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EUForts is a database of European forts founded in Asia-Pacific between the 16th and 19th centuries. It includes the information about founding and successive cultural attributions, and exact locations of the forts produced specifically for this data set.

Historical narratives on Oceania have over the last two centuries mainly focused on the second half of the eighteenth century as the significant period of first encounters between Pacific Islanders and Western explorers. However, the first crossing of the region by Fernando de Magallanes (Ferdinand Magellan) was in 1521. More importantly, it has been widely neglected that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese explorers navigated through parts of Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia, making regular landfalls and contact with many islands and archipelagos. The potentially devastating consequences of these early encounters (i.e., with interpersonal violence between natives and newcomers as well as the potential introduction of new deadly diseases) are well known for islands like Guam. They possibly also influenced the cultures and traditions of other archipelagos of Oceania before the better known voyages of Cook, La Perouse, and others more than 150 years later. Drawing on historical data and the scarcely available archaeological evidence, this paper aims to show that there is an urgent need to reconsider the early phase of Pacific-Western contacts as a key period in the shaping of the “traditional” indigenous cultural behaviors in parts of Oceania. This assessment has the potential to profoundly change our understanding of the ethnographical observations of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that have been produced and used in the last two centuries to define a baseline of the beginning of Western impacts on Indigenous societies in the region.

Despite being a perishable material, wood can nonetheless show in its full complexity the materiality of daily life activities, identity construction, economic exploitation, and adaptation in colonial processes. The study of two sets of wood samples in well-defined archaeological colonial contexts from the site of Heping Dao, on the northern coast of Taiwan, has unveiled otherwise unknown aspects of native exchange, adoption of indigenous practices, and differences and similarities between early European colonialism and Japanese imperialism in Asia-Pacific. Despite the constraints of taxonomic identification in subtropical (and tropical) areas, the use of different coniferous wood types has been recorded: Cupressaceae, cf. Chamaecyparis spp., cf. Cryptomeria japonica and cf. Cunninghamia spp. The paper highlights the close relationship between wooden objects and diachronic historical processes and stresses the complexity of their study in colonial contexts, with implications toward the prehistoric period.

The paper is an introduction to the study of European migration into Asia-Pacific through the case study of northern Taiwan. Here, several Spanish and Dutch colonial outposts were founded during the first part of the seventeenth century. Since 2011 and up to 2016 we have uncovered six burials of the cemetery of the Spanish colony of San Salvador de Kelang (Heping Dao, Keelung) (1626–42). The cemetery was associated with the Convento de Todos los Santos, Convent of All Saints, also discovered anew during our excavations. DNA analysis shows that at least one of the individuals was of European descent. This finding is unprecedented in Asia-Pacific within this early chronological framework. The archaeological evidence stands in contrast to the scarcity of contemporary written information relating to death and burials, both in Spanish and Dutch sources. We use the written sources to contextualize the archaeological data, inquiring about the life trajectories of the European colonists in Taiwan, people who truly lived in a global world. We aim to synthesize these data to create a documentary background for future research towards a better understanding of the European migration patterns into Asia-Pacific within cultural, biological, and demographic dimensions. This study offers a valuable contrast with research on the same topic elsewhere in the world., Unión Europea. FP7, Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO), Ministerio de Educación y Cultura (MEC), Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas / National Science Council of Taiwan, Institute of History and Philology of the Academia Sinica, University of Konstanz, Banco de Santander, Depto. de Biodiversidad, Ecología y Evolución, Fac. de Ciencias Biológicas, TRUE, pub

The paper is an introduction to the study of European migration into Asia-Pacific through the case study of northern Taiwan. Here, several Spanish and Dutch colonial outposts were founded during the first part of the seventeenth century. Since 2011 and up to 2016 we have uncovered six burials of the cemetery of the Spanish colony of San Salvador de Kelang (Heping Dao, Keelung) (1626–42). The cemetery was associated with the Convento de Todos los Santos, Convent of All Saints, also discovered anew during our excavations. DNA analysis shows that at least one of the individuals was of European descent. This finding is unprecedented in Asia-Pacific within this early chronological framework. The archaeological evidence stands in contrast to the scarcity of contemporary written information relating to death and burials, both in Spanish and Dutch sources. We use the written sources to contextualize the archaeological data, inquiring about the life trajectories of the European colonists in Taiwan, people who truly lived in a global world. We aim to synthesize these data to create a documentary background for future research towards a better understanding of the European migration patterns into Asia-Pacific within cultural, biological, and demographic dimensions. This study offers a valuable contrast with research on the same topic elsewhere in the world.

Tras varios años de experiencia docente hemos podido comprobar cómo hoy en día la sociedad demanda cada vez más el acceso a una formación de calidad, siendo Internet y los MOOC (ofrecidos por diversas universidades nacionales y extranjeras) una de las vías de acceso a la misma. Es por ello que entre los objetivos a alcanzar con la presente propuesta ha estado el de diseñar un curso de formación masiva, abierta y en línea (MOOC), que aproxime de una forma dinámica y accesible al público universitario y general al conocimiento de Filipinas y el Pacífico; facilitando de este modo un acercamiento académico especializado al estudio de la región de Filipinas y el Pacífico.

We present the results of six years of archaeological work carried out in Heping Dao, Keelung, northern Taiwan. The site has revealed a rich archaeological record spanning a sequence that comprehends most of the history of Taiwan, including the most salient historical landmarks in it. The study of this long-term sequence of habitation in Heping Dao throughout prehistory to current times, allows us to attempt a historical archaeology of the longue duree of the place that in turn enables the establishment of comparisons between periods and raising of specific questions, among them: the general understanding of cultural transformation along the Neolithic and the Iron Age, and in turn the transition Iron Age/Aboriginal historic times in Taiwan, which in our view has to be observed as a history of continuity rather than of interruptions; the recognition of the Chinese presence in Taiwan in the pre-European period; the implantation of the European colony and its effects on the local populations; the differing material remains and impacts caused by the presence of pre-European Chinese and the Qing occupation; and the potential for a comparison between the European and the Japanese colonial projects as seen in the material record.

The history of the Asia-Pacific region since the 1500s has traditionally been told as one of stagnation and decline imposed by the superiority of Europeans, who also allegedly established capitalism and political and economic domination since their arrival, thus opening the era of “the Rise of the West.” In the last decades, however, there has been a rejection of the academic paradigm that placed Europe as the key player in the formation of a globalized, capitalist world. Since, ever-earlier world-systems have been subsequently defined in Asia, with particular attention paid to China’s economy. The relevance of this task can hardly be overemphasized: a decentralized global history is being delineated. Thus, the mechanisms by which European colonialism managed, eventually, to bend existing “world-economies” and resources to raise a truly global thriving exploitative economy must be made clearer. Asia-Pacific deserves, as much as any other region, a place in global history as one of the key players not only before Europeans landed there but also after (practically until the nineteenth century). In doing such historical and archaeological work, Western colonialism becomes a comparatively tiny event. This book aims to gather different disciplines and points of view to outline the development of colonialism in Asia-Pacific and its implications, and to shed light on relevant topics for a holistic understanding of the colonial processes.

This chapter argues that traditional historiography has overlooked the extent of early encounters between indigenous populations and Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By emphasizing only the eighteenth century as the time of the first relevant European presence in the Pacific, traditional historiography ignores the potential consequences of earlier encounters on local peoples. This historiographical absence is the result of several factors, and it has serious implications for the anthropological, archaeological, and historical understanding of the Pacific.

This chapter presents the theoretical framework and scientific questions behind recent archaeological investigations undertaken in the hitherto relatively under-researched Spanish colony in Taiwan, founded in the seventeenth century. Despite its potential role in subsequent global developments, this historical episode has been downplayed in mainstream literature on early modern colonialism. My emphasis is not so much on building a thorough presentation of the archaeological findings obtained (in progress), but on summarizing the main results while creating a narrative about the possibilities and constraints of archaeological research on colonialism in the Asia–Pacific region.