 So hello and welcome to Ask an Archaeologist. I'm Sarah Kansa, the host of today's show. Ask an Archaeologist is a series of live-streamed interviews co-hosted by the Archaeological Research Facility and the PVA Hearst Museum of Anthropology. In this series, UC Berkeley archaeologists and others who work with archaeological materials discuss their research and answer audience questions. For those of you joining live today, you may ask a question in the live chat box which you should see to the right of the YouTube video. So today we're delighted to have Professor Junko Habu on the show to talk with us about archaeology in Japan. Junko is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley and an affiliate professor of the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature in Japan. Born in Kawasaki City and Kanagawa Prefecture, she received her BA and MA from Keio University and her PhD in 1996 from McGill University. Professor Habu has excavated at a number of prehistoric Jomon sites and historic Edo period sites in Japan as well as Tule Inuit sites in the Canadian Arctic. Her research focuses on human environmental interaction and long-term sustainability of human cultures and societies. Her archaeological project in Japan, the Berkeley Sanai Maruyama and Goshizawa Matsumori project uses archaeological data to investigate the mechanisms of long-term culture change among prehistoric Jomon hunter-gatherers of Japan around 14,000 to 500 BC. She's authored several books, the titles of which are located in the video description below where you can also see more biographical details. So thank you very much for joining us, Professor Habu. Thank you, Sarah. It's a pleasure. Great, and we're happy to have you here today. And if you just want to start out with your slideshow by telling us a bit about your research. Okay. So as Sarah said, I received my PhD in 1996 and right after that I came to UC Berkeley. And when I first arrived here, I was trained as a hunter-gatherer archaeology specialist. But my position was for the archaeology of East Asia. And for me, to think about how to contextualize my research on prehistoric hunter-gatherer society and early small-scale societies in the context of regional area studies, that was a really fun part. So today I'd like to show the excitement of Japanese archaeology to the people who are listening to this. So my research focus is the archaeology of the Jomon period. The Jomon is the name of prehistoric hunter-gatherers in Japan. They did to about 14,000 BCE to 900 BCE. It's an opportunity to examine short and long-term changes in human environmental interaction. And here in the slide, you can see... I think actually the slides don't look like they're sharing yet. How is this? Great. Okay. So here you can see on the left side is a book of mine titled Ancient Jomon of Japan. And on the right side is a handbook of East and Southeast Asian archaeology. Now, Japanese archaeology is unique in the sense that there are a large number of rescue excavations from the 1960s on and that provided us with excellent data sets to allow us find archaeological patterns. And second, the prehistory and early history of the Japanese archipelago show a highly unique trajectory, which is quite different from those of many other parts of the world. Specifically, the Japanese prehistoric sequence is characterized by one of the earliest pottery traditions in the world. As you can see in the... I have to get back to my slide. I pressed a wrong button. Can you see? Yes. Okay. Sorry. So Jomon and the gatherers are known for their use of very well-decorated pottery like this. And so they're classified as hunter gatherers, but their culture is associated with pottery. So for European cultures, people tend to think, well, is Jomon Neolithic or not? But it doesn't really fit into a conventional idea of the Neolithic to the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. Third, sociopolitical context of Japanese archaeologists inseparable from archaeological practice in Japan. This is partly because during the Second World War, Japan went through an ultranationalistic period, during which the imperial family is considered to have been the descendants of gods. And if you can imagine that under that kind of political regime, it was very difficult to talk about the interpretation of prehistoric archaeological data. After the Second World War, Japan really took archaeology as a tool to understand what really happened in Japan and the ancestors of the Japanese people. Fourth, Japan is a country where ample ethnographic evidence is still present and that they can be used to examine continuity and change in landscape practice from the past to the present. Now, here's a chronology of Japanese archaeology from the Paleolithic period, Jomon, Yayoi, early agriculturalist period, Kofon, the state formation period, and then the ancient period of Nara and Heian, and then the samurai period, Kamakura Muromachi, and Edo period, all the way to the mid-19th century, and then the modern period called Meiji Taisho Showa and Heisei. Now, I talked about a large number of rescue excavations that you can see in this graph that the number of rescue excavations in 1973 was about a thousand, and by mid-1990s it went up to over 11,000. And today it's coming down a little bit, but it's still around 7,000, 8,000 per year. And if I can just cut in real quick, Junco, to ask about that peak and what is that, 1995? Can you explain what's happening there and what happened after? That was right after the bubble economy burst in Japan. So the late 1980s and early 1990s, there were so many construction projects in Japan, and in the meanwhile, the number of academic excavations stayed about 300, constantly all the way from the 1970s to the present. So you can imagine that in this context, with the large number of rescue excavations, the quantity of the data really changed us, the types of archaeological research that we can do. It's not only the quantity, it's the quantity, it's not only the quantity, it's the quality of the data that allow us to do different types of research. Of course, we do academic excavations, and this is an example of an academic excavation. This was a field school project at the Goshizawa Matsumori site in Omori Prefecture in northern Japan, and we excavated at Jomon Pit House. But we also need to understand that history of post-Second World War archaeology in Japan is tied to the history of its rapid economic development and numerous construction projects. The left side of this slide shows rescue excavation of a Jomon site prior to a dam construction, and on the right side is rescue excavation prior to a bullet train line, and there are also a number of excavations associated with freeway constructions. Now by the 1980s, initially rescue excavations were mostly on prehistoric and early historic period, but by the mid-1980s, archaeologists began to do a lot of historical archaeology projects. This is an example of a rescue excavation that I did on the campus of the University of Tokyo back in the mid-1980s, and this was a small rescue excavation project for Japanese archaeology, but you can still see that it's a fairly large site. It was prior to construction, well, renovation of the chemistry building on the campus, and you can see a couple wells here. Well, you can see the other but here, and the building remains here, and the number of underground cellars. And for historical archaeology, we can look at historical maps, and this really helps us to think about the life ways of historic samurai people, also allowed us to look at ceramic circulation and the production. We were able to do chemical analysis of some of the porcelain fragments that we excavated from the site. So main characteristics of Japanese archaeology, here are some of the characteristics that I can see. I have to say the international interaction is rather limited. This means that Japanese archaeology has not suffered much from Western colonialism. In order to Japanese archaeology, you really need to learn the language, but it also means that it's really limited international collaboration and information exchange. Second, archaeology is seen as a study of our own ancestors in Japan, and over there, archaeology as history is seen as part of the scientific discipline. And that is a way to really understand what happened in the past, as opposed to interpret the past from an internationalistic view during the Second World War. Third, the unique nature of the law for the protection of cultural property, which was issued originally in 1950 and revised in 1975. This defines that if any known archaeological site is in danger of getting destroyed, a full area needs to be excavated as opposed to sampling. So this resulted in the large amount of archaeological data, but this also kept many archaeologists busy with rescue excavations, especially in the 1980s and 1990s. As an anthropological archaeologist, I'm very interested in human environmental interaction and conservation of environmental conditions and landscapes. And early site preservation movements collaborated with local environmental movements, but generally speaking, there is a big separation between the archaeological and environmental discussion during and after the 1980s. And this is something that I want to see more collaboration in the future. So with all these ideas in mind, from 2014 to 2017, I had a three-year project titled Long-Term Sustainability through place-based small-scale economies approaches from historical ecology. And this was based at the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature in Kyoto. And one third of this project was dedicated to archaeology and environmental studies. The second part is to think about contemporary society with a focus on ethnographic studies. And the third part is really to put an emphasis on the resilience of small-scale place-based economies and the importance of traditional ecological knowledge in the context of applied archaeology and anthropology. And when I first came to UC Berkeley, many of my colleagues encouraged me to think about how we can use archaeology to think about contemporary issues. And some of my colleagues really encouraged me that archaeology has the great potential to think about sociopolitical issues in contemporary society with a long time span. And I think this is really true with the current context of a fight against the coronavirus and rapidly increasing social inequality and racism. And I think this is especially relevant today. Now, Japan is a country that people may think that Japan is a place. You may think Tokyo and big cities. But when you look at the map of Japan, actually four-fifths of the country is covered with forest and it's very mountainous. The red part is Tokyo in central part of Japan. But you can see that the majority of the country is really mountainous. And you can still see that ethnographic evidence is really rich. And what we can learn from people's practice in rural part of Japan, traditional ecological knowledge, and everyday practice really helps us understand continuity and change in landscape practice. And here are some examples, results of a small-scale economy project use of wild food resources and the traditional food storage techniques in Iwate prefecture in northern Japan. And even though people today they're agricultural farmers, you can really see that the use of mountain resources has a lot of things in common with what we see with Jomon archaeological data. We can also learn from past and present landscape use from practice of lacquer ware production. This is one of the art that goes back all the way to the Jomon period. Evidence of the oldest use of lacquer products goes back to the early Jomon period. And you can see that lacquer production which involves obtaining poison oak lacquer sap, that technique is the basics are pretty much the same as what we see today. And that Jomon example really tells us that this type of practice was really connected from all the way from the prehistoric period to the present. That's incredible actually hearing that. So you're talking about practices that have persisted for thousands and thousands of years. Thank you. That's amazing. And I think since I came to the United States, I was an archaeologist who was interested in Japanese archaeology that really motivated me to study archaeology of the rest of the world and being here that really made me think of the ties of Japanese culture with the landscape. And I think that's something that I'm learning a lot through my project and through the discussion with my colleagues and my students here at UC Berkeley. So that kind of practice is really helpful when we think about our interpretation of archaeological sites. This is an example of an archaeological site, the Goshono site in Ichinohetown in Iwate prefecture. This is near the lacquer sap collecting area that I showed in my previous slide. This is one of the 17 Jomon archaeological sites that are aiming for the inscription of the World Heritage List. One of the great things about Japanese archaeologists, their strong support from local residents. And you can really see that the site is important for the local residents. And to think about the continuity from the path to the present is really important for local people's identity. Are there a lot of ethnographic museums that you can visit, considering how much ethnographic work has been done? Yes, usually each municipal unit and the prefectural units have their own museums and often they call it historical and for history and folklore museums. Sometimes they have two separate museums, but Japan is really big on outreach activities through these local museums. Thank you. So Japanese archaeology has a lot of potential. Here are some of the suggestions for future direction of Japanese archaeology that I really feel that understanding long-term continuity and change in landscape practice can help us think about resilience of food and socioeconomic systems in relation to vegetation, biodiversity, climate, etc. One of my research foresight is really to think about what happens if people focus too much on limited type of food resources. And I'm really thinking that it may have happened even during the Jomon period when people are heavily relying on plant food collection. White food diversity I think is very important whether you are relying on white food resources or environmental management or agricultural practice. And that theme I think is relevant when we think about the problem of monoculture and long-distance circulation networks. Second, we do need more discussion about the goals of archaeological practice and archaeological site preservation. Japanese archaeology has been doing very well in terms of record preservation of archaeological sites. So all the rescue excavations records are available in the form of published archaeological excavation reports, but it also means that a large number of archaeological sites have been destroyed. And this may be the time to really think about archaeological sites excavation and preservation of what for food and for how long and at what cost. And third, possible collaboration between archaeology, agroecology. I'm thinking about promoting food sovereignty and think about ecologically sustainable food production and ethnography and ethnohistory. This is something that I learned a lot through my project in Kyoto by collaborating with scholars in these fields. And I really feel that we need more collaborations with local and of course global environmental movement. Archaeology has a lot of potential to contribute to the kind of discussion of climate change and environmental issues in both local and global scale. And fourth, training the next generation of archaeologists in transnational and transdisciplinary contexts is very important that archaeology has a lot to learn from other fields. And we do have a lot to contribute to contemporary social and economic and political discussions. And for more information, please visit my website, junkohabu.com. Thank you. Thank you for that. But for the listeners, if you have questions for junko, please type them into the chat box on YouTube and we'll bring them, pose them to her. Can you, are there other practices that archaeology has documented such as the lacquer production that you can trace back for thousands of years that have been going on for? You mean in relatively consistent ways? In Japan? In terms of archaeological sites? Well, in terms of, yeah, what you find on the sites, I mean the hunting and fishing practices and that kind of thing, that is there a consistency in those as well that you can document over that long period? Yes. Basket making is one of the traditions and in many waterlogged sites, we can really see that basket making was an important part of Jomon archaeological tradition and some of the techniques are continuing to the present. And in terms of food food production, we really think that Jomon people are managing the environment. And we also think that the use of fire must have been an important part to manage the environment, which has a lot of things in common with some of the research at work, like Professor Kent Lightfoot in our program. And so even though they, in the later part of the Jomon period had exposure to agricultural, agriculturalists nearby that these, they continued their practices. And why was that? Was it because they were so successful? Well, part of the issue is, I think, is the landscape that, as you can see, four-fifths of the country is covered with forest and mountains. And if you are in the mountainous area, then really you are heavily relying on mountain food resources. So when I talk to farmers in the mountainous part of Japan, my sense is that acorns were replaced by millet and other types of agricultural practice, but it's fairly easy to replace one type of carbohydrate with another one. And I think the rest of the subsistence strategies really, I won't say remain the same, but the basic structure was still retained. And that's why I think ethnographic research is very important. Absolutely. A listener is asking, is it possible to identify basket-making resource maintenance? We can really look at the basket. Oops, hold on a sec. I'm trying to see the chat, but I can't, anyway. It's okay. I'll tell you the questions. So in some cases, we can identify the types of the fiber that people use. And from there, we can really start thinking about how that must have been part of the cycle of Jomon people's annual calendar. And one of the things that my students and I are very interested in is how different types of activities were incorporated as part of their annual calendar. That people tend to think, well, subsistence strategies, people fished in the summer, hunted in the winter, collected nuts during the fall. But once you start thinking about basket weaving and lack of production, that really changes the seasonal cycles of people's activities. And I believe that they had really intricate seasonal calendar, but also something that was very flexible that gave them the resilience that can adapt to changing environment. And that may be something that we are losing that today, that because we are so heavily relying on long-distance exchange, long-distance commercial network and large-scale monoculture, we may be losing the flexibility. So to learn about the precision and at the same time to learn about their flexibility or prehistoric people, that I think is really helpful to think about the condemnations. Right. And did domesticated animals have an impact also on their subsistence activities? Put this way, I call Jomon people as hunter gatherers. By the way, in Japan, it's okay to use the word hunter gatherers that because of the nationalist regime during the Second World War period, to talk about the presence of hunter gatherers in the prehistoric period was actually something that was really new in Japanese archaeology after the Second World War. So I'm using the word hunter gatherers, but think of this word as interchangeable as environmental managers in North America. So they knew how to domesticate plants, and we do have domesticated plant remains from Jomon sites, but that didn't seem to have been the major part of their subsistence strategies. And in terms of domestication of animals, there's a big debate about the domestication of war. And evidence indicates there might have been some kind of human involvement, but it's not very clear. And on the whole, animal domestication doesn't seem to have been as important as plant management. Interesting. Getting back to just as a last question, getting back to the rescue archaeology efforts, there's, it looks like thousands of rescue activations compared to like, as you said, hundreds of academic excavations. And it sounds like there's a lot of communication and collaboration among these people. Who's doing these rescue excavations? And how is it that you said that they published and they share the results? Could you just talk a little bit more about how that collaboration works? Sure. Many of them are working for prefectural and municipal governments or archaeological centers associated with each of the prefectural and municipal unit. And the National Organization is not a national cultural properties research institute, I believe, is training groups of archaeologists at these municipal and prefectural units. And there are also CRM companies. And I believe there are more CRM companies in these days. So these are really conducted as part of public project using tax money unless it's a large construction project by a large company. And if that is the case, funding is provided by the developers. So developers pay is the basic principle and they are trained in a very standardized manner. That's great that you have access to that information easily. Okay, so it looks like our time is up. And I want to thank you so much, Junco, for joining us today. This is really interesting to hear about the long history of archaeology in Japan. If any listeners have a chance to, at the end of this show, if you could click on the button to go and give us feedback about this series, we would appreciate your feedback. And we hope you can join us tomorrow. At the same time, for an interview with Bill White, Professor of Anthropology, UC Berkeley, who's going to talk about life at home with an archaeologist, living with an archaeologist during these days. So we'll see you then. And thank you again, Junco. Thank you.