Emergence of complex society in prehistoric Korea has long been understood as a socioeconomic corollary of its Bronze Age agriculture (1300–300 b.c. ). Archaeological data accumulated in recent years, however, point to the contrary. By around 3500 b.c. Korea’s Neolithic society had gone beyond foraging and collecting and become a society of the middle ground. It became increasingly sedentary and began food production, initially at a low level, as it sought to secure critical resources through logistic strategies. It also increasingly utilized storage as a mechanism of risk and wealth management. Gradually intensifying subsistence strategies that combined hunting, fishing, gathering, mobile horticulture, and storage mechanism, enabled Korea’s Chulmun Neolithic society to maintain its sociopolitical and economic stability over a period of several millennia. The intensification increased during the Late Neolithic with emerging mixed crop farming and mass-capture of marine resources. Post-Neolithic florescence of rice-based agriculture and the revolutionary societal elaboration during and beyond the Bronze Age were direct outcomes of socioeconomic foundations laid by the indigenous Korean hunter-fisher-gatherer-cultivators during the Chulmun Neolithic.
The Udu-dong archeological site in Chuncheon, South Korea, dates back to the Proto–Three Kingdoms Period (approximately 100 BC to AD 350). Many artifacts, including some earthenware, have been excavated in these ancient dwelling sites. We applied three geochronological dating methods (radiocarbon, optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), and archeomagnetic dating) to the archeological remains of this large-scale human settlement and reconstructed the history of depositional processes prior to human settlement. The timing of the ancient community’s settlement was investigated by radiocarbon dating of the charcoal fragments collected from old furnaces. Archeomagnetic dating allowed us to constrain the time period of the settlement’s abandonment by dating the last use of fire. The timing and development of fluvial deposits underlying the settlement site were reconstructed by OSL dating combined with sedimentary facies analysis. Our results show that, following the deposition of coarse sediments starting 10,000 years ago, the region formed a stable floodplain environment starting around 3000 years ago; people began to form clustered settlements approximately 50 years later. For the subsequent 150 years or so, the area was heavily used as a settlement site, with people evenly distributed across it, before eventual abandonment of the site around AD 200–250. Because the sedimentary deposits do not show any significant facies change during this period, we conclude that any catastrophic events were not the main reason for settlement abandonment. This study suggests that combining scientific and archeological analyses have significant benefits for studies of such archeological sites. Therefore, continuous collection of such data can provide important information for the excavation and protection of prehistoric or historic sites.
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