Transition from Hunting-Gathering to Agriculture in Amami and Okinawa Archipelagos, Japan

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.

Archaeological research in Amami and Okinawa archipelagos in the southwestern part of Japan started more than one hundred years ago. One of the most important archaeological themes in this region has been when food production began here. Archaeologists have agreed that the subsistence economy of the Gusuku period, prior to the Ryukyu Kingdom, was agriculture. Much less is known about the Shellmidden Period, which precedes the Gusuku Period. Large amounts of faunal remains and accidentally recovered plant remains prior to 1990s have been used to argue that the Shellmidden people relied on wild animals and plants, yet other scholars believed that Shellmidden people practiced food production because amounts of plant remains recovered from the islands had been so sporadic. Our results have strongly suggested that the Shellmidden people mainly relied on wild plants, and food production was introduced into this region ca. 8th to 12th AD. Two important findings are 1) hunter-gatherers lived on "small islands" for more than six thousand years and 2) transition from the former to the latter took place in the "small islands" context.

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): 23896