Coastal Resource Use During the Prehistoric Times in the Amami and Okinawa Archipelagos, Japan

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Human Behavioral Ecology at the Coastal Margins: Global Perspectives on Coastal & Maritime Adaptations" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Ryukyu archipelago, Japan, is located between Kyushu and Taiwan islands, stretching approximately 1200 km. The Amami and Okinawa archipelagos occupy the central part of the Ryukyu archipelago. Astonishingly, Homo sapiens settled these islands as early as ca. 30,000 years ago. Based on accumulated archaeological data since around the 1900s, chronology of the region is divided into the Paleolithic (ca. 30,000-10,000 BP), the Shellmidden (ca.7,000-1,000 BP) and the Gusuku (ca. 1,000-500 BP) periods. While archaeological evidence of coastal resource use during the Paleolithic is scarce, people appeared to collect shellfish from the coast, which is located ca. 4 km away from the site. During the Gusuku period, when subsistence economy was based on agriculture, while people consumed and used coastal resources, faunal remains imply that the importance of coastal resources decreased. Having briefly introduced coastal resource use during the Paleolithic and Gusuku periods, this presentation will focus on the Shellmidden period when people heavily utilized coastal resources, which are mainly available from coral reef environments. The availability of the coral reef resources (plus plant use such as nuts) enabled hunter-gatherer adaptions to the island environment, which is a very rare case in world prehistory.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Human Behavioral Ecology at the Coastal Margins: Global Perspectives on Coastal & Maritime Adaptations   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24064