Old enough?: Determining the beginning age of bifacial point technology in central Japan

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Late Pleistocene Archaeology of the Northern Pacific Rim" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The bifacial stemmed point (BSP) in Japan is considered to be synchronous with or older than the relevant examples across the northern Pacific Rim, which includes the Japanese archipelago in the west and western North America in the east. Therefore, bifacial point technology in Japan has recently been one of the focal points of discussion on the modern human peopling of Northeast Asia and the Americas. However, the onset age of bifacial point technology and BSPs in Japan is still provisional at present due to the lack of comprehensive radiocarbon chronological study. To contribute to this debate, this presentation attempt to establish a high-resolution radiocarbon chronology of bifacial point technology and BSPs in the Paleo-Honshu Island of central Japan, the largest landmass south of Hokkaido during the glacial period. For the past decades, Japanese CRM has identified more than 15,000 archaeological sites on the Island and performed radiocarbon dating of approximately 3,000 cases ranging from the Upper Paleolithic to the Incipient Jomon. In this presentation, we scrutinize and synthesize these data to provide precise onset ages for bifacial point technology and BSPs, respectively.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Late Pleistocene Archaeology of the Northern Pacific Rim

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51658