56
K. M. A. BARNETT
where the sea has been receding, it should be possible to find sites for excavation which are further away from the sea than they were when occupied. If one such can be found, it might be possible to uncover the whole settlement (whereas hitherto we have had to be content with the inland fringe of it) and thus to learn more of how these people lived before their way of life was disturbed. The area between the present Castle Peak Bay and Lau Fau Shan,79 particularly the re-entrants (which 1,000 years ago were bays) on the eastern side of Castle Peak and Tai Tau Shan,42 seems to afford the greatest promise.
Associated with the seashore sites, but also to be found on all the hills, are curious inverted conical pits variously described as kilns and vats. Their use has never been satisfactorily explained. These also should be plotted. I would be surprised if the plotting of all these objects: pits, stone walls, graves, standing stones, shore-side occupied sites and pre-Chinese irrigation channels, did not indicate that the inhabitants whom I have described throughout, in deference to tradition and to Chinese records, as of four kinds did not prove to have been after all one people. The fact that a people who grew cereals and roots on the hills and hunted wild game in the forests did not possess a technique for draining and cultivating mangrove swamps is no proof that they did not know how to catch fish; and the fact that our present boat people grow no crops and have for some centuries specialised in fishing and manufacturing salt does not mean that their earlier ancestors could not have hunted on the hills as well as in the sea, and there grown the cereals they needed to supplement a fish diet, and the roots from which they produced the preservative dye which they still use for their nets and sails. They must have had access to the forest to obtain the wood from which they built their boats, the skins from which they made their sails, and the gut from which, I suppose, they made their bowstrings and other fastenings. They may have done all this by friendly barter (I have suggested elsewhere that a group of place names including Yau Ma Tei,65 Ma Yau Tong90 and Ma Liu Shui could have been places where by convention the people of the shore and the people of the hills met to exchange their necessities), but the possibility that they were all one people