Trade Diaspora in Prehistoric Eastern Taiwan

Summary

The origin and expansion of Austronesian, a language group disperses from Easter Island to Madagascar, is a long-term discussed issue in Taiwan and Southeast Asia. For the movement of people and materials, the migrationist models have dominated the explanatory frameworks in the South China Sea, a broader area of my proposed research region. In this proposed research the concept of trade diaspora is applied to examine the possibility of frequent bidirectional movement of materials and people between Eastern Taiwan and Northern Luzon in the Philippines. I hypothesis the bidirectional movement may have persisted for at least a thousand and three hundred years from 2,300 BP to 1,000 BP, and this proposed research is to explore the interaction and bi-directional influences between trade diasporic communities and local host communities in Eastern Taiwan and Northern Luzon. The primary archaeological materials utilized for this study are the ceramic assemblages, burial practices and settlement patterns. All the data above will be tested to support the hypothesis that local interactions are more complex and less unidirectional than previous studies have reported and will test the trade diasporic model as a suitable framework to examine human interaction and its influence to society in Eastern Taiwan.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Guava Cat Archaeology: Papers in memory of Prof. Pochan Chen

Keywords

Spatial Coverage