at the Royal Captain Shoal, a coral reef west of Palawan, in 1985; the Griffin, an East India Company boat found in 1985 northwest of Basilan, south of Zamboanga, Mindanao; and the galleon San Jose, found in 1986 near Lubang Island, Mindoro Province. In 1991 a two-season underwater project was started on the Spanish warship San Diego, which sank near Fortune Island on 14 December 1600. Over 34,000 artifacts were recovered from this ship, including porcelains and stonewares, earthenware vessels, a navigational compass and a maritime astrolabe, and organic materials.

The National Museum is conducting survey and limited excavation, led by Dizon and Santago, of stone remains not unlike the castles found on Okinawa, on the Batanes Islands, the most northerly of the Philippines Islands. These sites are located on hilltops and have been dated to the twelfth century. The most recent article summarizing Philippine prehistory was published in Hawaii in 1992.

Taiwan

The first major interdisciplinary program on Taiwan prehistory was organized by K.-C. Chang and carried out from July 1964 to July 1965 by the Department of Anthropology, Yale University, and the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, National Taiwan University. The team was made up of five archaeologists, a palynologist, and a geologist. The primary sites excavated were Pa-li (the name shifted later to Tapenkeng), near Taipei, and Fengpitou, in southwestern Taiwan (Chang et al. 1969).

Chang organized an even more interdisciplinary team for a second major project in 1972 through 1974, sponsored by the same two institutions plus Academia Sinica in Taiwan. The team included experts in botany and palynology, archaeology, cultural anthropology, geography, geology, geomorphology, soil sciences, and zoology. Concerning this breadth Chang said: “Its breadth is not only intradisciplinary (for example, the study of the archaeology, the ethnohistory, and the ethnography of the modern inhabitants) but also interdisciplinary. Ours is a ‘saturation’ approach; we investigate many natural and humanistic scientific aspects of a small region—two river valleys—and seek to examine their interaction through a study of the ecosystems throughout their recent history” (Chang et al. 1974, 40–41). The two river valleys fall midway between the two major sites of the earlier program so the project also aimed to discover the relationships between the different cultures found at those sites. One of the archaeologists from Yale in this program produced two reports that present much of the archaeological results of this project (Dewar 1977, 1978).

Wen-hsun Sung made a small excavation at O-luan-pi, at the very southern tip of Taiwan, in 1966 (Sung et al. 1967) and reported extended burials in stone cist coffins with many associated artifacts but no metal. Later than the cist burials came a culture, which may have had metal associated, with flexed burials not in coffins. Another site at O-luan-pi, called O-luan-pi site II, was excavated in part by Li (1983) in 1982. He found four distinct cultural layers: OLP Prehistoric Cultural Phase I, without pottery, dated at about 5,000 years ago; OLP Prehistoric Cultural Phase II, with the same culture reported by Sung et al. (1967), dated about 4,000 years ago; OLP Phase III, with painted pottery, dated to about 3,000 years ago; and OLP Prehistoric Cultural Phase IV, with plain pottery, dated to about 2,500 years ago (Li 1983, 79–81). This report has 169 full-page color plates.

Li, in 1977, excavated at a site that has been called K’en-ting, about eight kilometers northwest of O-luan-pi, which had been discovered in 1930. The final report was his Ph.D. dissertation at SUNY-Binghamton University and unfortunately has not been published. However, he did publish an article, “Problems Raised by the K’en-ting Excavation of 1977” (1983). In this article he raised questions about Chang’s considering the fine red ware phase as an invasion of a Lungshanoid culture from the China mainland. He presented reasonable arguments that the fine red ware evolved out of the earlier Corded Ware culture. This suggestion has come to be generally accepted. One of the important finds at K’en-ting was the impression of rice husks on several fine red ware shards. This gives the earliest date for rice in Taiwan. This date has been reported as ca. 3000 b.c. by Bellwood