The Taitung district is the habitat of aborigines, mostly belonging to the Ami and Peinan tribes. When the relics were unearthed, during the widening of the Hualien-Taitung railroad and the building of a marshalling yard at Peinan, a village close to Taitung, both the Ami tribe and the Peinan tribe disclaimed any connection between the relics and the legacy of their own ancestors.
The Peinan insist that the area where the cist graves were found was an ancestral habitat of the Ami tribe, while the Ami dismiss the district as a wasteland.
Workers at the "dig" - A frantic race with time. (File photo).
According to a report published in 1915 by the "Office of the Taiwan Governor," the island's highest ruling body during the Japanese occupation, the children of Liwalapin, ancestors of the Ami, had inhabited the Peinan district. But their village was devastated by floods, and by a big fire caused by a thunderbolt.
Seven to eight hundred years ago, Peinan tribespeople appeared in the delta, but they regarded the devastated district as a "taboo,' and placed it out of bounds for their children and even their hunters. Huge upright stones, suspected of being pillars of ruined buildings, have stood there for three thousand years, but the mystery has never been unraveled.
In 1930, a Japanese professor published an article "on the remains of a Megalithic Culture in eastern Taiwan." He reported that, at the Peinan site, he had discovered a number of stone pillars, ranging from six to 15 feet in height, but mostly between six and 12 feet. There was a hole at the top of each stone pillar. He concluded that these stones were the supports of ancient buildings, and that there would be relics of an ancient aboriginal culture buried in the ground.
Taiwan returned to Chinese rule in 1945. In May 1953, two Chinese professors, Sung Wen-hsun and Shih Chang-ju, surveyed the Peinan area. In their report, they mentioned a discovery of "stone troughs."
In 1957, two Japanese professors published a report on their trial excavations around the biggest stone upright in January 1945. They concluded that the upright stones were actually the pillars of buildings and that the holes at the tops were used for supporting the beams. They suggested that stone cist graves could be unearthed in further investigations.
Ceramic vessels show artistic accomplishment. (File photo)
In 1967, Professor Sung published an article on the results of his archaeological investigations in eastern Taiwan in a Japanese magazine, Ethnos in Asia. He used archaeological seriation to explain the existence in the coastal area of east ern Taiwan of two neolithic cultures involving different systems, namely, the "Chi-lin culture" and the "Pai-nan culture;" their geographical distributions overlap partly in the area. He pointed out that both Japanese and Western scholars had confused the two as being one. In 1975, the Ministry of the Interior placed the Peinan site under government protection.
Five years later, this government decree was challenged. Construction excavators entered the protection zone, threatening evidences of the ancient culture for the sake of economics. In April 1980, a railway widening project was extended to Peinan, which is to become the connecting point between the existing railway and the projected south-bend railway. A new station and marshalling yard were built. Because the railway facilities required large quantities of earth, mechanized excavators were used to do the digging. This exposed cist graves that had been buried there for 3,000 years-and were in very bad shape. The mystery reported 50 years ago was cleared up, but gave rise to more mysteries for scholars to puzzle over.
On July 26, 1980, government officials and scholars organized a special group to handle the Peinan affair. It met at Taitung to discuss effective protection for cultural relics in coordination with the widening project for the railroad. The group decided to commission Professor Sung to lead a team to carry out excavations, and to legalize its action by officially registering with the Ministry of the Interior.
The team started systematic excavations from September 1980, explored burial custom patterns, and found the orientation of all graves and that of the alignments of the stone pillars to be exactly the same.
There was a thick "cultural layer" extending all over the site, in which huge numbers of fragments and a few undamaged articles were found, including stone knives, sickles, spear heads, arrowheads, pottery spindle whorls, ceramic rings, and pots. Small cist tombs appeared first because they were buried shallowly. But as the digging proceeded to deeper levels, bigger graves were discovered. Traces of buildings were found at the bottom of the cultural layer.
Ceramic ring, above, and stone implements, were frequently found in the "cultural layer". (File photo)
After its first excavations in September 1980, the NTU team was invited by the Taitung County government to continue its undertakings during summer, spring, and winter vacations for an authorized period of two years, expiring last September 4. All told, the team spent 250 work days unearthing 1,040 cist graves and tens of thousands of other burial objects in an area of 6,765 square meters. It is estimated that more than 2,000 cist burials are still untouched in the area which is to be destroyed by railway construction.
Nobody knows for certain the size of the site. Preliminary estimates amount to 350,000 square meters. Because the team had to work against time, it hurried to salvage all possible objects before rail way work started.
Wang Chiang, a graduate student of the NTU department of archaeology, notes that "for the first seven of the completed eight excavations, we called our work 'salvaging archaeology.' We sometimes had to use mechanized excavators to unearth the burial objects quickly. This should not have been done, although we watched the proceedings carefully. All excavations should have been carried out painstakingly and carefully with hand tools, and each dig should not have been deeper than ten centimeters, layer by layer. But we could not afford the luxury."
Strictly speaking, any excavations carried out, even by archaeologists, are destructive when they cannot restore a scene to its original configuration. Nevertheless, the NTU team carefully documented all existing detail in descriptions, drawings, and photographs.
All objects obtained in the eight excavations have been catalogued and shipped to the NTU department of archaeology and anthropology. The students toiled on excavations in the day time and cleaned their "spoils" at night. And they have projected the way of life of the primitive people.
They determined that the slate slabs for tombs were shaped from mother rocks in the Central Mountain Range, about 20 kilometers away; the length of the graves ranged from 25 cm to 205 cm, most of them measuring 175 cm. Infant mortality was disproportionately great, judging from the fact that so many small graves were unearthed. The death rate of youths around the age of 15 appeared to be the lowest, and that at around 40 years of age registered at the peak. Judging from the size of the graves and the skeletons, it is estimated that the average man was about 160 cm tall, whereas women were about 152 cm.
The fact that all people, including the infants, were buried in stone cist tombs testifies to the great importance given to burial ceremonies, undoubtedly related to their religious beliefs. In general, only one body was buried in one tomb, but there were cases of double and multiple burials, possibly related to some kinds of kinship and to the social system. Neither Ami or Peinan tribes men are accustomed to burying their dead in stone cist graves.
A study of recovered skulls showed that the ancient people had their upper canine and/or the second incisor teeth extracted when they were young; and the opposed teeth of the lower jaw were unabrased, and therefore remained higher than the other teeth. Among the aborigines of Taiwan, the Taiyal, Saisiat, and Bunun tribes have practiced the same teeth extraction custom in the past. It is interesting to note that no decayed teeth were discovered, evidencing a possible lack of sweet foods.
Most man-made objects found in the graves were personal jewelry-nephrite earings, necklaces, bracelets, pendants - plus weapons. Articles found apart from the tombs were mostly pottery. As mentioned above, articles discovered from the cultural layer included stone knives, sickles, adzes, chisels, weapons stone rings, pestles and mortars, stone axes, and ladle handles, pottery, spindle whorls, and ceramic cups and lids. These suggest, of course, that the people grew grains and also went hunting. There are evidences that they might have reared dogs. They knew the art of weaving probably with jute. Division of labor was practiced.
The jade work unearthed is very beautiful, but not all the jade-like articles are of genuine jade. Some are made from green stones, found aplenty on the nearby riverbed. But some are crafted of genuine Taiwan jade, from Hualien far to the north. Professor Sung noted that historic mining of jade in Taiwan began after the island's return to Chinese rule, and that the Japanese did not know of the jade deposits in the Hualien mountains during their rule here. He finds it intriguing that tribes people could possess jade objects 3,000 years ago.
Of the great number of stone pillars reported in the past, only one still remains. The study shows the nearby residential area was separated from the burial place.
The excavations here provided NTU archaeology students with their best opportunity for "on-the-job" training. Previously, co-eds especially were taken aback at the sight of a coffin. Now, they are eager to inspect as many of the ancient remains as possible. As each burial site was found, the students, as a rule, would clean off its top first. They would not open it until they had completed all possible documentation-and photo graphs and drawings. For cleaning, the students used such "tender tools" as grapefruit knives, bamboo scrapers, brushes, and even dentists' tools, to remove adulterants. When they found a trace of human bone or a tooth, they would treat it as a treasure.
After completing their excavating task, Professor Sung commented: "An archaeological dig is much like a circus, subject to the stares of curious spectators. Nevertheless, we enjoy our performances." Assistant Prof. Lien Chao-mei added: "An archaeologist is eager to inspect burial relics, because cemeteries are also places where ancient peoples intentionally preserved both their products and remains. There are intact objects. Human bones permit study of the physical features of a people, deformations and other characteristics of the skulls, the ages of death, and even a determination of epidemics that killed them. Burial objects also throw light on social classes and structure and on religious behavior."
Though these ancient relics had been in the ground for 3,000 years, and now are finally unearthed, the mystery of their identity-their origins even further back - remain to be solved. - by Chen Shih-chi