Environmental change and cultural dynamics of Holocene hunter–gatherers in Northeast Asia: Comparative analyses and research potentials in Cis-Baikal (Siberia, Russia) and Hokkaido (Japan)

Abstract

While substantial progress has been achieved in hunter–gatherer research over the last century, it is still the case that the understanding of the cultural dynamism, variability, and resilience of Holocene hunter–gatherers remains rather impoverished. Emerging archaeological insights suggest that the prehistory of many forager societies included periods of sudden cultural transformation, marked by major shifts in subsistence strategies, settlement patterns and associated social life. Recent theoretical and methodological advances are enabling archaeologists to reconstruct the cultural dynamics of Holocene hunter–gatherers in an unprecedented degree of detail. This is especially true in regions that contain large prehistoric cemeteries, which can provide the base data for bioarchaeological reconstruction of individual life histories, shedding light on forager life-ways, their subsistence strategies and mobility patterns. Renewed attention is also being directed at the role of unstable environments and climate, which would have formed important contextual factors influencing how local cultural dynamics were played out. However, identifying explicit causal links between environmental instability and culture change remains empirically challenging. This paper investigates the major sequences of Holocene hunter–gatherer culture change in two regions of Northeast Asia and details how the new Baikal–Hokkaido Archaeology Project will be researching the causal factors driving these cultural processes, including the possible role of climate and environment.