6. Archaeological Museums
Traditionally, archaeology starts where written history ends, covering the periods of time before written records, called prehistory. But archaeology from its earliest years also served to validate written history. Different schools of archaeology evolved.
Culture-historical archaeology, early functional-processual archaeology, processualism, and post-processualism developed successively in the 20th century, based on critique of previous schools of thought, without displacing them.
Archaeology’s roots in 19th century social evolutionism tied archaeology to the study of the deeper roots and evolution of human societies. Unilinear social evolution based in colonial encounters categorized groups in stages of savagery, barbarism, and civilization, and archaeology was employed to understand evolutionary developments.
Cultural-historical archaeology, based in the classification of material culture, soon was used to recognise supposed ethnic groups in the past and tie them to groups in the present. Archaeology was also employed to understand how these past groups lived.
The function objects found had for the users and what this teaches us about them became important, including how it was made and used, and who used it. Over time, archaeologists also recognized the great importance of understanding and recording context of the find, which took precedent over recovering individual objects themselves and then studying them. A negative of culture-historical archaeology was that it proved prone to nationalistic interests. The fracturing of a common human development into a multitude of ethnic cultures, assigning different levels of status to cultures and linking these to modern societies, a problematic exercise, enriches national history and boosts nationalistic sentiments (Trigger 2006: 235-248).
Next to the critique above, a fundamental objection emerging against the culture-historical approach was that while building up an image of a prehistoric site, it provided little information on how these sites functioned as a society. It paints the picture but does no tell the story. This story is the focus of early functional processual archaeology. Functional refers to understanding how societies functioned in daily life while processual refers to agents of change. Why and how did change happen (ibid:
314)? Out of the early functional-processual approaches, processualism and post-processualism emerged as mainstream approaches. The processual approach, also known as the New Archaeology, was a movement of archaeology away from an historical perspective towards that of a social science. The historical particulars of past societies were no longer the objective, but rather the uncovering of general rules of human behaviour and the development of societies, and this was to be done using a deductive, scientific approach. This put archaeology on par with sciences such as sociology, anthropology, and economics with their search for explaining human
behaviour. Post-processualism, which began in the 1980s, is a reaction to the processual approach. In the chapter on “Contextual Archaeology” in his book Reading the Past
(1986), Hodder argues that archaeologists should not only look for similarities but also for differences when analysing finds. To appreciate the function of remains of material culture found, this should be put into the context of the site. The critique on the
processual approach is that deriving generalist rules from individual archaeological findings may result in assigning meaning to objects they did not have for the society researched, so undermining the basis of rules determined (127-128).
The approaches are with us today and have all been important to archaeological research. An open mind however should be kept for the fact that people living in ancient societies will not have recognised their world described in modern concepts. Thought cannot be reconstructed (ibid: 148). Also archaeologists acknowledge that both the questions they ask and the answers they accept are influenced by their socio-political and other research contexts (Trigger: 456). This is something to realise when visiting archaeological museums and exhibitions and in understanding Taiwan prehistory.
Taiwan’s prehistory
Archaeology is especially important to Taiwan for bringing depth to national history, both in time and diversity. In the effort to link the present to the distant past, the relation between ethnography (anthropology) and archaeology is central. There are around 2,300 prehistoric sites in Taiwan, 150 of which are listed as important archaeological sites (Chen 2011; Liu 2009: 321). The earliest archaeological objects found date from the late Pleistocene at the Baxiandong Cave site on the East Coast in the form of stone tools. The earliest are dated to approximately 25,000 BCE. After a chronological gap from the few Paleolithic sites known, the earliest Neolithic culture appears in Taiwan, called the Tapenkeng Culture, for which artefacts have been found in many sites around the coastal regions of Taiwan (Bellwood 2009: 347). This is a Early Neolithic culture
(6000 to 4700 BCE) of hunter-gatherers who also had agriculture, pottery, and a wide variety of tools. They were a newly arriving population to Taiwan, originating from the Mainland. The Middle Neolithic period (4700 to 3500 BCE) saw a number of distinct cultures emerge in the coastal regions around the island. The best documented is the Yuanshan culture, of which the archaeological type site is in modern day Taipei City.
Whether this culture is connected to the much earlier Tapenkeng culture is a matter of academic debate. No archaeological connection has been made between these two cultures, which would imply that the Yuanshan culture is the result of a new wave of immigration from the Mainland, but no Mainland source has been identified yet to substantiate this. This debate is important to the narrative linking present day indigenous peoples to prehistoric cultures. Is the period of continuous indigenous presence 8,000 years or 6,700 years? The end of Taiwan prehistory is set at the end of the Iron Age at 400 BCE. This is an arbitrary date. The earliest written historical records are of a much later date. In the 17th century, the Dutch colonisers were the first to document life in Taiwan (Chen 2011: 60-61).
Archaeology was introduced to Taiwan by the Japanese. Their research led them to accept the hypothesis that there was a relationship between the archaeological
materials found and present day indigenous cultures and that the origins of the Taiwan indigenous people lay to the south, in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The Japanese archaeologists arrived at their conclusion using a cultural historical approach. They set out to reconstruct prehistoric settlements and compared these to present day indigenous societies looking for similarities to prove a direct historical relationship (Nobayashi 2009: 324).
The Taiwanese archaeologists who took over the research from their Japanese colleagues initially continued the Japanese mode of research, but, around 1965,
introduced considering how people interacted with their environment, what their daily life looked liked, and what induced cultural change. Not only building up an image of a settlement but also how it functioned and changed over time, based on information distilled from archaeological finds, became goals of archaeology, as in the tradition of the early functional-processual approach. Around 1975, the processual approach, or New Archaeology, was introduced to Taiwan archaeology, focussing on analysing archaeological finds in order to detect general laws of human behaviour seen in prehistoric peoples. This blends in with the ethno-archaeological research method introduced a few years later in which anthropological research on material culture of present day societies is used to form an understanding of material culture unearthed through archaeological research. This method starts with the assumption of an unbroken line between the past and the present (Liu 2009: 366-67). New insights gained through archaeology, but also through linguistic and DNA research, have changed the
understanding of the roots of Taiwan indigenous peoples. They are not the result of migration from the south as originally supposed, but rather the source of migration south into the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The common ancestral language, Proto Austronesian, was spoken in Taiwan and ever-evolving DNA research continuously links various Austronesian groups to Taiwan, an item that resurfaces as news item regularly (Bellwood 2009: 339-40, Newby and Smith: 2003).
The linking of Taiwan’s prehistoric cultures as ancestors of today’s indigenous cultures is an important issue for the reconstruction of Taiwan history and the search as to what constitutes the Taiwan identity. But it is also important to the indigenous population who lack early historical records. Although inclined to accommodate, archaeologists have advised that caution is necessary. The further back in time, the more problematic the link becomes. Societies are fluid. Cultural development and
change need to be reckoned with. Societies are prone to migration and assimilation for a wide variety of reasons. Also cultures are not by definition attached to ethnicity. New arrivals to an area are known to adopt existing culture. In the Taiwan situation therefore, linking tribes to ancient archaeological cultures is based on unproven causal
relationships. As mentioned earlier, the recognition of indigenous tribes is a modernism introduced by the Japanese colonisers based on essentialist criteria determined by them, as outsiders, such as language, customs, and physical and cultural characteristics. Still, while it is problematic to link tribes to specific prehistoric societies, archaeological research reveals that prehistoric cultures in Taiwan maintained a continuous, unbroken line of development, not disturbed by the introduction of external cultures until modern times. This does provide the circumstances for cultural and ethnical continuity (Liu 2009: 381).
6.1 National Museum of Prehistory
The location of the National Museum of Prehistory (NMP) in Taitung in southeast Taiwan is due to the nearby Peinan prehistoric site. This site, already noted by the Japanese in a survey report in 1914, was excavated by teams of professors and students of the National Taiwan University (NTU) between 1980 and 1988 as a salvage
operation, brought on by railway. What makes the Peinan site stand out is that through archaeological research an image of a Neolithic settlement, dating back 2,500 to 5,000 years, emerges. At the site, remains of houses, household items, and human burial sites with coffins, funerary objects, and human bones were found. This site has been turned into a museum to provide visitors with a view of an operational archaeological site.
Returning to the NMP, this museum officially opened in 2002. Although it is situated on a 10 ha landscaped garden, the museum building does not radiate the
grandeur of other national museums visited. The use of local materials, blending colours and reference to indigenous culture in the exterior design reflects a modesty not typical to the island’s national museums. The reference to prehistory in the NMP’s name does not cover the full scope of the exhibitions.
Taiwan’s indigenes and their Austronesian identity and Taiwan’s natural history also feature prominently. The NMP states that part of its mission is to put Taiwan’s prehistory and indigenous cultures in an international perspective. This provides a counter-message to a Sino-centred
characterization of the island. The
importance of indigenous history for Taiwan’s identity is illustrated with the display of a poem at the entrance area of the museum of which the English translation is “Facing the future, we treasure the past. For without history, we have no roots. And without roots, we have no future” (Website National Museum of Prehistory).
As for the exhibitions in the museum, the website explicitly states that the museum steps away from an overly academic presentation to make the museum more accessible to the general public. Visiting the museum, this becomes apparent.
Prehistoric artefacts do not take centre stage. Life-like models of people and animals set in time, a reconstruction of a pre-historic settlement, film, interactive media and more,
Figure 3: National Museum of Prehistory (author’s photo
together with a clear storyline makes the museum entertaining and an experience a younger audience will also appreciate. What the combination of archaeology,
anthropology and natural history does do in a sense, amplified by the approachability of exhibitions, is provide a romanticised image of indigenous people as a relic of a simpler and purer past detached from modern society, something hat we also noted at
ethnological museums. This said, attention is given to the indigenous rights movement in a short series of textual displays.