UC Berkeley

The purpose of this dissertation project is to identify characteristics of social organization among the Neolithic people in Taiwan. Specifically, this dissertation aims to examine the potential social differentiation at the inter-household level. Archaeological materials from the Wansan site (ca. 3,500-2,700 B.P.) are analyzed through examining the spatial distribution of house structures and archaeological artifacts. This dissertation explicitly utilized the House Society concept to examine how prehistoric Wansan people organized themselves and explore how and why there were differences among the houses. The House Society concept can offer archaeologists a framework to understand how the prehistoric people organized themselves, and assists us to interpret the differences of the quantity and quality of artifacts which might exist at the house/House level. In this dissertation, various archaeological implications derived from the House society concept were proposed and examined using the archaeological material excavated from the Wansan site in northeastern Taiwan.

The results of this analysis illustrate that the residential houses in the Wansan society was not only a place where people resided and interacted with other members on a daily basis, but also where the lives of the living members intertwined with the ancestors through situating of deceased members around the residential houses. Furthermore, the correlation between the presence of possible ancestor symbols and the variations of the artifacts among houses suggests that the social differentiation of the Wansan society was probably related to the people's ability to claim their association with the ancestors.

Inspired from the concept of House Society, I thus propose that these residential houses in the Wansan society probably constituted several Houses. The House, which could probably assure their connections with the ancestors, had better knowledge regarding how to manipulate local resources. At the same time, the House could construct a wider social network to share similar artifacts with other Houses in the society. On the contrary, Houses without the ancestral connections lacked the capability to fully explore local resources and were limited to certain options. As a result, the House's disparate technological tradition expressed in the artifacts resulted from social differentiation that emerged with differential ability to affirm connections with their ancestors.