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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Sunday, November 9, 2003

Hawai'i team to study China link to Oceania

By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

The University of Hawai'i and Bishop Museum are at the cutting edge of research into the distant origins of Pacific Polynesians, with contracts signed by two provinces in China.

Chinese archaeologist TianLong Jiao, left, and UH professor Barry Rolett examine artifacts from their dig on Dongshan island. Jiao is now with Bishop Museum.

Bob Krauss • The Honolulu Advertiser

Chinese archaeologist Dr. TianLong Jiao came aboard at the Bishop Museum last week to represent the museum on the research team. Dr. Barry Rolett,

UH professor of archaeology, is the other member of the team.

Together they have discovered the first evidence of Polynesian ancestors on the South China coast. Their contracts with the Zhejiang Provincial Institute of Antiquity and Archaeology and with the Guangdong Provincial Institute of Antiquity and Archaeology clear the way for more important discoveries.

The team is interested in researching the theory that rice culture introduced to South China at the beginning of the age of agriculture, and the population explosion that followed, may have prodded coastal peoples into making voyages that eventually resulted in the populating of Pacific islands.

By hiring Jiao, the Bishop Museum has once again put itself into the forefront of Pacific anthropological research, a position that it long held through the distinguished careers of Sir

Peter Buck, pioneer archaeologist Kenneth Emory and senior museum archaeologist Yosihiko Sinoto.

Jiao, a graduate of Beijing University, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Harvard, is one of the few Chinese archaeologists who have broken away from studying the cradle of Chinese culture to researching coastal peoples who may be the ancestors of Pacific Polynesians.

His credentials in China have paved the way for him and Rolett to dig where no foreigner has been permitted before.

Dr. William Brown, president of Bishop Museum, said he became interested in Jiao when he read about him in an Advertiser account of a dig that Jiao and Rolett conducted last year on Dongshan island in Fujian province across the strait from Taiwan. They found stone adzes that "could have been made in Samoa."

When Brown learned that Jiao was receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard this winter, he offered him a research position at the museum.

"Bishop Museum has a long history of distinguished anthropological research, but it has been diminished," said Brown. "During its time of greatness, individuals were asking important questions. I'd like to say that one important thing Bishop Museum is doing is in China."

Brown added, "In order to find funding for the museum, we have to do things that excite people."

Rolett, who speaks Chinese, said the collaborative research will strengthen bonds between UH and the museum. "Also, collaboration with China is tremendously significant in a way that is not apparent to outsiders," he said.

He explained: "At Fujian we worked with local archaeologists who, I came to realize, have never been outside their province. Our contracts with Guangdong and Zhejiang provinces increase our scope to the entire coast of China from Shanghai to Hong Kong.

"Something we can do is coordinate the research of all three provinces and make it available to everybody. This is important because local Chinese archaeologists have difficulty in getting funding to do outside study and to attend conferences.

"It's one reason local archaeologists are happy to work with us. We share with them the work of other Chinese archaeologists.

"We hope to invite local researchers from all three provinces to Hawai'i for a roundtable conference to share their results. They've never had an opportunity to meet face to face.

"Perhaps most significant of all is the fact that now some of the money for our research is coming from China. The money is coming from the Chinese Academy of Sciences for the geology portion of the project. This is very unusual. Usually, Americans pay for everything."

A third party to the collaboration is Harvard, where Jiao won a full scholarship to work on his Ph.D. He became interested in Polynesian origins as a student when he took a course from Rolett, a visiting professor.

Jiao said he is honored to follow in the footsteps of other Bishop Museum anthropologists. He said he and Rolett will return to Dongshan in March to look for sources of the stone adzes found in the dig there.

"We know these people were engaged in long-distance voyaging," he said. "We've sourced the stone adzes. They match with places on the coast and the Penghu archipelago, a group of islands in the Taiwan Strait."

He said these are the first baby steps in the study of Austronesian seafaring and other aspects of that neolithic culture such as the relationship of rice culture to voyaging. The Austronesians are a large, ancient-language family from which Polynesians descended.