Early-Middle Holocene resource use and niche construction in Jeju Island, Korea

Summary

This is an abstract from the "New Evidence, Methods, Theories, and Challenges to Understanding Prehistoric Economies in Korea" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Study of various human adaptations and human-environmental dynamics amid Early-Middle Holocene (ca. 11,500-5,000 BP) climate changes has been a noteworthy theme in archaeological research. One of the main questions in this discourse is how occupants in various environments and landscapes have gone through diverse utilizations and interactions with the surrounding resources. Early-Middle Holocene societies in Korea have been often simply defined as hunter-gatherer economies with no existence of plant management, due to dichotomous views between plant gathering and cultivation/agriculture, and between wild versus domesticated plants. The main objective of this research is to develop a niche construction model in Early-Middle Holocene societies based on the case studies of Early-Middle Holocene sites in Jeju, including the Gosanri. Through mainly microbotanical evidence, this study identifies plant species utilized through time and characterizes an early management of anthropogenic species prior to or along with systemic agricultural practice. The study aims to contribute to mapping diverse economic niche constructions, human-environmental dynamics, and sociocultural transitions amid climate changes of the Early-Middle Holocene worldwide.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• New Evidence, Methods, Theories, and Challenges to Understanding Prehistoric Economies in Korea

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24458