Wide-Range Regional Interaction prior to State Formation in Late Prehistoric Eastern Japan

Summary

In Japan, pottery of various regions was transported for long distances in different directions at the same time and was incorporated into local pottery assemblages from the late second to third centuries A.D. This happened prior to the appearance of the highly-standardized keyhole-shaped burial mounds all over Japan and, in western Japan, local adoption of the type of pottery typical of the Kinki region where the central polity emerged. In eastern Japan, the type of pottery under the influence of the Tokai region, an eastern neighbor of Kinki, was locally adopted in various regions. Because of these observations, archaeologists have focused attention on the move of people from Kinki and Tokai. Results of analyses of settlement patterns, pottery, and micro-geography in eastern Japan reveal that settlements at that time were located along the routes of water transportation and that local people in eastern Japan moved along the routes for short distance but not in neighborhood. The nature of the wide-range interaction in eastern Japan in the late second and third centuries was a chain of such short-distance interactions among local people.

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)   •
• Tribes, Chiefdoms and early states in late prehistoric Japan

Keywords

Spatial Coverage