Earliest settlements in Taipei discovered

Liu Yi-chang dated the settlement around 2,500 years before Christ.

Commissioned by the Taipei city cultural bureau, the archaeologist started digging a vacant lot at the Talungtung elementary school last year.

A police precinct had been on the lot before.

“We found relics on last Saturday and Sunday,” said Liu, Academia Sinica history and language research institute fellow.

Shard and stone implements were found in a layer only 3.5 meters under the ground.

They belonged to the earliest humans that settled in the Taipei basin about 4,500 years ago, Liu claims. No fossils of the settlers were discovered, however.

That made scientific dating of the users of what Liu identifies as Neolithic artifacts next to impossible.

“But the pottery shard we found seems to have been part of a pot for cooking,” Liu said.

He said the earliest settlers in Taipei probably were able to use canoes to go all the way up river to get good mud for pottery near Mount Tatun.

No vestige of a canoe was found in the vicinity to bear out Liu’s hypothesis.

Liu defined the relics as those of what is known as Hsintangpu culture in Taiwan’s prehistory.

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