(1985, 214) based on the thesis, but in an article Li states: “The beginning of rice cultivation in Taiwan is still in question, but its date has been push [sic] back to some 4,000 years ago by the K’en-ting excavation of 1977” (Li 1983b). A date for rice that is about as early comes from the site of Chih-shan-yen near Taipei. The author of this report (Wang 1983, 81) suggests a date of about 3,500 for the beginning of this site, but does not state in the brief English summary whether the rice was recovered from the very bottom of the site. Besides the rice there was much organic material in the lower layer.

Painan, Taitung, in southeastern Taiwan, is the largest site ever excavated in Taiwan and one of the most important. It was first reported in 1914 because of the several very large megaliths that were on its surface. It was investigated by Kano in 1928 and 1929 and trial excavations were made by Kanaseki and Kokubu in 1945. Excavations were undertaken by Sung from 1980 to 1982, when an area of 7,550 square meters was excavated and 1,025 stone cists recovered. Sung feels that the site was occupied by people of the same culture from about 3000 to 500 b.c. Besides the cist graves there were houses made from large stone slabs. A further report was published by Lien in 1989, but this was in Chinese.

The first human fossil remains in Taiwan were found in the Tsai-liao River, in Tso-chen Hsiang, Taiwan. These were seven skull fragments, some from the same skull, and two teeth, all identified as Homo sapiens. Three further skull fragments and two teeth from the same general location were reported by Lien. No artifacts were associated.

An International Conference on Anthropological Studies of the Taiwan Area: Accomplishments and Prospects was held in Taipei in late December 1985. Kwang-chou Li was the Executive Secretary of the Organizing Committee and on the editorial committee. Unfortunately he died during the editing of the proceedings. There were seven papers having to do with different applications of Taiwan archaeology in this book (Chang 1990).

In 1991 a bibliography of prehistoric archaeology was published. It is primarily of value to those who can read Chinese. The listing is divided into several parts, apparently by subject matter. The first part gives authors and articles that were published in English. At the end there is an index of authors, the authors writing in English listed first, in English. The authors writing in Chinese are listed in Chinese, in some cases with their names also in English. In the body of Chinese articles, many titles are listed as well in English, but many are not and the publications in which the articles were published are listed only in Chinese. The same authors, plus a host of others, compiled another very valuable book, this one only in Chinese except for a title page in English. Here are listed all the known prehistoric sites in northern and eastern Taiwan. Each site has one full page with a small map showing its location and for each group of sites in an area a foldout map showing the locations in a considerably larger area. There are 144 full-page color plates showing site locations and artifacts, with captions in Chinese.

Cheng-hwa Tsang did his Ph.D. dissertation research on the P’eng-hu Islands off the southwest coast of Taiwan. These are better known in the west as the Pescadores. His revised thesis (1995) is a final report of his research from 1983 to 1985 on those islands. The islands are closely related to the neighboring Taiwan coast but there are also strong indications of direct contact with the south coast of mainland China. One problem in the prehistory of the mainland of Taiwan is that there are very few sites with Corded Ware culture and these sites have very few artifacts other than some pottery. The Corded Ware site on P’eng-hu was a much richer site that those known from the mainland. For some reason these islands appear to have been uninhabited from about 4,000 years ago until the first historic occupation began in the early ninth century a.d. The ninety full-page color plates are impressive.

The Institute of History and Philology of Academia Sinica hosted an International Symposium on Austronesian Studies Relating to Taiwan in December 1995. A bound offset printing of most of the papers was presented to the participants at the conference and the proceedings are in press. Papers were presented by linguists,