Mark J. Hudson

Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropolgy

Japan’s transition from medieval to early modern occurred at the time of an emerging global Europe. In the 1540s European traders and missionaries began a century of dynamic cultural and economic interaction with the Japanese Islands. In the midst of civil war, over 300,000 Japanese converted to Christianity and Japan became an influential location...

Several cases that do not fit the agricultural adaptation model, in which people’s health deteriorated with the shift from hunting-gathering to farming, have been reported, such as the introduction of rice agriculture during the Yayoi Period in Japan and the Iron Age in Southeast Asia, where health was maintained or improved. However, the health of...

As an important component of prehistoric subsistence, an understanding of bone-working is essential for interpreting the evolution of early complex societies, yet worked bones are rarely systematically collected in China. Here, the authors apply multiple analytical methods to worked bones from the Longshan site of Pingliangtai, in central China, sh...

Innovations in horse equipment during the early Middle Ages provided advantages to societies from the steppes, reshaping the social landscape of Eurasia. Comparatively little is known about the precise origin of these crucial advances, although the available evidence points to early adoption in East Asia. The authors present new archaeological disc...

Domestic animal usage remains a key problem in understanding Japan's premodern economy. Assumptions that religious and other cultural proscriptions limited the use of domesticated animals, and the consumption of meat in particular, from Late Antiquity until Westernisation in the nineteenth century remain widespread. However, the zooarchaeological r...

The Bronze Age was a time of pivotal economic change when new long-distance trading networks became associated with a macro-regional division of labour and decentralised political complexity. These developments occurred against the background of a shifting mosaic of subsistence patterns, which included the east-west exchange of crops across Eurasia...

The Prunus genus contains many of the most economically significant arboreal crops, cultivated globally, today. Despite the economic significance of these domesticated species, the pre-cultivation ranges, processes of domestication, and routes of prehistoric dispersal for all of the economically significant species remain unresolved. Among the Euro...

In a recent study we used an interdisciplinary approach combining linguistics, archaeology and genetics to analyse the Transeurasian languages. Our analysis concluded that the early dispersals of these languages were driven by agriculture. A preprint published on this server presents objections to the Transeurasian hypothesis and its association wi...

For almost a century after E.S. Morse’s 1877 excavations at Ōmori shell mound demonstrated the existence of a Stone Age culture in the archipelago, it was generally accepted that the Japanese people dated back only to the Yayoi period, the time when wet-rice farming was introduced from the continent. The Stone Age was associated with pre-Japanese p...

Archaeological research exploring prehistoric food globalization is beginning to transform our understanding of early agricultural expansions and exchange. By contrast, a more linear progression from aboriginal to global systems remains a common interpretation of the long-term history of fisheries, a trend sometimes reinforced by ideas about ‘tradi...

Recent interdisciplinary studies, combining scientific techniques such as ancient DNA analysis with humanistic re-evaluations of the transcultural value of bronze, have presented archaeologists with a fresh view of the Bronze Age in Europe. The new research emphasises long-distance connectivities and political decentralisation. 'Bronzisation' is di...

Although many scholars date the onset of the Anthropocene to the Industrial Revolution or the post-1945 ‘Great Acceleration’, there is growing interest in understanding earlier human impacts on the earth system. Research on the ‘Palaeoanthropocene’ has investigated the role of fire, agriculture, trade, urbanisation and other anthropogenic impacts....

Hunter–gatherer occupations of small islands are rare in world prehistory and it is widely accepted that island settlement is facilitated by agriculture. The Ryukyu Islands contradict that understanding on two counts: not only did they have a long history of hunter–gatherer settlement, but they also have a very late date for the onset of agricultur...

The origin and early dispersal of speakers of Transeurasian languages—that is, Japanese, Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic—is among the most disputed issues of Eurasian population history. A key problem is the relationship between linguistic dispersals, agricultural expansions and population movements4,5. Here we address this question by ‘trian...

Walter Benjamin observed that it is precisely the modern which conjures up prehistory. From Yanagita’s ‘mountain people’ to Umehara’s ‘Jōmon civilisation’, Japan has been an especially resonant site of prehistories imagined in response to modernity. Conjuring Up Prehistory: Landscape and the Archaic in Japanese Nationalism looks at how archaeology...

Anthropology began in the late nineteenth century with an emphasis on kinship as a key factor in human evolution. From the 1960s, archaeologists attempted increasingly sophisticated ways of reconstructing prehistoric kinship but ancient DNA analysis has transformed the field, making it possible, to directly examine kin relations from human skeletal...

Modern shark attacks are uncommon and archaeological examples are even rarer, with the oldest previously known case dating to ca. AD 1000. Here we report a shark attack on an adult male radiocarbon dated to 1370–1010 cal BC during the fisher-hunter-gatherer Jo ̄mon period of the Japanese archipelago. The individual was buried at the Tsukumo site ne...

From northern China, millet agriculture spread to Korea and the Maritime Russian Far East by 3500–2700 BC. While the expansion of agricultural societies across the Sea of Japan did not occur until around 900 BC, the intervening period saw major transformations in the Japanese archipelago. The cultural florescence of Middle Jōmon central Honshu unde...

ARCHIPELAGO is an archaeological and historical database of land and sea food resources utilised in the Japanese Islands. Here we present a dataset of human bone and hair carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes measurements from Japanese archaeological sites covering the time span from the Upper Palaeolithic to the mid-nineteenth century. Reflecting th...

The Yangtze River Delta is the best-known homeland of wet-rice agriculture. From the Middle Neolithic, rice farming expanded from the Yangtze region to both the north and the south. However, poor preservation of ancient human skeletal remains in the region has meant that the population history of these expansions has not been fully understood. In o...

The origin and early dispersal of speakers of Transeurasian languages, i.e., Japanese, Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic and Turkic, is among the most disputed issues of Eurasian population history. A key problem is the relationship between linguistic dispersals, agricultural expansions and population movements. Here we address this question through ‘tria...

While earlier research often saw Altaic as an exception to the farming/language dispersal hypothesis, recent work on millet cultivation in northeast China has led to the proposal that the West Liao basin was the Neolithic homeland of a Transeurasian language family. Here, we examine the archaeolinguistic evidence used to associate millet farming di...

Environmental sustainability is probably the most significant factor in health and it is the responsibility of all practitioners to be aware of its various dimensions in relation to impact on human life (Beltran et al 2016; Jennings et al 2016). It is pretty well universally understood that most current climate change is a consequence of human beha...

Population growth and demic diffusion help explain the early Neolithic expansions of agriculture and Transeurasian languages in Northeast Asia. By the Bronze Age, alluvial agrarian states had come to possess considerable political and economic dominance over their subjects in the civilizational centers of Eurasia. At the same time, however, Bronze...

This book provides a comprehensive account of the Transeurasian languages, and is the first major reference work in the field since 1965. The term ‘Transeurasian’ refers to a large group of geographically adjacent languages that includes five uncontroversial linguistic families: Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic. The historical conn...

Northern China harbored the world’s earliest complex societies based on millet farming, in two major centers in the Yellow (YR) and West Liao (WLR) River basins. Until now, their genetic histories have remained largely unknown. Here we present 55 ancient genomes dating to 7500-1700 BP from the YR, WLR, and Amur River (AR) regions. Contrary to the g...

The Cambridge World History of Violence - edited by Garrett G. Fagan March 2020

The Cambridge World History of Violence - edited by Garrett G. Fagan March 2020

The first in a four-volume set, The Cambridge World History of Violence, volume I provides a comprehensive examination of violence in prehistory and the ancient world. Covering the period through to the end of classical antiquity, the chapters take a global perspective spanning sub-Saharan Africa, the Near East, Europe, India, China, Japan and Cent...

Broomcorn and foxtail millets were being cultivated in the West Liao River basin in Northeast China by at least the sixth millennium BCE. However, when and how millet agriculture spread from there to the north and east remains poorly understood. Here, we trace the dispersal of millet agriculture from Northeast China to the Russian Far East and weig...

The population history of Japan has been one of the most intensively studied anthropological questions anywhere in the world, with a huge literature dating back to the nineteenth century and before. A growing consensus over the 1980s that the modern Japanese comprise an admixture of a Neolithic population with Bronze Age migrants from the Korean pe...

Archaeolinguistics, a field which combines language reconstruction and archaeology as a source of information on human prehistory, has much to offer to deepen our understanding of the Neolithic and Bronze Age in Northeast Asia. So far, integrated comparative analyses of words and tools for textile production are completely lacking for the Northeast...

Review of S. Yoneyama, Animism in Contemporary Japan: Voices for the Anthropocene from Post-Fukushima Japan

This essay argues that the primary socioeconomic formations of premodern Japan were formed in the Bronze Age via processes of ancient globalization across Eurasia. Multi-crop cereal agriculture combining rice, millet, wheat and barley with a minor contribution from domesticated animals spread from Bronze Age Korea to Japan at the beginning of the 1...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Language is thought to be a crucial element behind Pleistocene expansions of Homo sapiens but our understanding of language change over the very long term is still poor. There have been two main approaches to language dynamics in this context. One assumes a continual ebb and flow of local human populations and languages, leading to high levels of ‘...

This chapter attempts an analysis of population expansions, trade, and landscape change during the Ainu culture period (ca. AD 1200 to 1900) in northern Japan. Growing demand for trade goods such as marine products, animal furs and eagle feathers transformed the landscapes of Hokkaido, Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands. The increasing commodification...

平野より山の社会が暴力的であるという考えは古代から存在する。ここでは、アルプスを中心にその歴史的な事象を探る。一部の例外を別とし、山の社会は暴力と密の関係を持ったとは言えないと結論する。山はむしろ、戦争や国家の暴力から避難する場所として活用された。

Cambridge Core - Global History - The Sea in History - The Ancient World - edited by Christian Buchet.

The Sea in History - The Ancient World - edited by Christian Buchet February 2017

he origins and dispersals of Austronesian peoples have been widely discussed in Pacific archaeology. There is broad agreement that Taiwan was the primary source for the initial expansion of these human populations in the second half of the third millennium BC. From Taiwan, these Neolithic populations migrated into the Philippines, and then to Indon...

Living in remote places can strain the adaptive capacities of human settlers. It can also protect communities from external social, political and economic forces. In this paper, we present an archaeological population history of the Kuril Islands. This string of small volcanic islands on the margins of the Northwest Pacific was occupied by maritime...

Minamata disease is a type of poisoning caused when mercury from a chemical factory in southwest Japan polluted the sea, accumulating in fish and shellfish, and affecting people who consumed contaminated seafood. This chapter reviews the historical background of Minamata disease and analyzes the suffering experienced by the victims of the Minamata...

The authors show that the Jomon clay figurines made by hunter-gatherers use imagery that emphasises a narrow waist and full hips, showing that a female construct was part of the symbolism of these possibly shamanistic objects. In creating these figurines, prehistoric people were no doubt turning a recognition of health and fertility into more cultu...

Resilience theory provides a critical framework for examining the capacity of human societies to respond to changes to essential features of the human–environment relationship. Studies employing the long-term perspective required to understand adaptive cycles of resilience are still rare. Despite the challenges of working with variably preserved ma...

The islands of the Central Ryukyus (Amami and Okinawa archipelagos), Japan, were continuously occupied by hunter-gatherers for several thousand years during the Holocene. This occupation would seem to represent a unique example of island settlement by hunter-gatherers. Homo sapiens had expanded into all continents except Antarctica by 10,000 BP, de...

We present a description and differential diagnosis of pathological lesions observed on skeletal elements found during surface surveys of the Nagabaka site on Miyako-jima Island, Japan. The Nagabaka site served as a bone depository during the Early Modern period (c. AD 1600–1870). We evaluated remains via macroscopic inspection to classify infectio...

http://www.equinoxpub.com/home/jca-book-reviews-hyperobjects-philosophy-ecology-end-world-timothy-morton/

Koji Mizoguchi . The archaeology of Japan: from the earliest rice farming villages to the rise of the state. xix+371 pages, 94 b&w illustrations, 21 tables. 2014. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 978-0-521-88490-7 hardback £75 & $120. - Volume 89 Issue 343 - Mark J. Hudson

In the nineteenth century, the Mekong, Red, and Chao Phraya river deltas in Southeast Asia underwent a massive expansion in agricultural settlement and engineering (Dao and Molle 2000). Contending with crocodiles and herds of wild elephants in addition to more prosaic insect and bird pests (Terwiel 1989), settlers struggled successfully to make the...

What role will archaeology play in the Anthropocene – the proposed new geological epoch marked by human impact on Earth systems? That is the question discussed by thirteen archaeologists and other scholars from five continents in this thought-provoking forum. Their responses are diverse and wide-ranging. While Edward Harris looks to archaeological...

Scientists have long noted the links between environmental change and human health, but recent years have seen a notable increase in such research. In 2009, the leading medical journal The Lancet argued that global climate change is the major health threat of the twenty-first century. In the same year, an editorial in the British Medical Journal co...

This introductory chapter examines the passing of a resolution recognizing Ainu as “Indigenous to the northern part of the Japanese archipelago, and especially Hokkaido.” This legislative triumph was tempered by conditions attached to Japan's 2007 signing of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Firstly, it was made cl...

This chapter suggests that revisiting the Ainu people's subsistence practice would illuminate one's knowledge of human foraging on a global scale. While historical models that positioned Ainu as moving from primitive to civilized gained traction in Japan, ecological models such as Watanabe Hitoshi's “Ainu ecosystem” garnered interest in academic an...

In 2008, 140 years after it had annexed Ainu lands, the Japanese government shocked observers by finally recognizing Ainu as an Indigenous people. In this moment of unparalleled political change, it was Uzawa Kanako, a young Ainu activist, who signaled the necessity of moving beyond the historical legacy of “Ainu studies.” Mired in a colonial minds...

In 2008, 140 years after it had annexed Ainu lands, the Japanese government shocked observers by finally recognizing Ainu as an Indigenous people. In this moment of unparalleled political change, it was Uzawa Kanako, a young Ainu activist, who signalled the necessity of moving beyond the historical legacy of “Ainu studies.” Mired in a colonial mind...

Current threats posed by anthropogenic climate change, biodiversity loss, the degradation of ecosystem services, and other related impacts of human activity require a concerted response through a global science of sustainability. The threats faced by humanity are so extensive that all academic disciplines are affected in some way and all have a rol...

This chapter presents archaeological evidence for Jōmon and Yayoi migration within and to Japan. These islands had a remarkable Holocene prehistory that reflected its temperate and maritime location, often developing cultural traditions quite different from those of the East Asian mainland. Keywords: archaeology; Asia; Holocene

This paper examines Neolithic cultural identities in the Ryukyu Islands of southwest Japan. It is argued that there were two different identities in this archipelago: a 'Jōmon' identity in the northern and central Ryukyus and an 'Austronesian' identity in the southern Ryukyus. These identities were constructed despite broad similarities in subsiste...

The 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment linked ecosystem services, the benefits people obtain from ecosystems, directly with four constituents of human well-being: security, basic material for good life, health, and freedom of choice and action. No explicit model of the role of human activity in the transformation of ecosystem services into well-b...

Archaeology has a long history of research in reconstructing past environments and in attempting to understand the interactions between climate and human societies. So far, however, there has been little attempt by archaeologists to employ this knowledge in the debate over current global climate change. This paper provides a broad overview of the r...

We describe an international summer school on Minamata disease held at Nishikyushu University in September 2011. Funded by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, the summer school was titled 'Occupational justice and the environment: Minamata and beyond' and was at-tended by faculty and students from Cardiff, Sheffield Hallam and Nishikyushu Universi...

Special Edition of the Finno-Hungarian Society Journal: Damm C, and Saarikivi J, editors. Networks, Interaction and Emerging Identities in Fennoscandia and Beyond: Papers from the conference held in Tromsø, Norway, October 13–16 2009

This article attempts the beginnings of an occupational theory of landscape. We propose the concept of occupationscape, defined as landscapes formed and performed through histories of occupational behavior. This concept is used to examine the relationships between occupation, landscape and ethnicity in the South Tyrol border region of northern Ital...

ERIC L.JONES. Cultures Merging: A Historical and Economic Critique of Culture. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. xvii, 297. $29.95 (US). Reviewed by Harold James

Since the end of the Pleistocene, East Asia has been a world with China at its center. Two major developments in China had profound affects on the prehistoric hunter-gatherers of East Asia and surrounding regions. These developments were the emergence of farming societies at the beginning of the Holocene and then the rise of states and Chinese dyna...

Despite growing interest in indigenous peoples within occupational therapy in Canada and elsewhere, there has been little consideration of hunter-gathering-an occupation that retains great material and symbolic significance for many indigenous groups. A preliminary analysis of occupational behaviour amongst hunter-gatherers was conducted to aid und...

It is argued that occupational therapy's focus on activities related to wellbeing puts it in a privileged position to contribute practical measures to stem the social and ecological threats posed by current human impacts on the natural environment. Three areas in which occupational therapy could contribute such measures are summarised briefly. Thes...

KidderJ. EdwardHimiko and Japan's Elusive Chiefdom of Yamatai: Archaeology, History, and Mythology, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007. xiii, 401 pp. ISBN 978 0 8248 3035 9. $65 - Volume 71 Issue 3 - Mark J Hudson

It is proposed that the so-called 'protruding buttock' figurines from Middle Jomon central Japan may be representations of steatopygia. The distribution of these figurines is associated with archaeological evidence for high population densities and possible intensive use of wild yams (Dioscorea japonica). Given the low fat content of these yams, it...