Tracking the Adoption of Early Pottery Traditions into Maritime Northeast Asia: Emerging Insights and New Questions

Abstract

Understanding the emergence and development of coastal adaptations is a central theme in the archaeology of Maritime Northeast Asia. The capacity to harvest, store and share aquatic resources offered a novel economic strategy that could support greater sedentism and new forms of social life. In turn, growing reliance on the exploitation of rich coastal resources would have generated powerful incentives to invent, adopt or refine food-processing technologies such as pottery. By the end of the Holocene, marine-adapted cultures were present along all habitable coastlines and most of them maintained some kind of pottery tradition, though the deeper origins of the apparent relationship remain obscure. To explore evolving associations between early pottery dispersals and the emergence of coastal adaptations we undertake a broad-scale chrono-spatial analysis of the expansion of these two phenomena across Northeast Asia and into Alaska, and then use this framework to discuss regional trajectories in more detail. Our preliminary results suggest that pottery and coastal economies have complex, and largely separate histories, and that closer associations only start to emerge in later times. While limitations in the quality and coverage of data make these insights tentative, this mapping exercise highlights important themes requiring further research. Improved chronological frameworks are needed in all areas to better correlate cultural developments with climatic and environmental changes. Many regions would also benefit from large-scale analysis of food residues preserved in pottery to clarify general patterns in vessel function. More contextual analysis is needed to clarify how pottery use relates to other food processing and storage technologies, and to explain why only some contemporaneous sites contain pottery while others do not. Finally, comparative insights from ethnography and oral history can shed light on later developments in food-processing technologies and will improve understanding of how ancestral cooking traditions continue to inform northern Indigenous food cultures