Ecological niche models of early rice agriculture in prehistoric Japan

The introduction of rice and millet agriculture into Japan during the 1st millennium BCE was a significant turning point in Japanese history that eventually led to the emergence of early states in the archipelago. Rice and millet agriculture was brought in by migrant communities from the Korean Peninsula; these communities spread into the Japanese islands interacting with the incumbent population of complex hunter- gatherers, the Jomon people. The introduction of wet-rice farming is of particular importance as it introduced major changes in settlement patterns and demography, but its adoption was not uniform across the archipelago, with some areas showing limited to no reliance on the new subsistence strategy and potentially unsuccessful adoption events. The geographically diverse response is generally assumed to reflect the underlying variation in the environmental and climatic settings of the islands. However, this assumption has gone largely untested, mostly due to a focus within Japanese archaeological research on the local and micro scales. This thesis aims to explain the observed variation in the adoption of rice agriculture by integrating archaeobotanical data with methodological approaches from ecology and climatology to explore the relationship between environmental suitability to rice agriculture and the spatial distribution of archaeological sites during the 1st millennium BCE. This involved reconstructing the ecological niche for rice during this period by using a mechanistic process-driven approach based on physiological assumptions on rice agriculture requirements and a correlative, data-driven, approach based on observed presence data of different proxies, namely rice macrofossils, paddy field remains and stone sickles; and past environment. My research demonstrates that environmental requirements of rice were likely to have had an impact on the spread of rice-based agriculture within Japan during the 1st millennium BCE, creating corridors of highly suitable areas that promoted rice dispersal in western Japan and limited its expansion in northern Japan. Discrepancies and unexpected patterns between the model output and the archaeological record provide the basis for hypothesising the role of cultural factors in the observed patterns. Through this integrated approach, I highlight the relevance of selecting appropriate proxies and their relationship to the phenomenon of interest and the archaeological questions.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Brainerd, Leah

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Crema, Enrico
• Yoshida, Akihiro

• Japanese archaeology
• Ecological Niche Models
• Species Distribution Models
• Yayoi period
• Computational Archaeology
• Rice
• Environmental Archaeology
• Agriculture

Licence

• https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/49cf0b93-ac74-4d15-8127-adbc36f7af21/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.116742

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/381617