Late Glacial hunter-gatherer pottery in the Russian Far East: Indications of diversity in origins and use

Abstract

During the Late Glacial, hunter-gatherers began using ceramic cooking containers in three separate geographic regions of East Asia: China, Japan and along the Amur River in the Russian Far East.While recent research has clarified the use of early pottery in Japan, very little is known about what led to the emergence of pottery in the other two areas, including the likely environmental, economic or cultural drivers. In this paper we focus on the Russian Far East, where pottery has been recovered from dated contexts that span circa 16,200 to 10,200 years ago (cal BP). Interpreting the use of early pottery along the Amur River has been difficult because the region's acidic soils make palaeo-economic reconstructions challenging. To address this gap in knowledge we undertook lipid residue analysis of 28 pot sherds from the sites of Khummi, Gasya, and Goncharka 1 on the Lower Amur River, and the Gromatukha site on the Middle Amur. Our results indicate that pottery was employed to process aquatic oils at sites on the Lower Amur, a pattern of use that aligns with similar results from Japan, and suggests that fishing -probably of salmonids and freshwater fish -was becoming increasingly important during this period. In contrast, the results from the Middle Amur indicate a different pattern showing a significant contribution of ruminant animals. These regional differences in use are also mirrored in contrasting manufacturing techniques with pottery from the Middle and Lower Amur forming distinct ceramic traditions. These combined insights may point to greater local variability in the development and use of early pottery in East Asia than has previously been indicated.

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

“…A similar pattern of use can also be observed in the earliest pottery appearing in the Lower Amur region in Far Eastern Russia, with recent findings of the Osipovka culture linking pottery adoption to the processing of salmon and freshwater fish c. 16,200 BP (Shoda et al, 2020). Therefore, this evidence suggests that most of the oldest pottery in Japan and the Lower Amur was linked to a process of economic diversification, with the addition of aquatic resources to an existing Late Pleistocene strategy of game hunting.…”

“…Finally, limited evidence of plant use was documented in these assemblages, that, similarly to the Kafukai materials, may have been a result of c. 50-year post-excavation storing having eliminated some of the lighter compounds in the potsherds. (Craig et al, 2013;Lucquin et al, 2016aLucquin et al, , 2018Shoda et al, 2018Shoda et al, , 2020. Indeed, the majority of the samples showed lipid profiles and isotopic values consistent with the presence of abundant degraded and thermally processed aquatic oils and fats primarily derived from marine fish and sea mammal organisms.…”

Lithic raw material economy at the Huayang site in Northeast China: localization and diversification as adaptive strategies in the Late Glacial

“…In particular, a new technique-grinding-was used to finish the newly made tools, such as axes, adzes, and chisels, resulting in the coexistence of ground and flaked stone tools at the sites. In addition, this general trend was accompanied by the appearance of pottery not only at these two sites but also in neighboring regions including the Song-Nen Plain and the middle and lower Amur River basin (Kuzmin 2014;Sato and Natsuki 2017;Wang 2018;Wang and Sebillaud 2019;Yue et al 2020), which signaled a substantial shift in human subsistence patterns (Kunikita et al 2013(Kunikita et al , 2017Shoda et al 2020). With reference to the theoretical expectations on relations between technological organization and settlement mobility (Binford 1979;Kelly 1992;Nelson 1991;Parry and Kelly 1987;Shott 1986), we suggest that the technological changes in the southern Lesser Khingan Mountains were likely the result of the decrease of mobility, as well as of the change in land use patterns shifting from residential to logistical mobility.…”

The Beixin Culture: archaeobotanical evidence for a population dispersal of Neolithic hunter-gatherer-cultivators in northern China

“…More contentious, however, is whether those populations were necessarily reliant on an established farming economy. As evident from the use of pottery by hunter-gatherers in East Asia (Habu 2010;Shoda et al 2020), or monumental architecture by hunter-gatherer-cultivators in South-west Asia, such as at Göbekli Tepe in Turkey (Dietrich et al 2012) and WF16 in southern Jordan (Mithen et al 2018), the presence of 'Neolithic' material culture does not necessarily reflect a farming economy. As such, its spread across continental regions need not imply the movement of farming populations, which is a fundamental tenet of the farming/dispersal hypothesis.…”

“…More contentious, however, is whether those populations were necessarily reliant on an established farming economy. As evident from the use of pottery by hunter-gatherers in East Asia (Habu 2010; Shoda et al 2020), or monumental architecture by hunter-gatherer-cultivators in South-west Asia, such as at Göbekli Tepe in Turkey (Dietrich et al . 2012) and WF16 in southern Jordan (Mithen et al .…”