Asia: East Asia (Geographic Keyword)
126-150 (276 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Guijiabao is an archaeological site in southwest China that dates from the Neolithic to the historical period. Its crucial location at the interaction of the Henduan Mountains and the Sichuan Basin offers a unique opportunity to study the southward spread of new crops and species into this region. Although it is widely accepted that mixed farming of...
Island Arrivals: the Ideal Free Distribution and Prey Choice Models in Neolithic Taiwan and Beyond (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Neolithic transition of Taiwan, current evidence indicates that farmer-gardeners immigrated from China's southeast coast about 6,000 BP and brought a diverse subsistence of cultivation, foraging, and fishing. The migration would have influenced habitat choice and interactions with Paleolithic foragers already existed in residence. The Ideal Free...
Island in History or in Ecology? The Construction of Monumental Burials in Ulleung-Island in Korea (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Social and Environmental Interactions on Coasts and Islands in Korea" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ulleung Island, a volcanic island located in the middle of the East Sea, is 130 km away from the Korean peninsula. Created 1.4 million years ago, Ulleung is narrow and has limited flat land, yet humans lived intensively on this island from AD 600 to 950. During this period, monumental megalithic tombs were built...
Jade and the Illusion of Jade: Gokok and Magatama in Korea and Japan from 250–700CE (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Two Approaches to Archaeological Jades: Source Characterization and Social Valuation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ritual stone ornaments (gokok and magatama) found in elite burials in Korea and Japan were examined to determine raw material and manufacturing process as well as use life. The primary materials examined were hard jadeite and nephrite, though softer stones such as alabaster/gypsum, amblygonite and...
Jade Ear Ornaments with Human-Animal Motif from Prehistoric Taiwan — Design, Technology and Symbolism (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Two Approaches to Archaeological Jades: Source Characterization and Social Valuation" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Jade ear ornaments with human-animal motif, dating to 2800-2300 BP, have been the most distinctive jewelry from prehistoric Taiwan. Since the first ear ornament of this kind became known in 1982, a total of 41 pieces of such items have been unearthed from 9 archaeological sites. These objects are...
Japanese Archaeological Artifacts in the U.S. Museums: A Case Study from the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 (2018)
There are thousands of Japanese archaeological artifacts stored in the major arts and archaeology museums of the United States. Many of the collections came to this country during the late 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries. In those days, archaeological objects left their home countries more readily than today and reached at the foreign museums through expeditions, inter-institutional exchanges, purchases from private art galleries, and gifts from wealthy art collectors....
Japanese or Ainu? Does the Term “Jomon” Delegitimize the Ainu as an Indigenous People? (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and Indigenous Issues in Hokkaido Island, Japan" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Some politicians and writers in Japan have proposed that the Jomon are the cultural precursors of the contemporary Japanese, while others recognize the Ainu as the descendants of the Jomon people of Hokkaido. Japan’s “Jomon archaeological culture” helps create conflicting interpretations and influences the expansion of...
Jomon Landscape Practice and Ecological Resilience in Prehistoric Japan (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Living Landscapes: Disaster, Memory, and Change in Dynamic Environments " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation argues that the resilience of the food systems during and after the Jomon period (ca. 16,000–2500 cal BP) in prehistoric Japan must have been closely related to the diversity of staple foods, settlement locations, and methods of landscape management including the use of fire. Despite an abundance...
Land Use in Neolithic Northeast China (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Hongshan societies (4500-3000 BC) in Northeast China were the first to witness a dramatic increase in population since the adoption of agriculture and a sedentary way of living were embraced some 9000 years ago in the region. Many aspects of Hongshan social dynamics have not been fully elucidated in detail. Regional surveys explore human-land relationships at...
Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Agro-Pastoral Diets at Shimao, Northern Shaanxi Province, China: Stable Carbon and Nitrogen Isotope Analysis of Human and Faunal Remains (2018)
The late Neolithic to early Bronze Age period (ca. 2800 BC–1900 BC) in the Ordos Region, Northern China was a transitional period, that included the adoption of agro-pastoralism, as well as increasing sociopolitical complexity. Subsistence economies were shaped by a variety of strategies that included a mixed agro- pastoral system focused on millet cultivation and herding of caprines and cattle, with limited contributions from hunting and gathering of wild plants. Here in this study we report...
Latrine Use and Human Waste Management in East Asia: Configurational and Depositional Approach (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Latrines have been excavated in East Asia dating back to the second century BCE. To tackle with the fact that the number of latrines that have been reported does not match with the one of settlement sites, this paper provides possible solutions of detecting a latrine with the configurational approach and the depositional approach. Excavated cesspits, cesspools...
Lithic Micro-Wear Traces at Morphological Junctions: Function Vs. Typology Reconsidered in Terms of Technological Organizations (2018)
The paper investigates some fundamental aspects of use-wear of lithic artifacts, concerning the relations between function and morphology. During the course of micro-wear research since the 1960s, it was often questioned whether tool typologies actually reflects their functions, or which morphological attributes are diagnostic of their utilization. Case studies in the Upper Paleolithic of East Asia also revealed variability in end-scrapers whose functions seem to be relatively consistent as hide...
Little Bronze Things: What They Do and How They Do It in the Early Bronze Age in NW China (2018)
Small bronze objects, some tools, others ornaments, and yet others of undetermined function, are the earliest known Bronze objects in China. Many of these objects are found in sites from Northwest China that date to the early part of the second millennium BC. Their manufacture seems to have been conducted locally on a small scale in this region, and yet the transformation of matter that their production entailed played a role in large scale transformations of society – ultimately culminating...
Living in the Marginal Land of Agriculture: The Adaptive Changes and Risks in the Ecotone of North China (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology on the Edge(s): Transitions, Boundaries, Changes, and Causes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ecotones are characterized by diverse resources which would attract hunter-gatherers and early practitioners of food production, but they also have a disadvantage that the resource boundary easily changes with climatic fluctuation. Long-term climatic changes, as well as annual seasonality, would produce significant...
Local Adaptation and Subsistence Strategy of Yangshao Migrants in Northwestern Sichuan in China During the Middle Neolithic (5300-4700 cal. BP) (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Migration is a frequent phenomenon in human history. Previous studies mainly used migration as a general term to explain any cultural changes observed in migrant communities. Recent studies, however, have recognized that migration is embedded in both environmental and social contexts, thus making it necessary to study the consequence of migration on a...
Local Pride and Prejudice: Public Archaeology, Archaeological Heritage Management, and Authorized Discourse in Japan (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For almost two decades, Japanese archaeology has fostered discourse on public archaeology and initiatives that involve the public in archaeological practices. This development coincides with a shift in cultural resource management policies that emphasize and expand the role of cultural properties within communities. Based on a discourse analysis of the...
Long-Distance Human Migration in Late Neolithic China: Isotopic Evidence from Qingliangsi Cemetery (2018)
Around 2200BC, Qingliangsi is a large settlement to the north of the Yellow River with wealth accumulation and social stratification. The location of the site close to rich salt resources made the location a draw for emergent elites during the late Neolithic. Among the most significant lines of evidence of emergent stratification are remains of human sacrifice found in the Qingliangsi cemetery. Our carbon, oxygen, and strontium isotope analyses of human remains excavated from Qiangliangsi show...
Long-Term Perspectives on the Resilience of Food and Socioeconomic Systems in Prehistoric Japan: Examples from the Early and Middle Jomon Periods (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Current Issues in Japanese Archaeology (2019 Archaeological Research in Asia Symposium)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper argues that the examination of rich archaeological data from the Jomon period of prehistoric Japan can contribute to the recent discussion of the resilience of food and socioeconomic systems. Theories of resilience which consider the importance of adaptive cycles and panarchical...
Mahan Political Economy: Evidence from Ceramic Geochemistry (2019)
This is an abstract from the "New Evidence, Methods, Theories, and Challenges to Understanding Prehistoric Economies in Korea" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Emerging data from the Mahan cultures of South Korea are fundamentally changing our understanding of this complex society and its relationship with Korea's early states. Using INAA data on ceramic geochemistry, patterns of production traditions and trade relationships reveal a political...
Make a List, Check It Twice: Bureaucratic Surveillance in the Early Chinese Empires (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Surveillance: Seeing and Power in the Material World" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The early Chinese empires, the Qin and Han, governed their lands and peoples using an army of bureaucrats who were responsible for, among other things, creating a vast quantity of administrative documents. Of particular interest to the state was the population—the governments kept population registries, updated...
The Making of Bronzes and Frontiers: An Archaeometallurgical Case Study of Bronze Finds in Southern Hunan, China, from 475 BCE–220 CE (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In both historical texts and modern narratives, the southern frontiers of China throughout the Pre- and Early Imperial era have been oversimplified as a geographical and cultural composite with underdeveloped conditions that have been slowly, but effectively, penetrated by the more civilized, powerful central state. This research aims to break such conceptual...
Making Plant Foods in the Early Neolithic: Microbotanical Evidence from Shangshan Pottery (2018)
The Lower Yangtze Valley of China is renowned for the origin of rice agriculture. Previous research based on archaeobotanical analysis and genetic data indicates that the evolution from wild rice to domestic rice was a continuous process that occurred between 11,000 - 6,000 BP. The Shangshan culture (11,400 BP – 86,00) has revealed the earliest evidence of rice cultivation in the region and abundant pottery vessels. These vessels are diverse in form but their functions still remain unclear. By...
Marine Mammal Hunting in the Kuril Islands: Zooarchaeological and Genetic Insights (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. People have inhabited the NW Pacific Kuril Islands for millennia, supported by the productive marine and coastal environments. Here, we build upon previous faunal analyses that examined biogeographical patterns in faunal exploitation by conducting a chronological analysis, grouped by cultural period (Epi-Jomon, Okhotsk, Ainu and Historic). Specifically, we...
Marxism in Chinese Archaeology (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since the founding of the People's Republic of China, Marxism became a kind of official philosophical thinking embeded in all the humanities. Thus, in most Western archaeologists’ minds, Chinese archaeology is a kind of Marxist archaeology, as Bruce Trigger described. We admit to this kind of definition, but the status of contemporary archaeology is already...
Material Properties, Sensory Experience, and Production Techniques in Early Chinese Bronze Casting (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Craft and Technology: Knowledge of the Ancient Chinese Artisans" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The extraordinary bronze ritual vessels of Shang- and Zhou-period China were produced by casting in multi-part ceramic molds. Laboratory analysis of casting-mold fragments has found that these molds were made from an unusual ceramic material—a paste that was quartz-rich, clay-poor, highly porous, and therefore quite unlike...