New Research Directions in the Archaeology and Linguistic History of the Hokkaido Ainu

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.

Research in Hokkaido since the 1980s has amassed a body of data related to ancestral Ainu material culture, settlement, chronology, and subsistence. Palaeoethnobotanical data have been instrumental in conceptualizing the Satsumon and Ainu as populations with a complex history that included dry-field (rain-fed) agriculture rather than hunting-gathering alone or the diverse mix of wet-rice and dry-field production elsewhere in Japan. This complex history, partially revealed by the history of agriculture and the dispersion of crops to and within NE Japan, involved long term, continued involvement and interactions with the rest of Japan. Furthermore, significant discontinuity marks the transition from Epi-Jomon to Satsumon so the Ainu are no longer considered an isolate of remnant Jomon (from a cultural perspective) in the Northeast. This raises issues pertaining to indigeneity, language, identity, historical ecology, and agricultural history among others. We examine the congruence of the formation of Ainu culture from the perspective of recent linguistic research with archaeological developments. Dialect comparative research indicates that the Ainu language family is relatively young, perhaps no more than 1K years. Rather than simply a surviving Jomon language, Ainu has features of a contact language or lingua franca, consistent with the non-Jomon origins of Ainu culture.

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)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24429