What Did They Cook? A Preliminary Investigation Into Culinary Practices and Pottery Use in the Central Part of the Korean Peninsula During the Mid to Late Holocene

Abstract

This study attempts to understand prehistoric human subsistence in Korean peninsula through the preliminary initiation of organic geochemical analyses on potsherds. While traditional approaches focus on reconstructing the ancient pot function or relative chronology, organic geochemical analyses on archaeological potteries endeavors to be precise about the types of food groups that were cooked or stored in a pot by attempting to identify the specific organic compounds trapped in the clay matrix. Since organic compounds are often preserved in direct association with archaeological pots, organic geochemical analyses have become an important method of investigation which archaeologists use to better understand the function of ceramic artifacts such as pottery and local diets. The sherd samples for the analyses in this paper were collected from the two prehistoric habitation sites located in the central part of the Korean peninsula: Kimpo-Yangchon site and Eupha-ri site. The main habitation period of the former is around 2800 BP (B. Kim et al. 2013), and the latter site was occupied around 1900 BP (H. Wang et al. 2013). We show that terrestrial animals are strongly represented in the organic residues, suggesting that views of a crop-dominated diet might need revision. Our results provide a critical clue to understand ancient subsistence of the central part of the Korean peninsula.

Archaeolinguistic evidence for the farming/language dispersal of Koreanic

“…The Neolithic was to be understood as the time of ‘indigenous Korean hunter–fisher–gatherers’ (Shin et al, 2013, p. 69). As an extension of this perspective, research on the adoption of farming has often emphasized regional and chronological variation across the peninsula (Kwak & Marwick 2015; Bale, 2017; Kwak, 2017; Kwak et al, 2017; Kim et al, 2018).…”

Pottery use by early Holocene hunter-gatherers of the Korean peninsula closely linked with the exploitation of marine resources

“…The most promising approach to reveal pottery contents, and thus direct insight into the motivation for its adoption, is through organic residue analysis. While this technique has been applied widely to early pottery assemblages in East Asia (Craig et al 2013;Lucquin, Gibbs et al 2016), much less attention has been paid in Korea with only three studies of much later prehistoric material so far undertaken (Kwak & Marwick 2015;Heron, Shoda et al 2016;Kwak et al 2017).…”

Broad-spectrum foodways in southern coastal Korea in the Holocene: Isotopic and archaeobotanical signatures in Neolithic shell middens

“…With rigorous soil sampling and flotation using fine mesh, this study was able to provide a glimpse into the utilization of a much greater diversity of grain, fruit, and nut taxa. Prior to our earlier studies on later prehistoric sites (Kwak and Marwick 2015;Kwak, Kim, and Lee 2017) and two recent studies by Heron et al (2016) and Shoda et al (2017), isotope analyses had only been applied only to human remains in Korea. Our integrative approach opens the door to using the most common artifacts of the Korean Neolithic, pottery, to better understand the evolution of human diets and subsistence strategies in this region.…”