Interestingly, following a recent "accident" that revealed an archaeological treasure trove, the area has also come to be associated with the distant past. The excavations at the Chienshan prehistoric site at Tayuan, which is the only formal archaeological dig on the Taoyuan plateau, have so far unearthed large numbers of stone axe heads and hammers, hunting implements, spinning wheels, whetstones, pottery and clayware. Exposed again to the light of day, these items from a lost world offer a veiled glimpse into life on the sandy hillocks of Chienshan some 3,000 years ago.

Scene 1: Rediscovery
Time: Late March, 2006
Location: Dayuan Primary School

The ear-piercing roar of jets and the excited shouts of children create a cacophony on the playground of the 100-year-old elementary school serving the "gateway to Taiwan." A group of laborers is at work behind the dais on the playground, renovating the bathrooms next to the three-story building that houses the fifth- and sixth-grade classrooms.

The din of the workman's digging and the clangor of their tools rings across the campus. Chen Te-jen, a teacher at Taipei County's Sansia Junior High School who has come down to Dayuan Primary to visit friends, is strolling across the school grounds when he comes across a strange stone. Chen's first thought is identical to that of Chang Liu-shui when he first discovered the Chienshan archaeological site--this stone is different from the others around it.

Chen had, in fact, stumbled across a 3,000-year-old treasure. When he sent his "strange stone" to the Academia Sinica's Chen Kwang-tzuu for an appraisal, he learned that it was, in fact, a prehistoric artifact contemporaneous with others found at the Peinan site in Taitung. He immediately contacted the cultural properties evaluation committee of the Taoyuan County Cultural Affairs Bureau (TCCAB). To ensure the site's preservation, the TCCAB in its turn contacted the county's Bureau of Education, asking it to suspend the school renovations. The two bureaus then raised NT$1.85 million to fund a dig by an archaeological team from the Academia Sinica's Institute of History and Philology (IHP).

The IHP team's leader, Liu I-chang, soon confirmed that it was a valuable prehistoric site and decided to begin a systematic excavation, the results of which would determine whether the site would be nominated for national-monument status.

A prehistoric archaeological site discovered at Dayuan Primary School during construction 60 years ago came to light again last year during renovations to the campus. Finds have included pottery shards and stone tools from two cultural strata--the Yuanshan and the Botanical Garden strata.

Scene 2--The Dig Begins
Time: April-May 2007
Location: Behind the dais, Dayuan Primary School

This is the second professional dig at the Chienshan site, 55 years after the first one in 1952.

Acting on Liu's orders, Chung Kuo-feng, a research assistant on the dig team stationed at Dayuan Primary School, began work on four locations in the pavement behind the dais in mid-April. In no time at all, he was unearthing fragments of pottery and stone tools at a depth of one meter.

On May 8, Liu reported the initial results of their dig to Taoyuan County magistrate Chu Li-lun while squatting with him in one of the four two-cubic-meter excavations. "The mix of red and black soil around the pottery lets you see with your naked eye that these are prehistoric," explained Liu, holding some of the fragments of stone tools and pottery they had unearthed near the surface.

A prehistoric archaeological site discovered at Dayuan Primary School during construction 60 years ago came to light again last year during renovations to the campus. Finds have included pottery shards and stone tools from two cultural strata--the Yuanshan and the Botanical Garden strata.

Scene 3: Preliminary Results
Time: June 21, 2007
Location: Dayuan Primary School Activity Center

Surveys and excavation at the four Dayuan pits unearthed about 20 boxfuls of artifacts, including large numbers of pottery shards, earthenware pots, arrowheads, and weights used on fishing nets.

"This first small sample excavation yielded a huge number of artifacts," said Liu, speaking into a microphone at a press conference on the dig. "We're now washing, air drying and numbering our finds. We'll undertake a scientific appraisal of them at a future date. What we've found so far indicates that this village site was perhaps the biggest known center of prehistoric human activity in the Taoyuan-Hsinchu-Miaoli area."

"As we move forward," said one participant, "we'll be working towards the preservation of the site and its coexistence with the school." TCCAB director Chen Shei-saint, Taoyuan County Bureau of Education director Chang Ming-wen, and Dayuan principal Su Kun-lang put their heads together to talk things over.

The archaeological team have continued to excavate the site to evaluate its state of preservation. The results of their work and their recommendations for the preservation of the finds will be released at the end of this year.

The roar of jet engines mingles with the shouts of children just let out of class--a privilege unique to the students of this primary school sitting at the "gateway to Taiwan." Now that excavation work is underway on the Chienshan prehistoric site, the school is also set to become the first in Taiwan to coexist with an archaeological site.

Prehistoric life in Tayuan

A shrieking jet flies at us from the horizon every five minutes. A competing din arises from the shouting children shooting baskets and tearing around the primary school's athletic field. In spite of the noise, the archaeologists are able to transport us across a 3,000-year gulf, transforming the riotous playground into the 37-meter-tall southern face of Chienshan....

Black-haired, brown-skinned people gather on the slope. Only about 130 centimeters tall, they carry stones from a nearby riverbed up the hill where they shape them into shouldered stone axe heads and triangular stone arrowheads by striking them with percussive blows, then flaking and honing them. They also produce stone weights for their fishing nets, which will become scored by long years spent tied to the netting. Meanwhile, smoke curls upwards from the nearby limekiln.

Another group grasps the decoratively patterned earthenware they will use to fetch water from the stream 100 meters away.

The residents of this medium-sized prehistoric village store their many stone implements in a 1.3-meter-deep stone-lined hole near their homes, and have braced it with logs cut from nearby trees. As concerned about their surroundings as the people of today, they dispose of their trash in a two-meter-deep ash pit.

An earlier discovery

The Chienshan archaeological site was discovered in Tayuan Township, then known as Tachiuyuan, during the Japanese era. In fact, its discovery was linked to the construction of Dayuan Primary's school buildings. According to The History of Tayuan Township, an alert and well-educated young teacher by the name of Chang Liu-shui picked up a few nondescript pottery shards on the campus in 1943 and sent them to his former teacher, the well-known Japanese archaeologist Kokubu Naoichi, for analysis. This brought the Chienshan prehistoric site to the awareness of archaeologists.

In a 1949 article, Professor Kokubu provides an estimate of its size at the time of its discovery 60 years ago, stating that it covered five hectares of slopeland on Chienshan at an elevation of 37.1 meters.

These early finds coincided with World War II, and the war and its aftermath pushed them from people's minds for a decade. It wasn't until 1952 that Professor Shih Chang-ju of National Taiwan University began a dig at Dayuan Primary, sponsored by NTU's Department of Archaeology and Anthropology. They made approximately 20,000 finds, the bulk of which were stone tools and pottery. These included jar-shaped vessels, lids and fragments of pottery, as well as axe heads, pestles, adzes, knives, arrowheads and fishing weights made of stone. But the project ended up being put on hold (along with many others) after the Nationalist government relocated to Taiwan. Work at the site was brought to a hasty conclusion.

In 1992, Taiwan's archaeological community named the Chienshan prehistoric site the only significant archaeological site in Taoyuan. They also recommended that it be provisionally named a heritage site and preserved, but were ignored. It wasn't until the Ministry of the Interior undertook a census of archaeological sites in Taiwan that the Chienshan site was recognized as a late Neolithic site roughly contemporaneous with the late Yuanshan culture and the early Botanical Garden culture. The MOI rated it a 3.5 on a four-point scale in terms of its importance as a cultural property, a level equivalent to a Class One National Historic Site.

"Tayuan has an archaeological site? I've lived here for years and had never heard that," says a Miss Wang. Like most local residents, she had no idea that she lived and worked so close to a 3,000-year-old site, even though the downtown nursing home that employs her is not much more than 100 meters from the elementary school.

"There's an early record of the Chienshan site's discovery," says former principal Cheng Ming-chih, a 70-year resident of Tayuan who went to work at the primary school immediately after graduating from junior college. "But the Cultural Heritage Preservation Act hadn't yet been written when the 1952 dig got underway. That meant that there was no way to apply to have the site designated a heritage site. It's no wonder that even the locals who exercised on the school grounds every day didn't know it was there."

An archaeological team from the Academia Sinica's Institute of History and Philology seeking the boundaries of the Chienshan prehistoric site discovered that it includes the entire Dayuan Primary campus and extends all the way to a private parking lot on the outskirts of Taoyuan International Airport.

The site's importance, part one:
The Taoyuan plateau's most complete prehistoric site

The site caught the attention of Tayuan residents when it was inadvertently brought to light again during renovations to the elementary school in 2006.

"Chang Kwang-chih, an authority on Taiwanese archaeology, has said: 'We judge the importance of a site by how much information it provides scholars about humanity's history.' The small sampling of finds we've so far recovered from this site are packed with data and reveal the breadth of this cultural stratum," says Liu I-chang, the IHP research fellow leading the Chienshan dig, explaining the site's value. Liu says that Chienshan has produced a wide variety of finds, including buildings, storage cellars and ash pits (for the disposal of garbage), which together paint a very complete picture of human life on the Taoyuan plateau 3,000 years ago.

Liu also notes that the same lack of water that later caused the Han immigrants from the south to bypass the Taoyuan-Hsinchu-Miaoli plateau and continue on into the Taipei basin tended to keep the plateau's prehistoric settlements relatively small. The Chienshan site is one of the very few large settlements on the Taoyuan plateau. Surface surveys and soil studies indicate that the site is larger than the Dayuan Primary School campus. In fact, it covers about five hectares, about half the size of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Plaza (also known as the Taiwan Democracy Memorial Plaza).

Liu's team has been working on four exploratory digs, where they have found a large number of carbonized prehistoric human artifacts. He explains that carbonized artifacts are simply artifacts that have been burned. These include the remains of a variety of burnt wooden beams and posts, and demonstrate that the settlement made use of charcoal.

Archaeologists frequently date their finds based on the stratum in which they are discovered. The positions of the brown pottery shards they found at Tayuan suggest that the Chienshan cultural stratum intersected the Yuanshan and Botanical Gardens cultural strata. At greater depth, the excavations have also revealed items of a different character thought to belong to a third cultural stratum. This third stratum is currently thought to be related to the Hsuntangpu, a mid- to late-Neolithic culture dating back some 4,000 years.

Hsuntangpu sites have previously been found only in northern Taiwan. If a link between this site and the Hsuntangpu culture is confirmed, it will indicate that the Taoyuan plateau's prehistoric inhabitants exploited not just land routes, but also sea routes that extended into the Tanshui River area and the Taipei Basin, and even to Miaoli, Taichung and Hualien, which suggests a stunning level of advancement. However, the scientific evaluation of the artifacts has so far been inconclusive and further study is needed.

The site's importance, part two:
Delimiting the spread of Neolithic culture

Still more importantly, the excavation of the Chienshan prehistoric site has provided a resolution to a long-running debate within Taiwan's archaeological community over the cultural inheritance of the Yuanshan and Botanical Garden cultures.

Liu explains that carbon-14 dating has shown the oldest human artifacts discovered in Taiwan to be about 6,000-plus years old, and says that there has been a direct line of transmission from the island's prehistoric inhabitants to its present-day indigenes.

"Change and rupture are two different things," says Liu vis-a-vis the dispute. "If the Jews were expelled from Israel, for example, and all trace of them disappeared from that area, that would be a rupture. The development of Austronesians on Taiwan involves only change, not rupture. But, as the culture has been handed down, have local or external factors provided the impetus to change? The question is worth investigating."

Archaeological finds on Taiwan reveal two principal late Neolithic cultures on the island--the Yuanshan and the Botanical Garden. The two cultures spanned about 2,500 years of history, with the former beginning its spread about 4,500 years ago and the latter persisting until about 2,000 years ago. The question is, was the Botanical Garden culture descended from the Yuanshan, or did external forces allow it to destroy and replace the Yuanshan? Taiwan's archaeological community has long been vexed by questions about the nature of the relationship between these two cultures.

As early as the 1960s, Professor Chang Kwang-chih noted that Botanical Garden archaeological finds included pottery implements featuring a diamond pattern remarkably similar to one previously identified with the southeast coast of mainland China, suggesting a cultural system recently transplanted to Taiwan. Meanwhile, Liu's teacher, NTU anthropology professor Sung Wen-hsun, has proposed that there is no direct link between the Yuanshan and the other prehistoric cultures of northern Taiwan. Instead, he believes that it was the Yuanshan culture that originated outside of Taiwan in mainland China's Han River basin (which includes eastern Guangdong and southern Fujian), arguing that their ethnicity, language, tools and customs were all different from those of Taiwan's Austronesian indigenes.

Other scholars disagree. They argue that there is no distinct "Botanical Garden culture," but that there is instead a single culture with a Yuanshan period and a Botanical Garden period denoting the different stages in its development. This diversity of opinion has so far made it impossible to definitively map the origins and movements of Taiwan's prehistoric peoples.

The discovery of the Chienshan prehistoric site has shed light on this issue. The Academia Sinica archaeological team preliminarily dated finds from the Chienshan site to the time period of both cultural strata, while carbon-14 dating has identified them as spanning a 2,500-year period. Liu further argues that stone tools from the site show characteristics of Botanical Garden tools and the form of Yuanshan tools, demonstrating a gradual evolution. Holding up a fragment of a Chienshan stone tool, Liu explains that it places both the Yuanshan and Botanical Garden cultures within the context of the ongoing development of the Austronesian cultural system. It's just that the introduction of external factors in the interim between the two impacted their development, giving the Botanical Gardens culture a somewhat different look. For the moment, the nature of this small number of external factors remains uncertain.

As the school bells ring out the end of class, the playground quickly fills with an occupying army of elementary-school children. Hard at work, the archaeological team prays that the children tearing around the field don't crush any of the 3,000-year-old relics of their ancestors. They also pray that this lost world will someday be revealed again, and its broken remains transformed into treasures cherished in the children's hearts.

A prehistoric archaeological site discovered at Dayuan Primary School during construction 60 years ago came to light again last year during renovations to the campus. Finds have included pottery shards and stone tools from two cultural strata--the Yuanshan and the Botanical Garden strata.

A prehistoric archaeological site discovered at Dayuan Primary School during construction 60 years ago came to light again last year during renovations to the campus. Finds have included pottery shards and stone tools from two cultural strata--the Yuanshan and the Botanical Garden strata.

A prehistoric archaeological site discovered at Dayuan Primary School during construction 60 years ago came to light again last year during renovations to the campus. Finds have included pottery shards and stone tools from two cultural strata--the Yuanshan and the Botanical Garden strata.

A prehistoric archaeological site discovered at Dayuan Primary School during construction 60 years ago came to light again last year during renovations to the campus. Finds have included pottery shards and stone tools from two cultural strata--the Yuanshan and the Botanical Garden strata.