| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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Fujian Province
During the 1980s and the 1990s, the horizon of Fujian Neolithic archaeology was significantly expanded. The new materials and sites discovered by excavations and reconnaissance not only filled spatial gaps in many areas of Fujian, they also expanded the chronological sequence of the Fujian prehistory.
From 1985 to 1986, the Fujian Provincial Museum excavated the Keqiutou site in Pingtan County (FPM, 1991). This was the first time that a Neolithic site was excavated beyond the Lower Reaches of the Min River. The discovery was a major contribution to the research of the Neolithic in southeast China. As will be elaborated in Chapter Three, the pottery and stone tools of the Keqiutou were different from those of the Tanshishan Culture, and more importantly, the C-14 date of marine shells of the Keqiutou site demonstrate that it was probably from 6000–5000 B.P., much earlier than the Tanshishan site. This discovery subsequently invoked discussions on the relationship between the Keqiutou and the Tanshishan Culture. Most people argued that the Tanshishan Culture was developed from the Keqiutou Culture (Lin, 1993), but others maintained that the origins of the Tanshishan site were not in Fujian (Chang, 1989). I will return to these issues in Chapter Three.
The excavation of the Huangguashan site in 1989 was another major contribution to the understanding of Fujian Neolithic (FPM, 1994). This excavation was not only the first archaeological dig in northeastern Fujian but also gives a better understanding of the Neolithic cultures than the later Tanshishan Culture in eastern Fuijan. As mentioned above, since the 1970s, archaeologists have been debating whether the Tanshishan Culture should incorporate all three layers of the Tanshishan site or should only refer to the Lower and Middle Tanshishan. The Huangguashan site yielded pottery and stone tools similar to the Upper Tanshishan, particularly the painted pottery, but it did not have remains similar to the Lower and Middle Tanshishan. This indicates that it represents a different cultural entity later than the Tanshishan Culture (Figure 5).