Late Pleistocene pottery production and exchange: Provenance studies of hunter-gatherer wares from southern Kyushu, Japan by neutron activation analysis

Abstract

Late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers in East Asia adopted pottery, yet the ability to reconstruct circulation, mobility, and exchange has been hampered, in part, due to problematic regional geochronology. The driving forces behind pottery adoption is unclear. The purpose of this study is to test our results of the first systematic petrographic pottery sourcing from the pre-Younger Dryas by utilizing neutron activation analysis. We examine samples from the Sankauyama I site on Tanegashima Island, southern Japan, dating to the Incipient Jomon, ca. 14,000/13,500–12,800 cal BP, with a well-defined geochronology. Our NAA results corroborate with the petrographic study suggesting that pottery was mainly produced in-situ, but some vessels were transported long distances from another island. Changing from high mobility, sedentary Incipient Jomon foragers made pottery, occasionally investing in long-distance ceramic vessel transportation and exchange likely involving ocean crossing. This may be associated with a risk-buffering strategy in the context of rising sea levels and isolation of Tanegashima.

Arheobotanička analiza „liburnske“ keramike s lokaliteta Nadin – Gradina

“…Recent archaeological research has demonstrated that the earliest pottery was already being produced by communities of hunter-gatherers in Asia (Chi 2002;Kuzmin 2002;2010;Bougard 2003;Keally et al 2004;Kuzmin, Vetrov 2007;Boaretto et al 2009;Wu et al 2012;Craig et al 2013;Budja 2016;Iizuka et al 2022a;2022b;Nakazawa et al 2022). Analysis of pottery dated to the very end of the Upper Palaeolithic has established that vessels discovered in Japan and Russia contain organic inclusions, deliberately added to the mixture, while the presence of quartzite -and occasionally also grog, or crushed recycled pottery -has been detected in pottery pastes from various parts of China (Chi 2002: 32-33;Keally et al 2004: 349).…”