Biogeography and adaptation in the Kuril Islands, Northeast Asia

Abstract

The Circumpolar North is generally recognized as a challenging environment to inhabit and yet, we know relatively little about how people managed their welfare in these places. Here, we add to the understanding of maritime hunter-gatherers in the subarctic North Pacific through a comparative approach that synthesizes biogeographic and archaeological data from the Kuril Islands. We conclude that our faunal, ceramic and lithic evidence support biogeographical expectations as assemblages from low biodiversity and insular regions show limited diet breadth, more locally produced pottery and a conservation of lithic resources. However, we highlight that these ecological factors did not strictly determine the occupation history of the archipelago as radiocarbon data suggests all regions experienced similar demographic fluctuations regardless of their biogeography. These results imply additional pressures influenced the strategic use and settlement of the Kuril Islands and the need for increased chronological resolution to disentangle these complex historical factors. IntroductionMaritime hunter-gatherers can be broadly defined as those groups whose subsistence relies primarily on wild resources extracted from the sea. However, given that many northern regions have had only intermittent human presence (Hoffecker 2005; Friesen and Mason 2016) and have been less intensively studied, the archaeological record of Arctic and sub-Arctic maritime hunter-gatherers is often scant. This is unfortunate as the archaeology of northern foragers present valuable opportunities to study long-term interactions between humans and their environments. This is especially true given the challenging climates, inherent instability of highlatitude ecosystems and their reliance on local resources for survival (Damm et al. 2019). Here, our approach is to compare archaeological and radiocarbon evidence from maritime hunter-gatherers that inhabited a subarctic landscape: the Kuril Islands, an archipelago that stretches from the northernmost Japanese island of Hokkaido to the southern tip of the Kamchatka peninsula (see Fig 1). We start from the well-established premise that islands make good areas for studying historical hunter-gatherer relationships to ecological variability (Keegan

Margins of the centre or critical peripheries?

“…Colonization of the circumpolar north would not have been possible without the series of innovations that arose from increasing institutional and economic complexity across Northeast Asia, beginning at~6000-5000 BC with widespread coalescence and resource management (Janz 2016;Popov, Tabarev, and Mikishin 2014;Shelach-Lavi et al 2019). Of equal importance, a range of new ideas and technologies accompanied the use and limited production of metals as it spread into northern and eastern Siberia and Alaska, including plant and animal domestication (Popov, Zhushchikhovskaya, and Nitikin 2019), new funerary practices (Dyakonov 2019), increasingly elaborate and durable art (Mason and Rasic 2019) and the mobilization of long-distance trade and migration (Friesen and O'Rourke 2019;Gjesfjeld et al 2019;Mason and Rasic 2019).…”

“…The most relevant development to understanding the trajectory of societies covered here is the development of effective sea-mammal hunting (Takase 2019). This allowed local groups to progressively settle previously unoccupied and environmentally marginal settings (see Gjesfjeld et al 2019). The geographic impact of this development is exemplified in the Thule, descendants of Bering Sea walrus/whale hunters, whose colonization of the vast Arctic coastlines stretched from Chukotka to Greenland (Friesen and O'Rourke 2019;Raghavan et al 2014).…”

“…Each stage of development facilitated larger cultural changes. The early colonization of the Kuril Islands, for example, Gjesfjeld et al (2019); Yanshina and Kuzmin (2010), is broadly contemporary with the oldest evidence for harpoon heads in Hokkaido at~5800 BC (Takase 2019). Bỹ 3800 BC, both adult and juvenile seal remains are found in local faunal assemblages, suggesting that a shift had occurred from opportunistic hunting in coastal nurseries to the targeted exploitation of feeding grounds in the open ocean (Takase 2019).…”

“…According to Takase (2019), this shift was interrelated with the rise of prestige status among fishers, including access to exotic goods such as shell and stone tube beads from southwestern and central Japan. In the Kuril Islands, the first major population pulse also dates to the first millennium BC, which Gjesfjeld et al (2019) connect to greater intensification on marine mammal use and improved harpoon technology. These developments correspond with a tremendous rise in the accumulation of wealth and the mobilization of luxury goods (e.g.…”

Island Colonization and Environmental Sustainability in the Postglacial Mediterranean

“…Why is this? In other contexts, such as the insular Pacific, size, distance, and degree of isolation-geometric variables that drive biogeographic patterning more broadly-have been shown to structure insular settlement, e.g., [2,29]. Indeed, island area has, since Cherry's early work [30][31][32], consistently been viewed as a major factor in explaining variation in the data, both for agropastoral settlement [28] and, more recently, in preceding hunter-gatherer exploitation [33].…”