Resumen de Taiwanese Prehistory: Migration, Trade, and the Maritime Economic Mode
Chin-yung Chao, Timothy K. Earle
In a previous Current Anthropology article considering the Scandinavian Bronze Age (Ling, Earle, and Kristiansen 2018), a model was proposed to explain the concentration of metal wealth and social stratification under conditions of low population density. This model is now considered to help understand anomalies in the archaeological sequence of eastern Taiwan during the Neolithic and Early Metal Ages. In contrast to Taiwan’s agriculturally richer western coast, evidence of complexity arose unexpectedly early on the east despite its more limited agricultural soils and lower populations. We propose that these outcomes resulted from a maritime economy, in which local agricultural surpluses finance distant voyaging that an emergent elite might control. Travels carried a substantial amount of rare nephrite from Taiwan’s eastern coast to Island Southeast Asia and the South China Sea. Subsequently, metals and glass technologies were introduced from there into Taiwan. This trade and technological transfer were earliest on the eastern coast, perhaps unexpected because it was more removed from the Chinese mainland, a likely source for cultural transfers. We propose that eastern coast Taiwanese populations developed an entrepreneurial raiding-trading political economy, perhaps involving slaves, that would explain these anomalies. Predating specialized merchant trading, a raiding-trading complex, not unlike later piracy, may have provided broadscale maritime interactions partially responsible for patterned developments of political complexity in this region of the world.
