[
    {
        "id": 205766,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1969",
        "page_number": 72,
        "title": "RAS-1969",
        "content_text": "66\n\nW. SCHOFIELD\n\nsmall plateau averaging some 10 to 12 metres above sea level. This is a plane of marine denudation dating from a time when the sea level stood 12 metres higher than now, perhaps during the last great inter-glacial period (Riss-Würm), some 100,000 years ago. From this lower area much less clay could be washed than from the higher and steeper hill to the north; and the gentler wave-action on the west beach, normally on the lee of the island, made it about five times as long as that on the east of the isthmus, with very few large boulders. Somewhere on the west side of the 12 metres terrace, between about 1100 and 1500 A.D., there was at one or more times a small settlement, perhaps no more than one or two fishermen's huts; for at this point on the west beach are found pieces of Sung and even Ming pottery lying on the beach and in the cliff, which here is largely built up of coarse rainwash from the hill behind. There is, however, no modern settlement and no cultivation, and the island appears to be used only by boat-people, either for fishing or for burial of their dead; for on one visit Prof. Shellshear, who was with me, discovered a human skeleton of recent date two feet below the top of the sand cliff.\n\nMETHOD OF INVESTIGATION\n\nThe site was first discovered and investigated by Dr. Heanley and Prof. Shellshear, who worked together from about 1925 in looking for sites showing early human occupation. Much of what they found lay on the surface of the beaches, but wherever possible they noted the depth from the soil surface of objects found in the sand cliffs. Part of their material was presented later to the British Museum, and some to Mr. Eumorfopoulos and others, but the rest seems to have disappeared during the war in 1941 when the Hong Kong University was wrecked. Their code number for the site was 123, which points to a comparatively later discovery: the Tai Wan site on Lamma, for example, is numbered 83.\n\nThe technique employed by the writer at Tung Kwu was as follows. Objects not found in situ were collected and the initials of the site were painted on them in Chinese ink. If a single object was found in situ, its depth from the surface was measured in inches or centimetres; it was extracted; the depth and initials of the site were written on it or its wrapping paper, and later were recorded in Chinese ink on the specimen. In 1935, by which",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1969.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 205772,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1969",
        "page_number": 78,
        "title": "RAS-1969",
        "content_text": "72\n\nW. SCHOFIELD\n\nThe above are in the writer's collection.\n\nThe following were in Father Finn's collection:\n\nStone hoe, triangular, slightly bruised at its points, from 114 cm. level, nearly 9 cm. long and quite light.\n\nAnother hoe, more worn, nearly 10 cm. long, from 122 cm. A cup-marked stone, nearly round, and fine-grained, from 92 cm.\n\nSmooth flat stone 4.5 cm. long, like a spatula, from 114 cm. Three adzes, all from 114 cm. depth: the first is roughly rectangular, its upper surface polished, but the lower entirely flaked except for the bevelled cutting edge. The second has diverging flattish sides, butt slightly rounded, and was polished on its surfaces after being flaked to shape. The third, which is only the butt-end of a fairly large adze, has slightly divergent sides, is polished on front and back, and is much flaked on one side. It is of bluestone and was found on the west side of the isthmus. The other two are of fine-grained acid rock.\n\nOne adze, found loose, of bluish ash-rock or hornstone, has rounded edges, slightly diverging, and convex butt and edge.\n\nThe writer also has a note of a flat sided and grip-marked stone in Prof. Shellshear's collection at Hong Kong University having been found at this site.\n\nB. ANCIENT POTTERY\n\nThis is by far the most numerous group of objects found on the site and the most numerous class of finds of pottery is the coarse string-marked type, which was so abundant that many pieces were considered not worth collecting. The same was true of the unornamented coarse pottery, some of which bore basket-work or nail-mark impressions in places, so that exact figures of the relative abundance of the fragments of different classes of pottery, whatever such statistics might be worth, cannot be furnished.\n\nThis rejection of coarse plain or cord-marked pottery only applies to fragments lying loose on the beach. All such pottery seen in the sections of cliff left by sand diggers was carefully collected, in the manner described in the section on methods of investigation. From these data it has been possible to draw up a scheme* showing the distribution in depth of the various classes of pottery grouped according to texture (coarse or fine) and ornament.\n\n* See Figs. 2 and 3.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1969.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 206612,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1972",
        "page_number": 160,
        "title": "RAS-1972",
        "content_text": "ARCHAEOLOGY IN H.K. AND SOUTH CHINA\n\n163\n\nquartz and jade, and stone beads, adzes and lance heads were discovered. Some of the pottery bore makers' marks, which seemed in some cases to resemble archaic Chinese characters. To deal with the problems raised by these and the ornaments on much of the pottery, the chief of which was a symbol resembling a long f and showing several variations, Prof. Shellshear invited the collaboration of the late Father Finn, S.J., a distinguished scholar in the Regional Seminary at Aberdeen, Hong Kong, and a lecturer at the University of Hong Kong. Father Finn devoted himself thenceforward to a careful study of this site and its culture, and published thirteen papers in the Hong Kong Naturalist on the subject, basing his work on a profound study of archaeological literature in neighbouring countries, Japan, China, Indo-China, the Straits and elsewhere.*\n\nThis study was greatly aided by the decision of the Hong Kong Government to have the site excavated at its own expense. In five weeks' work about half the undug portion of the sandbank was excavated to a depth of 6 to 7 feet, and some thousands of pottery fragments, a large number of other objects of stone, quartz, jade, bronze and even two or three partly of iron, were unearthed. Father Finn conducted this excavation, and included the description of the results in his articles.\n\nFather Finn also worked at other sites on Lamma and Hong Kong islands, and during visits to St. John's Island (where St. Francis Xavier died), and the Swabue district near Swatow, discovered more sites. The latter district gave very interesting and important results, which have recently been outlined in a paper by Father Maglioni in the Hong Kong Naturalist.\n\nIn 1932 Professor Shellshear brought the facts then known about Hong Kong's prehistory before the scientific world at the Prehistorians' Congress at Hanoi, whose proceedings were published by the École Française d'Extrême Orient as the Praehistorica Asiae Orientales (Hanoi, 1932). Father Finn summed up the results of his work at the Lamma Island site at the Manila Congress of the same body in 1935.†\n\n* A list of publications on local pre-history that includes those mentioned at various places in this article can be found at the end.\n\n† Whose proceedings were not published. I have Mr. Schofield's notes and can make them available to anyone who may wish to consider filling a gap in our published records.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 206620,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1972",
        "page_number": 168,
        "title": "RAS-1972",
        "content_text": "162 \n\nW. SCHOFIELD \n\nthought to be older than the Han dynasty (210 B.C.). It was known to have been conquered by the First Emperor and added to China, but even history is silent on it prior to that time (220 B.C.). Hence its prehistory lay shrouded in almost darkness, with only a few vague traditions and scanty ethnographic and linguistic data to shed light upon it. \n\nThe first beginnings of enquiry into the pre-Chinese culture of South China date back to about 1926 when Dr. Heanley, then investigating the geology of Hong Kong as an amateur, noticed lying here and there on hills of gravelly clay formed from decayed granite, stones which could not have been formed and left there naturally, and which clearly had the shape of stone adzes, as a rule smoothed and polished. Realising the importance of these finds, he devoted much of his leisure to a careful search for more of them, and in so doing discovered a number of sites, which included an axe factory, a workshop for jewellers working in quartz and other stones, and shore settlements, presumably of fishermen, as well as hill settlements. In this work he was associated with Prof. Shellshear, of Hong Kong University, and shortly before leaving Hong Kong in 1930 he interested me in the subject. I had for some time been investigating the geology of the Colony, and started this new line in association with Dr. Heanley and Prof. Shellshear. My contribution consisted mainly in discovering new sites, chiefly in sandbanks on the coasts and islands of the New Territory. Special attention was paid to these for two reasons; first, the beaches were being vigorously dug for sand to be used in building and public works; second, these sandbanks were the only places where a succession of layers containing objects of different ages could be found. As no beds of limestone exist in the Colony, it was vain to look for caves. \n\nIn my explorations I had occasion to examine a beach site discovered by Dr. Heanley on the island of Lamma close to Hong Kong. This had been dug back a considerable distance further, and I saw, littered over the beach, vast quantities of pottery, with more projecting from the sandy cliff behind. One piece of a cup I found was covered with a bottle-green glaze, a ware which was later found to be a feature of the culture at this and several other sites in Hong Kong. Later visits to the site revealed that bronze weapons and tools were to be found in fair number; in addition, rings of",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h",
        "rank": 0
    }
]