Bringing Home Animals: Final-Stage Jomon and Okhotsk Culture Food Technologies

Abstract

In this thesis, organic residues preserved in ancient pottery are used to reconstruct diversity and change in the foodways of Late Holocene hunter-gatherer communities in coastal northern Hokkaido (1750 BCE-1250 CE). The Late Holocene period of this region is very dynamic, and characterised by numerous migrations and cultural replacements. The research into these processes has generally focused on typological variation in pottery, which is a device each of the period's different cultures made widespread use of. This thesis takes a novel approach, and uses pottery residue analysis to investigate long-term patterns of continuity and change in cooking practices, employing the concept of cuisine to interpret the results. In particular, the Okhotsk Cultures (400-1100 CE) form a central focus of the thesis, and their complex animal cosmology, diverse subsistence and multifaceted household activities offer a rich context in which to examine changing foodways. The primary goal is understanding long-term and "macro-scale" patterns of continuity and change, and this also requires improving existing chronological frameworks, which largely rely on pottery typologies rather than radiocarbon dating. Refining and improving existing chronologies therefore forms the second goal of the thesis. The third goal is to examine foodways at a more contextual "micro-scale". This involves studying how pottery use was organised within the domestic space of a single Okhotsk Culture long-house, and how these practices were informed by social relations and the cosmology of human-animal interactions. The present thesis consists of an extended introduction, which sets the research in a wider regional and culture-historical setting, and also presents the main methods, concepts and approaches. The central research question is whether the close association between use of pottery and the processing of aquatic resources, which was established by the Early Holocene, does in fact persist into these Late Holocene cultures. The core of the thesis tackles this question by presenting five journal articles, which focus on the archaeological sites of Hamanaka 2, Kafukai 1 and 2, and Menashidomari. The overall results indicate that this older pattern was starting to break down, and that a range of new and more diverse cooking practices was emerging. The thesis also demonstrates that these important shifts in cuisine can also be tied into much higher-resolution chronological frameworks using new methods and approaches. Finally, the "micro-scale" analysis of container function within a single household suggests that some sort of symbolic distinction was made between different sources of foods.

Factors influencing cranial variation between prehistoric Japanese forager populations

“…These studies suggest there may be meaningful differences in protein intake between regions, but that the storey is complex and needs further investigation, preferably using isotopic methods that allow the interpretation of the whole diet, rather than just its protein portion (Kusaka 2019 ). Archaeobotanical analyses of food remain in dental calculus (e.g., Salazar-García et al 2013 ; Henry et al 2014 ) and residue on cooking/food preparation items (e.g., Junno et al 2020 ; Robson et al 2020 ; Saul et al 2012 ; Yasui 2022 ) could also improve the resolution of our understanding.…”