East/Southeast Asia (Geographic Keyword)
126-150 (499 Records)
Carbonized black debris was found in many fu pots recovered from an early stratum at the Hemudu site (c. 7000–6500 cal. BP). The debris resembles food residues. Although this kind of debris has been regarded as residues of cooked rice for a long time, so far no specific research has been conducted. To clarify the nature of these residues, we carried out a microscopic morphological analysis and stable isotope analysis on one of the specimens. The morphological analysis found starch granules of a...
Early Bronze Age Animal Use at Lajia, a Qijia Culture Site in Qinghai Province, China. (2015)
The faunal remains from Lajia, a late Neolithic and early Bronze Age site in northwestern China, reveal that sheep, a newly introduced domesticate during this time period, are the central source of meat for the site’s residents. This represents a shift from earlier modes of subsistence in the region, which were focused on pig husbandry. Sheep were the most common domesticate in the Lajia assemblage, followed by pigs and cattle. An examination of age profiles reveals that mature adult sheep...
Early Cultivation in China: Where and When (2017)
For over 2.6 million years foragers did not demonstrate that cultivation was a way for obtaining food stability although occasional events may have escaped the archaeological records. Cultivation by hunter-gatherers across the continents (except for Australia) emerged during the Terminal Pleistocene and early Holocene as a response to limitation on mobility due essentially to competition among growing populations conceived archaeologically as "relative demographic pressure". The paper will...
Early Historic Overseas Exchanges in Tamra, Jeju (2017)
Overseas exchanges are a key interest in Jeju archaeology as several sites there document intricate networks in early historical periods. The term "Tamra" is first appeared in the "Samguk Sagi (History of the Three Kingdom, 1145)," and is widely believed to refer political entities in Jeju. In archaeology, "Tamra" often refers to the period from c. 200 BC to AD 1105, and if further divided into three phases. The Tamra Formation period (200 BC–AD 200) marks a population increase and increasing...
Early Maritime Involvement of Butuan with other Southeast Asian Polities and China (2015)
The significance and importance of Butuan as a trading center as early as the 10th century C.E. Can be based on the thousands of artifacts excavated from 1976 to 2014 ranging from Chinese ceramics belonging mostly to the Song Period (ca. 10th-13th centuries), Southeast Asian and locally produced earthenware pots and stoves. Another very important artifact encountered were plank-built edge-pegged boats that measures approximately 15 meters long and 3 meters wide. In 2012, a larger boat was...
Early Neolithic plant exploitation in East China (2015)
Early Neolithic plant exploitation is a key subject for understanding the subsistence strategies of late hunter-gatherers and early farmers. As archaeobotany has developed in China, plant remains, together with other ecofacts, have been recovered from several early Neolithic sites around Shandong Highlands, East China. Preliminary results show changes in the role of plant resources. At about 10000 year BP, the inhabitants of Bianbiandong Cave relied mainly on animal food with very small amount...
Early Spanish Colonialism in Manila: A Historical Archaeology Viewpoint (2015)
The establishment of Spanish Manila in 1571 marked a turning point in global history. Historians have extolled the roles of Manila as a hub of global trade networks and a key locus of cultural exchange between the East and the West. Nevertheless, the power relationships that defined colonial life in the Manila area were taken for granted by scholars. The major ethnolingustic groups of colonial Manila - the Spaniards, the indigenous Tagalog, and the Chinese - formed a specific urban landscape...
Early Subsistence Practices at Prehistoric Dadunzi in Yuanmou, Yunnan: New Evidence for the Origins of Early Agriculture in Southwest China (2015)
In 2010, flotation work was carried out at the site of Dadunzi in the Chuxiong Yi Autonomous Zone. A number of crops were recovered from this work including: foxtail millet, broomcorn millet and rice, as well as weeds originating from both fields and the natural environment. The results of the flotation show that at 4000 BP, that the Yuanmou site had already entered a phase of agricultural production and the majority of the diet of the inhabitants of this site came from these three crops....
Early Urban Configurations in Mahan, Korea: Local and Regional Approaches to Settlements dated to 100 BCE-CE 300 (2017)
Mahan, composed of 54 polities in central and southwestern Korea, grew rapidly from 100 BCE to CE 300, by which time it covered about 40,000 square kilometers, with a population of roughly 500,000. During much of this time, urban zones became the dominant residential mode at both local and regional levels, but without suggesting a strong central authority. No unequivocal capital cities have been identified. At the same time, there is evidence of a dual-urban organization with distinctive...
Economic differentiation in Hongshan core zone communities: A geochemical perspective (2015)
It is proposed that a greater degree of differentiation between households in Hongshan villages (4500-3000 BC) in northeast China with regard to productive activities implies a greater degree of economic interdependence between households and a more complex economy, which possibly provides leaders with enhanced opportunities to mobilize labor toward such ends. Analysis of household artifact assemblages in the Hongshan periphery has indicated some very modest levels of productive differentiation...
Economic Intensification in Old Kiyyangan: Global Interaction and Intra-Regional Trade Understood Through Trade Ceramics (2017)
Access to imported goods by premodern societies implies economic intensification and long distance trade and interaction. Investigations in the Old Kiyyangan Village (OKV), Ifugao, Philippines have indicated that Southeast Asian and Chinese tradeware ceramics began to influence social interactions as early as 600 years ago. This presentation reports on our work in OKV that highlights the role of outside trade in the development of social differentiation in the region. We focus on the period...
EDXRF Analysis on Ceramics During the Mongol Period in China (2017)
In this paper I will present the results from analyzing and comparing ceramics from multiple contexts, including ceramic production centers, burials and residential areas during the Mongol period. I adopted Energy-Dispersive X-Ray Fluorescence (EDXRF), a very effective and non-destructive way to analyze the chemical compositions of their pastes, glazes and pigments of samples from Jingdezhen, Inner Mongolia, and other areas of the Mongol Empire. Other scientific techniques and statistic methods...
Elemental composition of Iron Age glass beads from Myanmar (2015)
Glass appears in Southeast Asia at the début of the Iron Age, around the middle of the 1st millennium BC. Variations in Southeast Asian glass type distributions were found to be excellent markers of changes in cultural and economic interactions but are based heavily on material from Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. Other regions, in particular Myanmar’s pivotal position with India, have remained largely unexplored, making it difficult to draw a global picture for Southeast Asia during this...
Elite formation and wet-rice access in the northern Philippine highlands (2016)
Elite formation and development of cultural complexity in the Philippines have been considered to be a product of long-distance trade and interaction beginning at ca. AD 1000. Proxy indicators for this political shift have been based on increasing centralization of pottery production and consumption. In the highlands, however, we see an alternative basis for elite formation; one based on access to wet rice and the ability to sponsor feasts. In this paper, we explore the development of social...
Elusive wild foods in Southeast Asian subsistence: modern ethnography and archaeological phytoliths (2017)
While grain crops, such as rice, are relatively easy to identify in the archaeobotanical record, evidence for early agriculture in the wet tropics can be elusive. In this region staple foods were not always grain-based and even today wild plants play an important role. So how do we identify ancient food pathways? Unlike temperate parts of the world, charred material rarely preserves, so this is where micro fossils such as phytoliths and starches come into play. I use phytoliths in combination...
The Emergence of Blade Industry in Late Upper Paleolithic Central Plain of China (2017)
The lithic remains of blade manufacturing have been found in the Central China Plain dating to roughly 25 ka B.P. Based on chaîne opératoire analysis of lithic assemblages from Dongshi and Xishi sites, the blade industry in this region shared many features in common with typical blade industries of Western Eurasia. Such discovery challenges the presumption that the hinterland of East Asia lacked the development of blade industrialization during the Paleolithic age. The emergence of blade...
Emergence of Walled Towns in the Neolithic Jianghan Plain: Warfare or Flooding Control? (2015)
The late Neolithic in the Jianghan plain is characterized by the emergence of a new kind of settlement pattern. In this period, highly nucleated large local communities were walled as regional centers. In the past decades, the emergence of walled sites has caused hot debates on its social dynamics, particularly on function and causal factors. Most explanations for the emergence of walled sites fall into warfare model and flooding control model. To evaluate those models, we investigate into both...
Ending the Antiquity Debates: The "Short History" Model of the Ifugao Rice Terraces, Philippines (2015)
Local wisdom and nationalist sentiments would have us uphold the long-held belief in the age of the Ifugao Rice Terraces, espoused by pioneer anthropologists of the Philippines, Roy F. Barton and Henry Otley Beyer. Recent findings by the Ifugao Archaeological Project (IAP), however, have provided new information which have driven us to rethink this proposed date, primarily because of the dearth of archaeological data to support the "long-history" model. Evidence is now pointing to a relatively...
Environmental Archaeology of Spinning, Weaving and Dyeing in Ancient Thailand. (2015)
This paper will address the question of "What impact would cultivation, and possible domestication, of native and introduced fiber plants have on the local environment and people’s lives in prehistoric Thailand?" This study begins by considering artifacts such as spindle whorls but will also discuss what fiber plants we have evidence of? How many are native? Where do the introduced species come from and when do they first appear in Thailand? Moreover, as well as growing the fiber plants, it is...
Environmental fluctuation in Neolithic coastal central Thailand: a human story (2016)
As a continuously occupied Neolithic (~2,000-1,500 B.C.) site in coastal central Thailand, Khok Phanom Di yielded abundant artifacts and biological remains providing detailed insights to its environmental patterns and human biology. Core studies and faunal diversity analyses suggested the existence of an episode of receding coastal margin between 1,750 and 1,650 B.C., exposing marsh and freshwater areas that were previously inaccessible. The transition from a marine/estuarine site to a...
The Environmental History of Settlement at Co Loa, Vietnam: A Preliminary Pollen Sequence (2015)
Co Loa is a 600ha Iron Age settlement located in the Red River Delta of northern Vietnam. Recent excavations of the three earthen ramparts at Co Loa are illuminating the processes of site construction begun during the Dongson cultural period (600 BC-AD 200). The scale and organization of these efforts reflect a highly centralized and institutionalized authority; however, little is known about the nature of settlement and urban form. Using preliminary palynological data from cores and...
Environmental Preconditions and Human Response: Subsistence Practices at Prehistoric Settlement Sites in the Liangshan Area, Southwest China (2015)
The Liangshan Area in Southwest Sichuan is known for its great diversity both in geographic layout and ethnic composition. It is furthermore characterized by a highly diverse archaeological assemblage, whose date and cultural affiliation is in large parts still unclear. To solve this problem, in recent years archaeological fieldwork has focused on settlement sites, whose stratigraphy promises to aid in establishing a local chronology and furthermore provides insight into the daily life of past...
Equine Dentistry and Early Horse Husbandry in the Mongolian Steppe (2017)
Although nomadic horse pastoralism remains an important way of life in eastern Central Asia, the origins of horse herding in the region and their relationship to key social developments are poorly understood. Recent work indicates that late Bronze Age people of Mongolia's Deer Stone - Khirigsuur (DSK) Complex herded horses, and used some of them for transport by circa 1200 BCE. This paper presents evidence that DSK people practiced equine dentistry and veterinary care, removing or modifying...
Ethnoarchaeological Analysis of Prehistoric Baskets from Central Japan and Basketry Techniques found at the Museum of Archaeological Research (2017)
Many ancient baskets have been excavated from the wetland sites of the Japan’s prehistoric period in the Hokuriku district, Central Japan. 65 baskets have been excavated from 10 prehistoric sites and date from c.3600 cal BC to c.250 cal AD. Also 14 impressions of basketry were found on the bottom of deep bowls from 8 prehistoric sites. Two points are clear from the analysis of these basketry materials: (1) in terms of construction materials, a Inugaya (in Japanese; Cephalotaxus harringtonia), a...
Evaluating lithic microwear traces in terms of settlement mobility patterns and raw mateiral distributions (2015)
The paper investigates concrete methods to evaluate lithic microwear data in conjunction with human mobility patterns and raw material distributions. Since the discovery of micro-polish variety reflecting different worked materials, use-wear analysts emphasized reconstruction of individual behavioral episodes at the site location. However, actual wear traces reveal highly complex patterns, partially attributable to combined factors of mobility and raw material selection. Conventional methods of...