| Page 690 | |
It is not known under what authority or what source of funding this archaeological research took place. Wu has stated, however, that “a new trend, conducting organized excavations, had developed for the study of Formosan prehistory after the establishment of the Lecture Room of Folklore and Ethnology, Taihoku Imperial University” (1969, 107). Apparently, from about 1929 both authority and funding came through the Imperial University. New professional archaeologists became prominent in the field from this time. The most important of these were A. Matsumura, Takeo Kanaseki, Naoichi Kokubu, and Tadao Kano.
In about 1927 Matsumura discovered the Ken-ting site at the southern tip of Taiwan. Excavations were undertaken there in 1930, but other than brief preliminary papers, no final reports were published. In 1929 Kano listed 151 prehistoric sites that had been discovered and reported previous to that time. Many more were discovered in following years but little was published by other than those mentioned. The information on these sites comes from the Kanaseki and Kokubu report (1950). Kano was the most active, continuing fieldwork and publication until 1943, at which time he was moved by the Japanese military government to the Philippines to be in charge of the museums there. He worked closely with Beyer and informed him of Taiwan prehistory so that in later publications Beyer was the only English-writing archaeologist to be able to include data on Taiwan prehistory.
Taiwan was the only country in Island Southeast Asia where fieldwork continued during World War II. In all the other countries fieldwork came to a virtual standstill with the beginning of the Japanese invasions. Unlike the abrupt beginning of this period at the end of the war, the ending varied for each country and was gradual in most cases. The year 1959 is an approximate average.
R. Soekmono, the director of the National Archaeological Institute of Indonesia in 1968, had this to say about the Dutch Archaeological Service after the end of World War II:
When the Dutch came back to Indonesia after World War II and found that the Archaeological Service had become an institution of the Republic of Indonesia, they established another archaeological service that was staffed with the expert personnel of the prewar period, but it lacked the needed resources. It was not until 1950 that the Archaeological Service became united again with its branches at Prambanan and Bali. Since then it has functioned normally under the direction of Professor Bernet Kempers.
(Soekmono 1969, 96)
Prehistoric research continued during the Japanese occupation, but at a much reduced pace. W. Rothpletz made a survey of the Bandung hill region in West Java, his report on which was published after the war (1951), as was the report by Bandi (1951) on the Bandung obsidian artifacts.
H. R. van Heekeren was the only prehistorian working with the Archaeological Service after the war. During the war he was a Japanese prisoner of war working on the Thai-Burma railroad, where he made archaeological discoveries. He returned to work in Indonesia in 1946, doing fieldwork in Central and South Sulawesi until the early 1950s on Paleolithic sites (1949a), Toala sites (1949b), and at Kalumpang (1950). D.A. Hooijer, the paleontologist, examined animal remains recovered by van Heekeren (1949). Van Heekeren continued working for the Archaeological Service until 1956, when he returned to the netherlands. He excavated in caves on Flores (1958b), on Patjitan sites in Java (1955a), in sites with stone sarcophagi in Bali (1955b), and urn burial sites in Java (1956b) and East Sumba (1956a).
The three generalized periods of archaeological activity in this region vary a bit for Sarawak because of one man, Tom Harrisson. Although he had visited Sarawak in the 1930s, his archaeological work there started after World War II, in 1947, and continued until his retirement in
| |