Historical Ecology and Archaeometallurgy on the 5th and 6th century Osaka Plain

Summary

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.

Extensive excavation records and legacy materials provide ample opportunities for novel research in Japan. This project seeks to open and demonstrate new avenues of inquiry using legacy data and previously excavated materials related to well-studied topics by linking environmental change to the production of iron implements, a major topic in Kofun Period research. While paleoenvironmental data are regularly collected from Japanese excavations, environmental perspectives are rarely explicitly foregrounded in narratives of the Kofun Period, which usually focus on issues of political economy.

Specifically, this project uses paleoenvironmental data published from the 1980s onward in conjunction with archaeometallurgical analyses of previously excavated objects to examine human impacts and management of the forest landscape during the middle and late Kofun Period Osaka Plain. This presentation focuses on analyses of forging slags excavated from the Ogata site in Kashiwara City and the Mori site in Katano City to clarify changes in forging practices over this time period, and ties them to landscape management practices and human impacts through a chaîne opératoire approach. These analyses indicate changes in fuel use as widespread changes in local vegetation occurred.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Current Issues in Japanese Archaeology (2019 Archaeological Research in Asia Symposium)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24528