"The literature at the culture park and the Prehistory Museum reads: `We live on ancient land,'" said the museum's Lin. "If this attitude of inheritance and custodianship is promoted not just by archeologists and cultural workers, but by farmers and hotel owners as well, then Taiwan will have its World Heritage sites."
MORE QUESTIONS THAN ANSWERS
ost of what we know about the people who inhabited what is now Peinan Township, Taitung County is something of a ghost story. Landscape machinery building a new railway station there in 1980 tore through a series of slate graves still holding the skeletons of men, women and children who lived there as long as 5,000 years ago.
While the exhumed graves have taught archeologists and anthropologists a lot about the civilization, the discovery has unearthed a great many more questions, too. We know that they buried their dead under their houses and encased them in sarcophagi with stone lids so that when subsequent family members passed away, the graves could be reopened and bodies could be laid beside their deceased relatives. What scientists don't know is why all of the graves -- hundreds of them found thus far -- are arranged so that their occupants face southwest, or why some graves were built overlapping others.
We've learned about their pottery and stonework from artifacts buried in the graves and from the skulls of their occupants, we have discovered that they removed their cuspids and incisors in a ritual thought to have been a rite of passage to adulthood.
But scientists can only speculate about the most obvious remnant of their civilization; huge stone slabs -- the largest over 3m high -- that stand upright in the ground, each with a large hole chipped out of the center near the top. While most of these slabs have been moved into the museum, they were still standing in their original locations when Japanese anthropologists stumbled upon them in the late 1800s. What they were used for or how they were brought to an area many kilometers away from the nearest slate deposits is a mystery that has died with the ancient people.
Of course, their descendants remain in Taiwan today. The Puyuma have an oral history recounting their origins, but the lack of a written language has deprived these traditions of corroboration.
One such legend holds that the Puyuma originated on the shores of Ruvuahan, which means "the place of origin" in the Puyuma language. The waves brought thousands of bubbles which turned into small particles and from them a large stone was formed. The stone broke and a kind of man emerged whose knees had eyes and a face grew on each side of its head. A man and a woman were born from each of its legs.
A different legend claims that the first male and female Puyuma were born of a bamboo tree planted by a goddess who emerged from the sea.
The Puyuma language itself is one of the last tools scientists have to learn about the culture. Unfortunately, their language, like so much of their ancient culture, will likely one day be heard only in museums.
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