Chulmun Neolithic Intensification, Complexity, and Emerging Agriculture in Korea

Emergence of complex society in prehistoric Korea has long been understood as a socioeconomic corollary of its Bronze Age agriculture (1300–300 b.c. ). Archaeological data accumulated in recent years, however, point to the contrary. By around 3500 b.c. Korea’s Neolithic society had gone beyond foraging and collecting and become a society of the middle ground. It became increasingly sedentary and began food production, initially at a low level, as it sought to secure critical resources through logistic strategies. It also increasingly utilized storage as a mechanism of risk and wealth management. Gradually intensifying subsistence strategies that combined hunting, fishing, gathering, mobile horticulture, and storage mechanism, enabled Korea’s Chulmun Neolithic society to maintain its sociopolitical and economic stability over a period of several millennia. The intensification increased during the Late Neolithic with emerging mixed crop farming and mass-capture of marine resources. Post-Neolithic florescence of rice-based agriculture and the revolutionary societal elaboration during and beyond the Bronze Age were direct outcomes of socioeconomic foundations laid by the indigenous Korean hunter-fisher-gatherer-cultivators during the Chulmun Neolithic

An Anthropocene Without Archaeology—Should We Care?

For more than a decade, a movement has been gathering steam among geoscientists to designate an Anthropocene Epoch and formally recognize that we have entered a new geological age in which Earth’s systems are dominated by humans. Chemists, climatologists, and other scientists have entered the discussion, and there is a growing consensus that we are living in the Anthropocene. Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen (2002a, 2002b; Crutzen and Stoermer 2000) coined the term, but the idea that humans are a driver of our planet’s climate and ecosystems has much deeper roots. Italian geologist Antonio Stoppani wrote of the “anthropozoic era” in 1873 (Crutzen 2002a), and many others have proposed similar ideas, including journalist Andrew Revkin’s (1992) reference to the “Anthrocene” and Vitousek and colleagues (1997) article about human domination of earth’s ecosystems. It was not until Crutzen (2002a, 2002b) proposed that the Anthropocene began with increased atmospheric carbon levels caused by the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century (including the invention of the steam engine in A.D. 1784), however, that the concept began to gain serious traction among scientists and inspire debate

Madsen: Exploring the Fremont

Exploring the Fremont. David B. Madsen. Salt Lake City: Utah Museum of Natural History, 1989, xiv + 70 pp., 70 figs., $12.00, (paper)

Bard, Busby, and Kobori: Ezra's Retreat: A Rockshelter/Cave Occupation Site in the North Central Great Basin

Ezra's Retreat: A Rockshelter/Cave Occupation Site in the North Central Great Basin.James C. Bard, Colin I. Busby and Larry S. Kobori. Davis: University of California Center for Archaeological Research at Davis Publication No. 6, xi + 255 pp., 3 plates, 4 maps, 45 figures, 32 tables, 6 appendices, $6.50 (paper)

Jennings: Prehistory of Utah and the Eastern Great Basin

Prehistory of Utah and the Eastern Great Basin. Jesse D. Jennings. University of Utah Anthropological Papers No. 98, 263 pp., 239 figs., 2 append., $8.00, paper

Environment, Ecology, and Interaction in Japan, Korea, and the Russian Far East: the Millennial History of a Japan Sea Oikumene

Encircling the Sea of Japan, or East Sea in Korean terms, is a north-temperate landscape that includes thousands of miles of deeply indented seacoast, mountains, and plains, all covered by variously mixed woodlands. The Japanese archipelago comprises its eastern edge, fronting the Pacific Ocean, while the great Amur-Ussuri-Sungari riverine plain forms its far west. We perceive the region comprised by modern Korea, Japan, and the Russian Far East as a "Japan Sea Oikumene," and review culture-historical and environmental evidence to show that—contrary to earlier historical and archaeological impressions—the region has a long-lived ecological and technological unity as a distinctive "cultural world" that can be traced continuously from late Pleistocene into recent times. To contextualize this "world" in comparative terms, we note that it is analogous in prominent ways to the Atlantic sides of both Europe and North America, feeling the cold of northern winters but also warmed by the currents of a southern ocean and having both coastal and deeply continental terrains. Like them also, it is a region of great biotic diversity and productivity where the species of northern and southern ranges overlap and hunting-fishing-gathering peoples developed prosperous, stable, and long-lived cultural traditions. All three of these north-temperate "cultural worlds" also saw their peoples relate increasingly over time to precocious southern lands "beyond," where husbandry, human numbers, and socioeconomic complexity grew on a steeper trajectory than they did farther north