Abstract
Understanding the development of early states on the Korean Peninsula is an important topic in Korean archaeology. However, it is not clear how social structure was organized by these early states and what natural resources were utilized from their surrounding environments. To investigate dietary adaptation and social status in ancient Korea, stable isotope ratios and radiocarbon dates were measured from humans and animals from the Imdang cemetery, Gyeongsan city, South Korea. The results indicate that the Imdang diet was mainly based on C3 plants and terrestrial animals. Animal remains in the graves were directly consumed as daily food items as well as for ritual offerings. MixSIAR modeling results revealed that the dietary sources for the humans were: game birds > C3 plants > terrestrial herbivores > marine fish > C4 plants. The finding that the game birds represented the highest contribution to the whole diet, indicates that game birds must have been intensively hunted. Furthermore, elites consumed more game birds than their retainers and they also consumed seafood as a privileged dietary item in the Imdang society. This study demonstrates that the Apdok was a stratified society having high variations in the consumption of food items available to an individual and provides new insights about the subsistence and social status of the early ancient Apdok state on the Korean Peninsula.
Highlights
The emergence of early ancient states and their territorial expansions on the Korean Peninsula is one of the most debated topics in Korean a rchaeology[1,2,3,4,5,6]
It is suggested that the growth of many polities inevitably initiated competition for land and resources and these internal conflicts between local polities resulted in the development of early states on the Korean Peninsula[8,9]
Records, Samguksagi (The Histories of the Three Kingdoms written in 1145 AD), there was a local polity called ‘‘Apdok’’, an early ancient state that existed in the Gyeongsan Basin during this time period[15,16]
Summary
The emergence of early ancient states and their territorial expansions on the Korean Peninsula is one of the most debated topics in Korean a rchaeology[1,2,3,4,5,6]. There were scientific attempts to identify the kinship and family relationships among human remains from the Apdok burials using ancient mitochondrial DNA analysis[25,26] These studies have made substantial contributions to increase our knowledge about the Apdok society, there is still a limited understanding of the subsistence activities and social status in this ancient state during the Proto-Three Kingdoms period. The Imdang mound site is well known in South Korea for the elite burials associated with the early ancient state of Apdok located on the southeastern Korean Peninsula[16,37] (Fig. 1). The Imdang site contains a large number of human and animal remains that were interred using different burial practices[16] These human and animal remains from the Imdang burials provided valuable information for a wide range of human subsistence activities during the Proto-Three Kingdoms period. The skeletal remains of 259 individuals within 182 graves were recovered and examined by the Yeungnam University Museum (YUM)[39,40]
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