The National Museum of Prehistory’s Tainan branch is to officially open on Saturday following a nine-month soft opening, with hundreds of artifacts on display, the head of the museum said yesterday.
National Museum of Prehistory director Margaret Wang (王長華) said that the Museum of Archaeology in Tainan is to display 540 items consisting primarily of artifacts unearthed in the Tainan area, some of which have never been exhibited publicly before.
“More than 60 cultural sites have been uncovered in Tainan’s Southern Taiwan Science Park area, which covers 1,034 hectares of land,” she said. “The concentration of cultural sites in the area is very high and many artifacts dating back 300 to 5,500 years have been found.”
Photo: CNA
More than 8 million artifacts of various sizes and ages were collected in the science park and Tainan’s Tree Valley Park, research assistant Huang Yu-lin (黃于琳) said.
Among the artifacts being showcased are fossils of carbonized rice pellets, which date back 4,300 to 5,000 years.
“The rice pellets show us that people lived in the area 5,000 years ago. They were found 7m underground when the land was excavated in the 1990s for the building of the high-speed rail system,” she said.
Also on display are crystallized parts of bone found in fish heads, which are also evidence that people lived in the area up to 5,000 years ago, Wang said.
They are of particular interest because they indicate the kind of diet people had, she added.
Another highlight is a necklace made from 188 pieces of jade that is 2,100 to 2,800 years old.
“The diameter of the jade pieces is about 0.2cm. These pieces are originally from Hualien, showing that 2,800 years ago there was already a very extensive trading system across the island,” she said.
The Museum of Archaeology’s soft opening, which ran from Dec. 26 last year to Sept. 30, was attended by 53,827 visitors.
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