Environmental change and cultural dynamics of Holocene hunter–gatherers in Northeast Asia: Comparative analyses and research potentials in Cis-Baikal (Siberia, Russia) and Hokkaido (Japan)

Abstract

(250 words)While substantial progress has been achieved in hunter-gatherer research over the last century, it is still the case that our understanding of the cultural dynamism, variability, and resilience of Holocene hunter-gatherers remains rather impoverished. Emerging archaeological insights suggest that the prehistory of many forager societies included periods of sudden cultural transformation, marked by major shifts in subsistence strategies, settlement patterns and associated social life. Recent theoretical and methodological advances are enabling archaeologists to reconstruct the cultural dynamics of Holocene hunter-gatherers in an unprecedented degree of detail. This is especially true in regions that contain large prehistoric cemeteries, which can provide the base data for bioarchaeological reconstruction of individual life histories, shedding light on forager life-ways, their subsistence strategies and mobility patterns. Renewed attention is also being directed at the role of unstable environments and climate, which would have formed important contextual factors influencing how local cultural dynamics were played out. However, identifying explicit causal links between environmental instability and culture change remains empirically challenging. This paper investigates the major sequences of Holocene hunter-gatherer culture-change in two regions of Northeast Asia and details how the new Baikal-Hokkaido Archaeology Project will be researching the causal factors driving these cultural processes, including the possible role of climate and environment.

Barley (Hordeum vulgare) in the Okhotsk culture (5th–10th century AD) of northern Japan and the role of cultivated plants in hunter–gatherer economies

“…In contrast, the Hokkaido Region (Fig 1C) was not affected by these changes in subsistence. People in northern Japan, similar to those in Greenland, Arctic regions of Asia, and the American West Coast, remained “complex” hunter–fisher–gatherer well into the historic period [19]. Local Jomon populations of Hokkaido continued a foraging lifestyle [20] until the middle of the 1st millennium AD when they were replaced by Okhotsk cultural communities in the north and by Satsumon cultural communities in the central and the southern parts of the island [21].…”

“…Local Jomon populations of Hokkaido continued a foraging lifestyle [20] until the middle of the 1st millennium AD when they were replaced by Okhotsk cultural communities in the north and by Satsumon cultural communities in the central and the southern parts of the island [21]. Both of the latter cultures are commonly identified as hunter–fisher–gatherers [19]; however, their archaeological remains show evidence for the use of metals and the cultivation of crops [8]. The extent of their productive economy has not been fully studied.…”

Palaeobotanical records from Rebun Island and their potential for improving the chronological control and understanding human–environment interactions in the Hokkaido Region, Japan

“…Weber et al, 2010Weber et al, , 2013. Weber et al (2013), summarizing the substantial progress achieved in hunter-gatherer research during the past few decades and defining the BHAP rationales, noted that 'the understanding of the cultural dynamism, variability, and resilience of Holocene hunter-gatherers in many regions remains rather impoverished'. The Holocene cultural sequence of the Hokkaido Region is characterized by a series of hunter-gatherer populations.…”

“…What role unstable environments and climate played in the local and regional cultural dynamics remains an extremely important, although an empirically challenging question (e.g. Weber et al, 2013). Thus, in the northern part of the Japanese Archipelago including Hokkaido and adjacent islands (Figure 1a and b), potentially rich in archaeological and environmental archives, the main challenge remains the scarcity of published environmental and archaeological records with high temporal resolution and adequate dating control (see Igarashi (2013) and Habu (2004) for details and references).…”

‘You must keep going’ – Musculoskeletal system stress indicators of prehistoric mobile pastoralists in Western China

“…arts.ualberta.ca/project description) clearly demonstrates advantages of bioarchaeological research and the individual life history approach for better understanding Neolithic and Bronze Age hunteregatherer lifeways in two macro-regions of Eastern Asia (see Weber et al, 2010Weber et al, , 2013 and references therein). Li et al (2013) emphasize that application of the individual life history approach e a suite of laboratory and macroscopic methods which give detailed information about individuals through examination of their skeletal remains and provide insights into the variation of past human behavior at the individual and community level (Weber et al, 2010) e has a particularly high research potential in Western China, where extremely arid environments are favorable for preservation of organic material and detailed palaeopathological analysis of human skeletal remains (Wagner et al, 2011).…”