Pre-Colonial Hokkaido and East Asian Trade: Exchange and Identity Formation of the Okhotsk Culture

Summary

This is an abstract from the "From the Altai to the Arctic: New Results and New Directions in the Archaeology of North and Inner Asia" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This research explores ways precontact commodities trade networks, originating in distant nation-states and empires, can create the conditions to trigger changing social relations and novel identities far from market centers. I argue that a shift in the functional role of trade from one focused on social relationships to one focused on goods, brought about by communities becoming engaged in and entangled with commodities markets, would later drive settler-colonial dynamics. Within this context, I study ceramic sherds as the primary means for investigating temporal changes in trade networks and social identities. On one hand, I use these sherds to quantify connectedness via provenience studies using geochemical characterization and petrographic analysis. Specifically, I use laser ablation-inductively coupled-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS), portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF), and stable isotopes for my geochemical studies. On the other hand, I use them to examine shifts in how people were making pots through formal analysis and thin section analysis.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• From the Altai to the Arctic: New Results and New Directions in the Archaeology of North and Inner Asia   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36843.0