What caused the cultural hiatus in the Iron-Age Kiwulan Site, northeastern Taiwan?

Abstract

Influenced by rapid tectonic activities and frequent typhoons, Taiwan is unique in having extremely high rates of uplift, precipitation, denudation, and sedimentation. These dynamic surface processes not only influence landscape evolution and river behavior, but severely affect human societies both at present and in the past. Particularly, mass-movement and flooding events caused by earthquakes and/or typhoons may introduce a huge amount of sediments into river systems, and result in natural hazards due to consequent river-aggradation. The Iron Age Kiwulan Site is a recently discovered archaeological site situated on the margin of the Lanyang Plain in northeastern Taiwan. In its deposits, a cultural hiatus centered on 1150–1350 CE was recognized suggesting that the settlement was abandoned for two hundred years before being recolonized. To find the cause of this cultural break, the river-aggradation history since 800 CE has been reconstructed by a source-to-sink approach using multiple lines of evidence from the Lanyang Source-to-Sink System, northeastern Taiwan. Two particular river-aggradation events that occurred during 875–925 CE and 1400–1500 CE were traced from their source (upland river terrace), through floodplain lakes to their ultimate sink (the Okinawa Trough and Hoping Basin of the Pacific Ocean). However, as these extreme river-aggradation events occurred either significantly earlier or later than the cultural hiatus, dramatic climate and earthquake events are not likely to be the direct causes for the cultural hiatus. Instead, river migration might have been the reason for the abandonment and return of the Kiwulan settlements.