Demographic Fluctuation in Jomon Period of Japan

Summary

This paper surveys our recent studies on fluctuation in prehistoric population of each local area in Jomon or Japanese neolithic period, and infers the reasons for the fluctuations in archaeological contexts.

Archaeological demographic reconstruction in Japan has been based on numbers of archaeological sites or structures such as pit dwellings. In Japanese archaeology, pottery chronology has been established in detail. In recent years, many 14C data of various pottery types in Jomon period (14000BC-2800BC) have been acquired from carbonized residues attached on Jomon pots and vessels. We can know each duration of time for each pottery type in detail, and also we can know each number of sites in an local area per one hundred years.

In this paper, we reconstruct some archaeological demographic fluctuations based on numbers of archaeological sites in some areas of Japan. And we compare them with each other to discover common tendencies and contradictory ones. If the population of all areas were declining, we can expect a common reason such as a decrease in food products of a broad area. We specify such events and conclude some events coincide with radical changes in subsistence and settlement style and/or in environmental changes.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Issues in Building Radiocarbon Chronologies

Keywords

Spatial Coverage