It was during the Japanese colonial period that excavators first uncovered a rectangular stone coffin at Dulan. The discovery was not accidental — local knowledge had long pointed to unusual rock formations in the area — but the excavation transformed what had been a curiosity into a subject of serious study. Academia Sinica, Taiwan's premier research institution, took up the investigation and found far more than one burial: beneath the soil lay extensive stone piles, the remnants of structures built by people who inhabited this stretch of coastline some 3,000 years ago. The site now carries official recognition as a third-grade cultural heritage site under Taiwan's preservation framework.

Visitors today move between two distinct areas. The stony coffin zone is where the burial remains were found — slab-lined rectangular chambers set into the hillside, their proportions deliberate and precise. These are not rough pits but carefully constructed resting places, speaking to a community with defined beliefs about death and the afterlife. The stony wall zone preserves the outlines of ancient structures, their purposes still debated: habitation walls, ceremonial enclosures, or both. Footpaths thread between the formations, and explanatory signs offer context in multiple languages, turning what might otherwise seem like an overgrown hillside into a legible landscape of the past.

The Dulan Site sits just inland from one of Taiwan's most storied stretches of coast, a narrow corridor between the Pacific and the forested slopes of Dulan Mountain. The Amis people — whose oral tradition holds that Dulan itself was one of their ancestral homelands, a place they called A'tolan — have lived along this coast for millennia. The archaeological record at this site aligns with those traditions: 3,000 years of continuous human presence is not myth, it is stratigraphy. Standing among the stone coffins, with the sea breeze carrying salt from the Pacific a few hundred meters away, that continuity becomes palpable. The stones are still here. So are the people descended from those who placed them.

What makes the Dulan Site unusual among Taiwan's archaeological sites is its location within a still-inhabited Amis community. This is not a remote ruin sealed off from contemporary life — it is a piece of the village's own biography, accessible from the same roads that lead to the surfing beach and the old sugar factory turned art space. Visitors who walk the site in the morning and then stop for lunch at a local restaurant operated by Amis families are experiencing the long arc of that history compressed into a single day. The prehistoric and the present share the same hillside, the same air, the same ancestral connection to this particular bend in the Pacific coast.