| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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Lin Huixiang, a scholar at Xiamen University, was another pioneer in the archaeology of southeast China. Lin collected artifacts from four groups of Neolithic sites, and excavated twenty-one trenches at these sites during his seven-day trip to Wuping in May 1937 (Lin, 1956). The discovery includes 84 stone adzes and 949 pieces of pottery sherds. Lin compared the stepped stone adzes with those in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and speculated that there must have been some relationships between them. He also speculated that the Neolithic period in Wuping ended around 2500 years ago, and the Neolithic people in this area were not the Huaxia people; instead they were the Yue, a group of minorities who lived in southeast China before they were conquered by the Han Dynasty (Figure 2).
Maglioni visited Wuping after Lin‘s expedition, and he was aware of Lin‘s discoveries. Maglioni reported ten sites, all located on the hills surrounding the walled city of Wuping County. According to Maglioni, five of them (Wuping 1, 2, 7, 8, 9) were Neolithic SAK sites, and the rest of them were from the Bronze Age or even later (Maglioni, 1975).
One of the problems of these early works is that the materials were mostly collected from the surface without a secure archaeological context. Therefore, neither Maglioni nor Lin was able to distinguish the remains from different periods at one site. Maglioni noticed the artifact difference at some sites, but he still mixed materials from different periods into one culture. Judging from current archaeological information, his SON actually included remains from several different periods (Figure 3).
It has been proved that the establishment of a chronology of prehistoric cultures in southeast China is not an easy undertaking. As will be illustrated in the following paragraphs, it remains an unresolved problem to date.