セキツイ ドウブツ イタイ カラ ミタ アマミ オキナワ ノ カンキョウ ト ナリワイ

Palaeoenvironment and resource use in the prehistoric Amami and Okinawa islands were investigated based on archaeofossils of vertebrate fauna. Evidence of forest animals such as wild boars and tortoises shows that the islands were covered with evergreen broadleaf forests in the Shell Midden period (ca. 5000 BC-AD 1100) but clearance started in the Gusuku period (12th-15th centuries) and spread rapidly thereafter. Most of the fish found in the archaeofauna live in and around coral reefs and are the same as present, demonstrating that the maritime environment of the islands has been constant from the Shell Midden period to the present. Fishing of coral reef fish and wild boar hunting had been consistently predominant through the Shell Midden period except at Noguni shell midden, the oldest Holocene site of the Ryukyu Islands, where fishing is almost absent. The introduction of pigs and cattle into the Ryukyus possibly dates back to the Shell Midden period but, if anything, they seem to have been minor subsistence elements at that time. In the Gusuku period, the breeding of domesticated animals flourished, while fishing and hunting declined. These changes in land environment and vertebrate resource use in the Gusuku period are presumed to have been provoked by the development of agriculture including rice cultivation