Promoting archaeology on Heping Island
Borao Mateo, who has always believed that the Keelung fort was in no way inferior to that in Tainan, first established the location of the Spanish bastion by comparing historical images. In 2002, he finally was able to bring in Lee Der-her, a professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at National Cheng Kung University, to use ground-penetrating radar to detect the position of the old fortress. It turned out to be under the fitting-out shop on the western side of the No. 1 dry dock of a shipbuilding company, CSBC Corporation, Taiwan.
In 2011, working through a program of Taiwan’s National Science Council (today the Ministry of Science and Technology) called “From the Renaissance to the Neolithic: The Spanish Fortress of Kelang (Taiwan) and Its Earlier Austronesian and Prehistoric Environment,” Borao Mateo arranged for members of the Spanish National Research Council (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, CSIC) to come to Taiwan and conduct an international collaborative project with the Academia Sinica’s Institute of History and Philology. Borao Mateo handled the interpretation of historical documents, while the archaeological work was carried out by Spanish archaeologist María Cruz Berrocal and Academician Tsang Cheng-hwa of the Academia Sinica. Finally, archaeological work was underway on Heping Island!
However, while it was initially intended that Fort San Salvador would be the first site to be excavated, there were delays in getting permission from CSBC because of the current buildings on the site. Therefore, working within the area where CSBC did allow them to dig, the team turned their focus to the company parking lot, which also potentially had historic remains beneath it. The following year, Borao Mateo reinterpreted a 1654 map of northern Taiwan and suggested that the archaeological team go “25 meters from the tree, following the edge of the parking lot, and begin digging there.”
As a result they were able to discover the remains of the Convento de Todos los Santos (Convent of All Saints) built in the 17th century by Dominican friars. In addition, the Spanish archaeological team led by María Cruz Berrocal also found a Catholic cemetery attached to the convent’s church.
The dig unearthed strata from various past eras, including the Neolithic, the Iron Age, and the Age of Discovery. Borao Mateo, working with his students and the archaeologist Hung Hsiao-chun, gathered these discoveries into a book entitled Recovering the Past of Jilong: New Archaeological Findings from Heping Island of Northern Taiwan.
José Eugenio Borao Mateo (kneeling, front) worked with archaeological teams from Spain and Taiwan to excavate Spanish historic sites in a collaborative project under the National Science Council. (courtesy of J.E. Borao Mateo)