Biogeography and adaptation in the Kuril Islands, Northeast Asia

ABSTRACT

The Circumpolar North is generally recognized as a challenging environment to inhabit and yet, we know relatively little about how people managed their welfare in these places. Here, we add to the understanding of maritime hunter-gatherers in the subarctic North Pacific through a comparative approach that synthesizes biogeographic and archaeological data from the Kuril Islands. We conclude that our faunal, ceramic and lithic evidence support expectations from biogeography as assemblages from low biodiversity and insular regions show limited diet breadth, more locally produced pottery and a conservation of lithic resources. However, we highlight that these ecological factors did not strictly determine the occupation history of the archipelago as radiocarbon data suggests all regions experienced similar demographic fluctuations regardless of their biogeography. These results imply additional pressures influenced the strategic use and settlement of the Kuril Islands and the need for increased chronological resolution to disentangle these complex historical factors.

KEYWORDS:

• Archaeology
• biogeography
• Kuril Islands
• hunter-gatherers
• Circumpolar

Acknowledgments

All authors would like to acknowledge the support provided by the National Science Foundation for the International Kuril Islands Project (#9505031, Pietsch PI; #9910410, Fitzhugh PI) and the Kuril Biocomplexity Project (#0508109; #1202978, Fitzhugh PI). Project administration support for KBP came from the UW Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology (CSDE) with funding from a Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) research infrastructure grant, R24 HD042828. We are grateful for additional support from the University of Washington, Seattle, the Hokkaido University Museum, the Historical Museum of Hokkaido and the Sakhalin Regional Museum. EG would also like to acknowledge financial support from the NSF Office of Polar Programs (#1202879). KT is grateful to financial support from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). This paper is a product of extensive discussion with many people especially the many international members of the Kuril Biocomplexity Project. The authors accept full responsibility for any errors or omissions and appreciate the helpful and constructive comments of the three anonymous reviewers. Finally, this paper would not have happened without the help and patience of guest editor Lisa Janz and her organization of the Interaction in the Circumpolar Sphere: 5000 BC to AD 1 workshop sponsored by Trent University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data accessibility

Radiocarbon dates used in the research were previously published in Fitzhugh et al. (2016), available at doi:10.1016/j.quaint.2016.02.003. Geochemical compositional data on ceramic artefacts are curated in the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) available here: doi:10.6067/XCV85M66NM. Additional data generated from the Kuril Biocomplexity Project including information on faunal remains can also be found curated in the tDAR project archive available here: doi:10.6067/XCV8BC40ZG.

Supplementary material

Supplementary data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [0508109 – Kuril Biocomplexity Project (Fitzhugh), 1201978 – Kuril Biocomplexity Project (Fitzhugh), 1202879 – Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant, 9505031 – International Kuril Islands Project (Pietsch, 9910401) – International Kuril Islands Project (Fitzhugh)], JSPS KAKENHI [15H01899 and 15KK0031 – Kuril Ainu Archaeology Project (Takase)].

Notes on contributors

Erik Gjesfjeld

Erik Gjesfjeld is currently a Renfrew Fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge and a Research Fellow at Fitzwilliam College. His main research interests include the application of archaeological and macroevolutionary approaches to understanding how past communities managed the challenges of social and environmental change. He specializes in quantitative research methods, cultural evolution, hunter-gatherers, and the archaeology of Northeast Asia.

Michael A. Etnier

Michael A. Etnier is Affiliate Research Faculty at Western Washington University.  He is a zooarchaeologist, primarily interested in studying biogeography and historic ecology of North Pacific marine ecosystems and how changes in each of these has or has not influenced, or been influenced by, prehistoric human hunting practices. To study these complex systems, he spends nearly equal amounts of time working with modern and ancient bone and tooth samples.

Katsunori Takase

Katsunori Takaseis an associate professor at the Graduate School of Humanities and Human Sciences, Hokkaido University, Japan. His research focuses on prehistoric resource use in Northeast Asia using methods of the lithic use-wear analysis, archaeobotany, and zooarchaeology.

William A. Brown

William Brown is a Temporary Lecturer in the Department of Statistics at the University of Washington. His research focuses on developing and refining probabilistic models and methods in quantitative and statistical archaeology, with a special emphasis on improving the reliability of statistical inference in the context of archaeological demography.

Ben Fitzhugh

Ben Fitzhugh is a Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Quaternary Research Center at the University of Washington. His research focuses on human-environmental dynamics and archaeological histories of maritime/coastal hunter-gatherers especially in the North Pacific. This research addresses questions of human vulnerability and resilience in remote subarctic environments. He collaborates widely with scholars across a range of disciplines in atmospheric, earth and biological sciences and takes an historical ecological perspective on human adjustments to (and of) environments in which they live.