mainly with slate slabs and natural boulders, remained almost unchanged throughout the time. Mortuary customs were similarly unchanged, with villagers burying the deceased directly beneath the village.
From the architectural remnants, it was determined that the houses had front yards and fences. Dwellings and burials used the same construction materials and architectural techniques. They also followed the same compass orientation. All the graves, just as the dwellings, were aligned along a north-northwest and south-southeast line. Several burial sites were found beneath the floors inside two probable houses, which led to the hypothesis that the houses of the Peinan people served both the living and the deceased.
"Except for a few cases, most of the burials were in stone coffins," Lien says. "We see that the dead were mostly buried in an extended position [with legs stretched out straight, rather then flexed as in some burial techniques], and it appears that the death rate of infants was rather high." Lien also points out that multiple burial, using the same coffin more than once, was quite popular in the village, and perhaps to the Peinan culture in general. Slightly more than 20 percent of the coffins excavated contained the skeletal remains of more than one person, up to a maximum of seven.
These research results were not gained without effort. "It was really hard work," says Liu Ke-hung, a student on the final excavation team. "If people weren't committed to the job, they could never stand it." The university volunteers stayed at Lungfeng Temple, two miles from the site, rising at 6:30 A.M., then working until 5:30 in the after noon. Lunch was eaten on site, usually at the unfinished railway platform.
Fortunately, most of the work did not depend upon bulldozers. "We depended more on brushes and bamboo knives after the initial digging," Liu says. "For objects like the stone coffins, we took measurements, made records, took photos and video films, and thought up ways to remove them properly for temporary storage." Since many of the items were not immediately identifiable, the record keeping was done as carefully as possible in order to assist later researchers. After the team returned to the temple each night, they organized the records and objects uncovered during the day, usually getting to bed near midnight. "We were almost always exhausted by the time we went to sleep, " Liu says.
Liu's first involvement with the Peinan excavations was in 1984, when he helped clean some of the first objects brought back to the NTU campus. He volunteered to work at the site during the summer of 1986, the ninth Peinan excavation, after he graduated from the department and before entering graduate school. "I'm intensely interested in archaeology and intend to make it my career," he says. "There is still much archaeological work to do in Taiwan."
One aspect of that research is discovering just whose ancestors the Peinan were. "They were most likely the ancestors of the present aborigines," Lien notes, "but we are not yet sure which aborigine tribe is descended from this early culture."
From the shape and materials of excavated pottery articles, as well as the extended burial style found at the Peinan site, Sung thinks the Peinan culture might have been the forerunner of the Ami tribe. But based on the burial system, Lien's preliminary observation is that the Peinan people might be the ancestors of the Paiwan tribe. The question is as yet unsolved.
"There are big differences between the cultures of the Peinan people and the Paiwan tribe as described by folklorists," Lien says. She hopes that folklorists will work further to trace the Paiwan's ancestry as she tries to glean more findings about the later development of the Peinan culture. Perhaps one day a clearer connection can be made between the two. "A lot of research is still needed before anyone can reach a conclusion about which tribe is actually descended from the Peinan people," Lien says.
Early traces of other prehistoric human activities can be found around Taiwan. In 1968, Sung led a group of students to Pa hsien Cave, near the town of Changpin in Taitung county. There they discovered the Changpin culture, the earliest traces of human activity yet found on Taiwan, which dates back more than 15,000 years to the Paleolithic Age. Two other examples are the Tapengkeng culture found in western Taiwan, which dates back about 7,000 years, and the Yuanshan culture in suburban Taipei, which dates back 4,000 years. In Taitung county alone there are thirty-one historical sites. Three of them, the Peinan, Chang pin, and Tulan, have been designated national historical sites.
In July 1988, a nephrite earring in a part human, part animal shape was found at the Peinan site. Though not the first of its kind ever found in Taiwan, Lien says, "It was the first that was obtained by archaeological excavation. "The ornament was quite similar in material, shape, and size to an artifact from the Yuanshan culture found by chance in 1979. Nevertheless, since the two cultures were widely separated by mountainous geography, local archaeologists have long considered the Peinan and Yuanshan cultures as two distinct groups. Now, based on the similarity between earrings found at both sites, Lien and Sung both assume that there was some connection between the two cultures.
Although widespread public interest in the Peinan discoveries was the most important factor in the government's decision to temporarily preserve the area for archaeological excavation, this curiosity later hindered the team's efforts. Tourists and journalists descended on the site each day, asking endless questions and even carelessly wandering around the site.
"We were a working team, and this was not a tourist site," Liu complains. "Although we really appreciated their interest, we just didn't have the time or physical strength to meet with them to explain things. They not only interrupted our work, they also sometimes damaged the site."
The visitors' questions also revealed a lack of understanding about the value of the excavations. "Archaeological work is not treasure-hunting," Liu ex plains, "so we considered everything to be important. After gathering the evidence piece by piece, we wanted to put the whole picture together. To us, the artifacts were materials for study, and our main goal was to determine details about prehistoric life in this area."
For people interested in learning more about Peinan culture, the Taitung County Culture Center, which opened in June 1988, is the best place to visit. "One special feature of Taitung is its different aborigine tribes, and our objective is to preserve that local color," says Chiu Ming-yen, the center's director. "At present we have more than 2,200 articles from the Peinan site, in addition to over 400 more recent items of aboriginal culture. "
In 1983, after government officials recognized the importance of the Peinan site, the Executive Yuan directed the Ministry of Education to plan a National Taiwan Prehistoric Culture Museum that will be built near the excavation site. According to Sung, the museum will include both an open-air area for larger objects such as coffins and housing remains, and several indoor display areas for the smaller jade and pottery items.
The museum is expected to cost US$74 million, and completion of the first phrase of construction is scheduled for 1995. Displays will focus on the peoples of southern Taiwan, the area's natural history, and a survey of prehistoric culture in Taiwan, concentrating specifically on the Peinan culture excavation site. The second phase, to be completed in 1997, will focus on more general themes in order to put Peinan culture in archeaological context: prehistoric humans and culture, prehistoric culture in the Pacific region, and the origin of Chinese civilization and its prehistoric cultures.
The residents of Taitung are pleased with the museum plans. "Taitung has long been neglected and is behind in its development," says Lin Yi-shan. "The discovery of the Peinan culture and other prehistoric remains prove that we have the roots of the island's earliest civilization right here."