title: Barley (Hordeum vulgare) in the Okhotsk culture (5th-10th century AD) of northern Japan and the role of cultivated plants in hunter-gatherer economies.
abstract: This paper discusses archaeobotanical remains of naked barley recovered from the Okhotsk cultural layers of the Hamanaka 2 archaeological site on Rebun Island, northern Japan. Calibrated ages (68% confidence interval) of the directly dated barley remains suggest that the crop was used at the site ca. 440-890 cal yr AD. Together with the finds from the Oumu site (north-eastern Hokkaido Island), the recovered seed assemblage marks the oldest well-documented evidence for the use of barley in the Hokkaido Region. The archaeobotanical data together with the results of a detailed pollen analysis of contemporaneous sediment layers from the bottom of nearby Lake Kushu point to low-level food production, including cultivation of barley and possible management of wild plants that complemented a wide range of foods derived from hunting, fishing, and gathering. This qualifies the people of the Okhotsk culture as one element of the long-term and spatially broader Holocene hunter-gatherer cultural complex (including also Jomon, Epi-Jomon, Satsumon, and Ainu cultures) of the Japanese archipelago, which may be placed somewhere between the traditionally accepted boundaries between foraging and agriculture. To our knowledge, the archaeobotanical assemblages from the Hokkaido Okhotsk culture sites highlight the north-eastern limit of prehistoric barley dispersal. Seed morphological characteristics identify two different barley phenotypes in the Hokkaido Region. One compact type (naked barley) associated with the Okhotsk culture and a less compact type (hulled barley) associated with Early-Middle Satsumon culture sites. This supports earlier suggestions that the "Satsumon type" barley was likely propagated by the expansion of the Yayoi culture via south-western Japan, while the "Okhotsk type" spread from the continental Russian Far East region, across the Sea of Japan. After the two phenotypes were independently introduced to Hokkaido, the boundary between both barley domains possibly existed ca. 600-1000 cal yr AD across the island region. Despite a large body of studies and numerous theoretical and conceptual debates, the question of how to differentiate between hunter-gatherer and farming economies persists reflecting the wide range of dynamic subsistence strategies used by humans through the Holocene. Our current study contributes to the ongoing discussion of this important issue.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Geological Sciences, Section Paleontology, Freie Universität Berlin, Malteserstr. 74-100, Building D, Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Christian
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0805-2345
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Leipe
authors.affiliation: Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnography, Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Pushkinskaya 89, Vladivostok, Russia.
authors.forename: Elena A
authors.initials: EA
authors.lastname: Sergusheva
authors.affiliation: Institute of Geological Sciences, Section Paleontology, Freie Universität Berlin, Malteserstr. 74-100, Building D, Berlin, Germany.|Eurasia Department and Beijing Branch Office, German Archaeological Institute, Im Dol 2-6, Building II, Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Stefanie
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Müller
authors.affiliation: Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University, New York, NY, United States of America.|Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany.
authors.forename: Robert N
authors.initials: RN
authors.lastname: Spengler
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Physics, Adam Mickiewicz University, Umultowska 85, Poznan, Poland.|Poznan Radiocarbon Laboratory, Foundation of the A. Mickiewicz University, Rubiez 46, Poznan, Poland.
authors.forename: Tomasz
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Goslar
authors.affiliation: Center for Ainu and Indigenous Studies, Hokkaido University, Kita 8, Nishi 6, Kita-ku Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan.
authors.forename: Hirofumi
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Kato
authors.affiliation: Eurasia Department and Beijing Branch Office, German Archaeological Institute, Im Dol 2-6, Building II, Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Mayke
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Wagner
authors.affiliation: Department of Anthropology, University of Alberta, Tory Bldg. 13-15, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.|Aix Marseille Univ, CNRS, Minist Culture & Com, LAMPEA, Aix-en-Provence, France.
authors.forename: Andrzej W
authors.initials: AW
authors.lastname: Weber
authors.affiliation: Institute of Geological Sciences, Section Paleontology, Freie Universität Berlin, Malteserstr. 74-100, Building D, Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Pavel E
authors.initials: PE
authors.lastname: Tarasov
mesh_terms: D001106:Archaeology; D000069599:Crop Production / Q000266:history*; D003469:Culture; D049690:History, Ancient; D001467:Hordeum / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D006801:Humans; D007564:Japan; D012639:Seeds / Q000033:anatomy & histology*