The Jomon period of ancient Japan, characterized by hunting and gathering, lasted from 16,000 to 2,400 years cal BP. In this ∼13,000-year period, the geographical range of trade is known to have been extensive but may not have always been constant. We conducted obsidian social network analyses on a large dataset to explore the dynamics of trade networks and their tipping points during the Jomon period. This study clustered sites by geographical location and summarized obsidian artifacts in aggregate values by region to increase regional representativeness. This improved the readability and interpretability of the analysis results and decreased the distortion of results owing to a small sample of sites. The results showed that, for sites adjacent to one another, it is reasonable to group the total values by region and assess the regional representativeness of the findings. Framing the provenance and consumption areas as a bipartite graph and using network analyses among consumption areas revealed that the obsidian trade network expanded throughout the Kanto region in the middle Jomon period (5,500–4,500 years cal BP) but regionalized in the late Jomon period (4,500–3,200 years cal BP). These periods were extracted as tipping points in the Jomon trade network. The timing of these tipping points possibly occurred during a period of major climate change. Therefore, these tipping points of obsidian trade networks may have resulted from population decline and migration caused by shifting coastlines and living infrastructure owing to climate change.
In this study, we applied natural language processing (NLP) techniques to texts of excavation reports on buried cultural properties to calculate the degree of similarity between the reports for determining archaeological sites that have a high degree of similarity. Specifically, we validated whether the similarity of sentence embeddings in the excavation reports of these sites is consistent with the existing classification. Four archaeological sites classified in existing archaeological research papers were used. For validation, 128 excavation reports from the four sites were used; sentence embeddings were obtained using Doc2Vec. We obtained the following results: 1) In applying NLP to excavation reports for determining the similarities of archaeological sites, merging the texts for each site into a single document and then processing it was more preferable than processing it in separate volumes of the excavation report. 2) The similarity based on sentence embedding of excavation reports using Doc2Vec was more consistent with the classification of the characteristics of archaeological sites than term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF-IDF). 3) When targeting a specific period, the sentence embedding exclusively for the text of the relevant period is consistent with the classification of the characteristics of the archaeological site from the artifacts and structural remains of that specific period. 4) When a specific period is targeted, the exclusive sentence embeddings of that period, obtained through the additive compositionality of sentence embeddings, can be used to classify the characteristics of archaeological sites based on the artifacts and structural remains on that period. Consequently, the similarities of texts based on NLP can reflect the similarities of archaeological sites. This holds true even for excavation reports that include spelling inconsistencies, optical character reader misrecognition, and garbled words.
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