Evidence of Coastal Use by Foragers: Inferences from Pottery Petrography from Two Pleistocene Sites, Tanegashima Island, Japan

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Tanegashima Island in the southernmost region of Japan has the earliest evidence of a large quantity of ceramic production by late Pleistocene foragers of eastern Eurasia. The island is also part of the southern Kyushu region, where the pottery-bearing occupation is found under well-dated tephra dated to ca. 12,800 cal BP, termed the Incipient Jomon. In our previous research based on visual and stereoscopic analyses of pottery from three sites and petrographic analysis combined with neutron activation study from a site suggested that pottery produced on the island had local raw material procurement signatures, in the vicinity of sites. In this study, we examined pottery thin sections from the Onigano and Okunonita sites, previously studied through visual analyses. Our results indicate that some pottery produced on the island has relatively rounded mineral and rock inclusions, that are more common in sediments near the coast. This study provides an insight that ceramic producers were users of resources relatively close to the paleo-coast not just inland that had previously been hypothesized.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39879.0