 The Archaeological Research Facility recognizes that Berkeley sits on the territory of Huqin, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chechenyo Eloni, the successors of the historic and sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Eloni people. We recognize that every member of the Berkeley community has and continues to benefit from the youth and occupation of this land. By offering this land acknowledgement, we affirm Indigenous sovereignty and will work to hold University of California Berkeley more accountable to the needs of American Indian and Indigenous people. So with that, today we are very fortunate to be joined by Professor Junco Habu all the way from Japan. So thank you for joining us. She is a professor of anthropology at UC Berkeley as well as an affiliate professor of the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature in Japan. From 2014 to 2016, she led an international transdisciplinary project called Long Term Sustainability through Place-Based Small Scale Economies Approaches from Historical Ecology, some themes of which I believe she's going to touch on tonight. And she's going to be specifically speaking on reexamining the importance of traditional ecological knowledge and talking about the unique perspectives that Japanese archaeology can provide on themes of landscapes and ecosystem resilience. She was also one of my favorite professors I've had in my time at Berkeley and taught me a lot about archaeological theory. So thank you for being with us tonight, Junco. Thank you very much, Lucy, for your kind introduction. Hello, everybody. It's great to be the first background speaker for this semester. I'm currently in Japan doing my remote teaching at my 1.30 a.m. to 3 a.m. Tuesday, Thursday. And the background slots happen to be my 4 a.m. And I felt that it would be much easier to shift the time and also this would be an opportunity for my Japanese colleagues to tune in. So let me start. My talk today is titled Reexamining the Importance of Traditional Ecological Knowledge, Continuity and Change in Landscape Practice in Rule of Japan from the Prehistoric German Period to the Present. And this talk was partially triggered by my previous talk for the Ask an Archaeologist episode 18, in which I really talked about the importance of sociopolitical context of Japanese archaeology. And really, in order to understand Japanese archaeology, you can't ignore the background and also the importance of archaeology for the people living on the Japanese archipelago. My research focuses on the early and middle German period. So it's about 6,000 to 4,500 years ago. And you can see that what we call the prehistoric German period lasted for more than 10,000 years. But you can also see that, okay, I missed one slide, but it's okay. It's really part of the long continuity in Japanese history. And we can really think about landscape practice continuity from the past all the way to the present. My research, I'm particularly interested in the growth and decline in the number and size of German sites. And based on archaeological data, many archaeologists assumed that there was a major population decrease from the middle to the late German period. This is the first time that you see a big population decline in Japanese history. And there are only three more, and the present is the fourth one. So what does this mean in the big picture? And what can we learn from archaeological examples is one of my major foresight when conducting archaeological research. And as I said, German archaeology should be placed in the chronological sequence in Japan all the way to the present. And this is also tied to the issue of heritage conservation in Japan. When we think of Japanese archaeology after the Second World War, archaeology after 1945 in Japan was a new paradigm to replace emperor-centered ultra-nationalistic ideology during the Second World War. And as part of people's effort to really understand what really happened in the past, archaeology became an important part of people's effort to fight against ultra-nationalistic ideology. And archaeologists tried very hard to preserve archaeological sites. But from the 1960s on, large-scale land development projects throughout the Japanese archipelago made preservation of archaeological sites, per se, very difficult. And that led to the revision of the law for the preservation, protection of cultural property, and archaeologists shifted their focus to at least excavate archaeological site and preserve archaeological excavation records. Initially, archaeologists' efforts were strongly tied to local preservation movements of environmental movements. But by the 1980s, archaeologists' discussion, I think, became less frequent. And today, we have less funding for archaeological heritage management, which is very similar to our cultural resource management. So Japanese archaeology has lots of data, but we do have a lot of problems in terms of the future of site preservation. And in a way, I think what Japan is facing today will become an issue in North America and many different other parts of the world. This slide gives you the sense of changing through time in the number of rescue and academic excavations in Japan. And you can see that it peaked in the middle of the 1990s. And it's coming down, but we still have a large number of rescue excavations. And my life actually really was together with this trend. I was born in 1959, so it's not even in this diagram. But when I was a kid in the 1960s, there were many site distractions. This was one of the shell medans that was destroyed, and that's picking up shells. And that was me helping an undergraduate archaeology major student who was doing a week and quick checkup. This was another site that was bulldozed in the early 1970s with no site proper excavations. By the late 70s, Japanese archaeology became much more organized, that rescue excavation became very common. 1980s and 1990s were the time when we had a large number of large-scale rescue excavations. And it continues, but the number is less. Now, one thing I began to really think over the past several years in relation to the discussion of re-evaluating the importance of traditional ecological knowledge is that Japan is an area, especially rural Japan is rich with ethnography and memories of traditional ecological knowledge. Upon the other 1950s, if you go to rural parts of Japan, especially the mountainous part of Japan, you are able to see many practice that goes back to earlier historic period, and some of the traditions can be traced back to the prehistoric Jomon period, including acorn processing and lack of air production. Just to give you quick examples, this is a slide that I took at the Miyako City, Kitakami, Sanchi Museum folklore. And this slide shows a part to process acorns and bakais to remove tannic acid. It was a common practice until the 1950s. It became less common before and during the Second World War, and the tradition came back after the Second World War. And today, some people still remember how to do it, and this is one tradition that goes back to the Jomon period. Another tradition is lack of air production. Lack of air in Japan is produced using poisoned oak lacquer sap. And today, it's an important part of local economic activities. These are a couple of slides that I took in Iwate prefecture. And lack of air production, these are ethnographic examples from the Edo and Meiji period, again at the Kitakami, Sanchi Museum of Folklore. The production of lacquer with artifacts and basket and pottery are reported from many Jomon archaeological sites. So for sure, this tradition goes back to the Jomon period. And refining Ulushi Poison Oak sap to produce lacquer is time-consuming and it's very specialized work, and that affects various other subsistence activities and people's life ways. In my background talk last year, I talked a little bit about it. And Jomon archaeological excavations have revealed the presence of lacquer trees seeds. It's quite common. These are a couple of examples from our field excavation at the Goshizawa Matsumori site in Amori from 2008 to 2010. So I believe that Japanese archaeology and ethnoarcheology can make a unique contribution to the current discussion of landscapes, traditional ecological knowledge, and ecosystem resilience. But there are also barriers. The biggest barrier is the language. The Japanese archaeology has been quite independent in terms of its academic tradition. The majority of archaeological publications are published in the Japanese language. And many Japanese archaeologists are not fluent in English. So when we think about contribution of Japanese archaeology to the world archaeology scene, if we assume that it has to be done in English or other Western languages, obviously Japanese archaeology has a big disadvantage. And I really feel that it should be efforts need to be done from both sides that I do not think English should be prioritized, but in reality, Japanese archaeologists also need to find a way to send the information out to the rest of the world. And I have to say that they're actually less international and interdisciplinary research and transdisciplinary research in Japanese archaeology. For my generation, there are about probably two or three dozens of Japanese young PhD students and scholars who studied abroad to promote more interaction. But I believe there are less and there are less professors in North America who are currently teaching Japanese archaeology in Canada and the United States. And I feel that part of my job is to really bridge the gap and really to respect Japanese tradition while I'm not making it isolated from the rest of the world. So with these goals in mind, as Lucy said, I had a transdisciplinary project titled Long-Term Sustainability through Place-Based Small-Scale Economies Approaches from Historical Ecology from 2014 to 2017. You can take a look at the website. It was a three-year project with three components. The first component was focusing on archaeology and paleo-environmental studies that I called the Long-Term Group. The second group consisted of many anthropologists, ethnographers, sociologists, and other ecologists who are working on contemporary society issues. And the third group put a lot of emphasis on the resilience of small-scale place-based economies and the importance of traditional ecological knowledge and how can we apply that to contemporary issues and think about future directions. So this started as a diversity project and the project questions two commonly accepted assumptions from an ecological perspective. Number one, large-scale production is more efficient. Number two, homogenous production is more efficient. A hypothesis for the archaeology part was highly specialized subsistence strategies, i.e. low food and subsistence diversity can support a larger population for a short period. However, a decreasing food and subsistence diversity makes society more vulnerable in the long run. And the problem of large-scale homogenized production, we learned that after the 311 earthquake in Japan in 2011, if you rely too heavily on long-distance transportation and centralized distribution systems, then in several days you may not get food. This slide shows, I think the left side is the section of bread. And I think the next day after the earthquake hit Japan, we lost bread and then meat, veggies, canned food, and eventually toilet paper. Now, does this look kind of familiar to many of you in California? This is what happened in March 2020 in Berkeley. The left side is toilet paper and the right side is water. You can really see that at the least in order to make our life sustainable, diversified backup plans are important. And part of my question is, how far does this kind of problem go back to the earlier period? Could this even go back to the prehistoric Jomon period is my question. So in order to think about these, we had three groups that each group had Japan focused research and comparative studies, mainly from this side, the California, the Pacific, North American side of the Pacific Ocean. My own research at that time was focused on subsistence, diversity, and population estimates and environmental changes from the initial to the final Jomon period. And as I said previously, I was very interested in the decline of population estimates from the middle to the late Jomon period. And this happened to overlap with the growth and decline of one of the really well-known sites, the Sanai Maruyama site in Omori Prefecture. Now, this is a site located at the edge of Omori plain. And many scholars in the past said that the decline of the population at the Sanai Maruyama was tied to a decrease in tied to rapid climate change, the cooling climate that hit Japan and many other parts of the world at around 4,300 years ago. But our research indicates that population decrease itself probably started several hundred years earlier. And we have an alternative hypothesis that too much emphasis on plant food, loss of food diversity may have been related to the population decrease before the cooling climate hit the area. So we were looking at various archaeological indicators to think about diversity in network, local autonomy, scale, climate change, human impacts on the environment, and chronology. As I said, our results of archaeological findings at the Sanai Maruyama seems to be consistent with our hypothesis that change in the loss of food and subsistence diversity occurred first, followed by a decrease in settlement size and a decrease in the number of clay figurines and ritual activities reflected in that. So based on that, we are testing, further testing our hypothesis that loss of food and subsistence diversity led to the reduction in settlement size and changes in rituals. Now, while our project started with a strong focus on the issue of diversity, in the three-year period of the project, three key theoretical issues emerged out of our small-scale economies projects. There are resilience, traditional and local environmental knowledge and landscape and material culture. Now here, we suggested landscape is a real-world phenomena but also meaningful location in which lives are lived. This definition is coming from David and Thomas, 2010. Resilience in the contemporary world's discussion, we hear the word very often, in the resilient theory discussion is defined as the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure. It's an important operational concept when discussing long-term sustainability of socio-ecological systems. Many of you have probably seen adaptive cycle in the resilience perspective. It starts with the exploitation phase, to the conservation phase, to the release phase, to the reorganization phase. This is modified from I'm holding at ours chapter in 2002. And they also talk about the importance of remembrance and memory in thinking about the reorganization of resilient systems. It also says that a small change in part of the last system can lead to a catastrophic change. And the resilience theory may look complicated, but we have our great former faculty member Elizabeth Carlson who said basically the same thing in a much simpler manner in her 1917 article that the most resilient system is really to emphasize diversification, food storage, information of the main food, conservation of surplus food into the other variables and social relationships. And she was looking at ethnographic examples from Makar and Grinberg-Tonger. And when you look at her article and when you think of what it means in the context of resilience theory, it's very clear that food strategies of self-resilient societies have multiple backup plans on many small scale food production systems that are connected but self-independent and has autonomous control. The second concept, traditional ecological knowledge, involving knowledge acquired by indigenous and local peoples over many years through direct contacts with the environment. It includes knowledge, practice, and belief. And you can see that it overlaps with local environmental knowledge and indigenous knowledge. The third concept, landscape, they are physically and socially constructed. There are many definitions but specifically culturally impacted arrangement of land, water, and biota and this is coming from Bill Ballet's article containing bundles of practices, meanings, attributes, and values linked to memory and material culture. And continuity in landscape practice from the past to the present is important and many people re-evaluating its importance and they believe Japan is a great place where we can really think about continuity from the past to the present. The highlight of the project was a workshop that we did together with a new museum in Shiraoi where the importance of traditional ecological knowledge and rituals were presented by Ed Carrier, a Squamish elder and many people who were there were really impressed by what Ed presented. One of the things that he said was when you're making a basket, 80% of the work is really to collect raw materials and that starts with planting trees in the forest. And that was really an eye-opening statement for many of us. We knew intuitively but it was a very clear statement that looking at material culture we are talking about the background and environmental context and it also involves long-term maintenance and conservation and that cannot be done without having traditional ecological knowledge. With that in mind one of the things that we focused was our case study of ethnographic work in the Hei River region in Iwate prefecture where we see that traditional staple food of this area has various types of minutes but also acorns and soy and azuki beans. Resilience of subsistence strategies in this area is really supported by a wide range of food diversity with a wide variety of wild food from the mountains and there are also staple food diversity that Bayard Millet is the staple food together with barley and soybeans. It's the three-crop rotation system for two years but ethnographic records indicate that that wasn't stable enough that as a backup plan people had Slash and Burn Agriculture people also utilized buckwheat, foxtail millets, beans and at the backup plan of Slash and Burn Agriculture people also had acorns whose storage was very important and social network was also very important. By talking to local stakeholders we quickly realized that the food tradition that we learned is still there. Diversity in food and subsistence practice is very important and traditional ecological knowledge is still retained among elders and young people may not practice in exactly the traditional way but many of the key principles are still retained. We have a Japanese publication titled Weaving the Knowledge of Mountains, Rivers and the Ocean in 2018 if you go to my website junkohabu.com and if you are Japanese speaker you can download several chapters of this book. We also learned that use of wild resources and traditional food storage techniques are quite important that we learned that various techniques to freeze dry some of the staple food and the use of wild mountain veggies such as Warabi Bracken is still incorporated in people's agricultural practice. One of the farmers showed us how important it is to share food with their neighbors. This was an example that when we visited her she said well because you guys are coming she cooked like 30 packages of food and while we were there various local people stopped by to pick up food communicating with her a little bit some of them talking to us and we really saw that food exchange is an important part of networking. So the main results of our project work at Hey River Bali interviews of elders, farmers, fishermen and forest industry practitioners and local residents indicate that food and subsistence diversity supported by traditional ecological knowledge plays a critical role in the resilience of food systems and communities. Traditional ecological knowledge and local networks have been important especially in cases of flood typhoons and earthquakes that we see that if there's an emergency situation the local network and still today I think more important. It's clear that people in rural parts of Japan have much more resilient systems compared to people living in big cities such as Tokyo and Osaka. The current issue there are efforts to revitalize areas through farmers markets and local products but the population is a serious problem today and large-scale non-development plants with anticipated serious environmental damage threaten small-scale food producers in rural parts of Japan. One of the things that we thought was really interesting was that by looking at vegetation we can still see patchy deciduous forest vegetation such as shown in this slide this seems to be the evidence of repeated clearing and regeneration of the deciduous forest and artificially planted red pines and large and cedar can be detected but we can still see the signature of part of past people's practice by looking at the vegetation today. Another result of a small-scale economies project this was done by another group of the project was focusing on lacquer stack collectors also in Iwate prefecture. And interviews of lacquer collectors, entrepreneurs and the co-owners of farmers market indicates the subsistence practices at Joboji share a number of things in common with those in the Kitakami mountains that we just reviewed small-scale lacquer sub-collecting is still alive and historically multiple backup plants supported by white subsistence diversity and traditional ecological knowledge were critical for systems resilience and this is shown changing through time in subsistence strategies in Joboji that lacquer production development growth and decline of lacquer production is closely tied to forestry and agriculture and when you look at traditional practice like lacquer production you really need to think about that as part of the seasonal cycle and long-term changes they bet when we think about German lacquer production we need to think in the same way and as part of that when we think of archaeological sites in the area it is really exciting to think about how traditional knowledge may have been inherited from the German period to the present one of the sites that we are very interested in is the Gosconal site in Iwate prefecture this is one of the 17 German archaeological sites that I am in for the inscription of the World Heritage List and we are hoping that it will happen soon the site receives strong support from local residents and the importance of the Gosconal site in the local cultural landscape is quite evident that this is the view of the site it's on top of a hill you can see that it's in the inland part of Iwate prefecture it's very mountainous part it's very close to Djoboji the lacquer, sap collecting area so we can really see that for the interpretation of this archaeological site various ethnographic examples can be very helpful as part of our efforts funded by the center for Japanese studies last summer we visited the site we were allowed to do some flotation of soil samples and we were also fortunate to visit some of the local artists who are making baskets like this and we are also able to revisit the lacquer, sap collecting site and it was really great to be able to make this visit together with a local archaeologist so that we can think about the connection between the ethnographic examples and archaeological practice now thinking about the importance of continuity and change in landscape practice I told you earlier that my archaeological career started going back to the late 1960s working on the case study from Iwate prefecture really made me rethink of the local landscape where I grew up in Tama Valley in the western edge of Tokyo and part of Yokohama city this is the area that housing land developments pretty much wiped out the majority of archaeological sites and traditional landscapes but when I was a kid I was still able to see what these may have been in the early to mid 20th century this is a map that shows the whole town basically my house was around here near the site of Nakagoma this burdo site is this dot here and you can see that these black dots are all well known and these are on top of hills and this part is a little valley associated with the Hayabuchi river at the height of the sea transgression these were like peninsulas and the ocean was coming into this small valley so this is an area where you see a large number of shell midlands but that said it wasn't like shell mountains in California they were not along the previous course they were near the ocean but on top of hills that one of the things that really is striking for German archaeology many of the German sites are located on top of hills and we see a lot stronger connection to the active use of mountainous resources acorns, buckeyes walnuts and other types of plant foods marine food was part of the important food items but it seems like there was only a portion of that in many cases I think for German what's really important is the importance of the ties with mountainous food and even in the case of shell midlands site clusters like this we need to think about that this is one of the excavations of the Takada site here today the area is pretty much well you can see that it's covered it's typical survival of Tokyo Takada is one of the really few locations where you still see part of that traditional farmland in the area but that said I can still picture how things may have been because I remember how things were in the 1960s where the landscape still retained its signature of how things were up until the 1950s today you can see that City History Museum has reconstructions of some of the archaeological sites this slide shows when three of my colleagues from the ARF Professor Lightfoot, Robata Kevin Gips visited the site in 2019 and what's interesting is for many archaeological museums it's not only archaeology it's always covering both archaeology and ethnography of folklore so for this Yokohama History Museum you see the ethnography part is also an important part of the museum now with these two examples in mind getting back to Sanai Maruyama the Iwate example is really focusing on the mountainous part of Jomon archaeological site and ethnographic examples that can tell us about Jomon people's practice and the second example much closer to the river and the ocean but still focusing on the hillside of the terrain compared to that the site that I worked for a while Sanai Maruyama that's right at the edge of the big plain and this is like about sea level and this is one of the first examples when the Jomon people started to come down to the lower part and why do we have a large archaeological site and for this particular location and what does that mean and what does that mean when we think about long-term sustainability of hunting gathering practice and environmental management at that time I think is really important we are also doing some site database and GIS analysis to think about changes through time and this is still we are in the middle of a practice so I can't really present you the final results of this but this is something that we are really working on so with these in mind what I'm trying to do as a continuation of my previous project is to think about how to integrate three key components of my small scale economies project the first one is archaeology with a focus on long-term perspectives archaeology has a strength of emphasizing signatures of human actions landscapes through the analysis of material culture and environmental data and that includes micro and macro plant remains micromorphology etc and in the process we got very interested in the field of agriculture it's an intersection of traditional ecological knowledge and scientific knowledge and it's really focusing on the always changing nature of traditional ecological knowledge and sovereignty and autonomy as a core of agroecological practice and third working on many anthropologists sociologists working on ethnography and ethnology made me realize importance of multiple backup plants at the time of disasters through diversity storage and social networks and autonomy are very important and resilience is directly linked to memories and material cultures really there's so much to be learned from traditional knowledge and in the case of Japan elderly people still retain the knowledge but for the past 50 years Japan was still in the mode of getting the pressure feeling that they need to catch up with the western world so often traditional knowledge was not truly appreciated many farmers felt that that was something that is not really unvalued by many people and I think that started to change and that really needs to change and I believe that by combining these three fields we can really start to think about some continuity in landscape use in terms of the structure of systems resilience and I really hope that in doing so really to reevaluate the importance of ethnographic work and archaeological work that have been done in the Japanese language I think it's very important to really think about what kind of collaborations can be done it used to be that Japanese archaeology and Japanese studies they were the field for those who are willing to spend a large amount of energy and effort to learn the language but with new technologies I think things are shifting to more collaboration with local stakeholders and local scholars who are willing to work with English speakers so finally I want to let you know that as part of these efforts we just started a new project titled Agroecology Sustainable Food Production and Landscape Conservation International Collaboration between Japan and the Americas and if you are interested in the project if you go to my website and if you go to Agroecology project you can learn more about it and we do have descriptions in both Japanese and English languages okay so that's it thank you very much very much Junko for an amazing talk as always I have a couple of questions from viewers if you're willing to take a couple of questions sure okay so the first is from Anna Nielsen so she asks many of the viewers tuning in today are from California what are some ways that we can apply the principles of sustainability resilience and traditional ecological knowledge here especially in regards to the wildfires and COVID-19 mm-hmm very good question who is asking the question? from Anna Nielsen okay Anna probably knows the answer as good as I do but I think what I was really excited about a small scale economics project was that Kent Lightfoot was able to provide his perspective from the California side and we were amazed to see how much overlap we can find in terms of the importance of fire to control the vegetation mm-hmm to really think about continuity and change from the past to the present that a big advantage of Japan is that um traditional ecological knowledge mm-hmm we see the continuity and local farmers still retain the knowledge so that I think many Japanese people feel that it's part of their own heritage on the other hand in the case of California it's really Native American people's heritage that mm-hmm for many non-indigenous people that is something to learn a different cultural tradition but that said when we think of environmental management what works what worked in the past I think there are a lot of overlaps and I think one of the things that what we are trying to do with our agroecology project is to work closely with scientists and ecologists who do have scientific data but who really knows the individual regions so I think theoretically we can do the same and at the time of COVID-19 in our small-scale economies project what we really try to do is at the least we do want diversified systems as a backup plan in the case of a big disaster but ultimately what I envision is that really loosely connected but autonomous many decentralized small-scale food production systems and other production systems I feel that that should be the future or otherwise if everything is centralized if that one system falls apart then we don't have backup plans Thank you for that we have another question here from Jenny Kerr who is wondering as a new transfer student I'm interested in Japanese archaeology and I wonder if there is a place for a western person to work in Japan how do you think English speakers should think about working with Japanese archaeologists in collaboration and what can they offer That is a great question let me say we do need more western people to do Japanese archaeology and I think we do need more Japanese students to study abroad not only in the western world but also in different parts of the world including Asia and really Japanese archaeology has a long tradition that because it's still sticking to the Japanese language primarily it is not under the very heavy colonial practice but the power imbalances there that when I try to present my work in English I really have to summarize what's written in Japanese I don't want to spend the rest of my life just to summarize what's written in English and I don't want to spend the rest of my life summarizing our 2-9a history of archaeological thoughts into Japanese so we do need more people who do have the background for both and for non-Japanese speakers language ability will be important so even if it's not completely fluent a little bit of Japanese is a good start and I think more and more depending on which field you want to work on there are some fields such as parallel botany that you can do scientific analysis and by working with Japanese collaborators you can really do a decent job if you want to work on social political context of Japanese archaeology then I think at that point reading Japanese language materials will be necessary to a certain extent so choosing a theme that is manageable is important but I'd love to have more people, non-Japanese people I think part of the problem is the Japanese archaeology really tried to use archaeology as a tool to fight against ultra-nationalistic ideology during the Second World War so they really want to see what really happened in the past in Japan is important but the irony is by doing so they focused really heavily on Japanese prehistory and proto-history which was not necessarily with nationalistic intention but it can really be going back to a different type of nationalistic focus and that is something that I think it's really important to have people who are coming from different background she says thank you that is really good to know great thank you if anyone else has any other questions feel free to put them in chat but if not I'm going to abuse my power as host and ask you a question myself which is this isn't something that you talked a lot about today but you have talked about it in the past and certainly another comparison between California and Japan is that many archaeological sites are threatened by sea level rise in the face of climate change and so I was just wondering if you could speak a little bit to what kinds of salvage archaeology or other types of conservation projects are ongoing in Japan and how do you respond to that threat thank you that's an important question and as I said interestingly enough many of the Japanese are on top of hills so unlike in the case of California the rising sea level is not threatening many archaeological sites right away but big disasters and typhoon often is a problem and after 311 earthquake people who are inundated by the tsunami needed to evacuate to the higher elevation location and many in many cases they were archaeological sites so that created a conflict so we can see that climate change and environmental disasters are affecting Japanese archaeological practice and in the big picture I think they overlap with people's concerns in California and other parts of the world that sea level rise is affecting as a side note some scholars think that Jomon people knew that sea level tsunami would hit the lowland part and that's why many of the Jomon sites are on top of the hills now this kind of goes circular it's also possible that we lost some of the Jomon shell midlands in the lowland part so these are some of the unresolved questions that we need to keep pursuing it's striking that many of the Jomon shell midlands are associated with settlements on top of hills we have one more question from Kazuyo Nishihara who asks given the continuing aging and depopulation especially in rural areas what could change in the near future in terms of traditional ecological knowledge and what can we contribute to the local community as anthropologists in the region okay big question now Japan as some of you may know is facing a serious birth rate decline which is leading to depopulation in rural parts of Japan and also decrease in the number of total population now people saw that it means that many of the rural villages will disappear and I think people started talking about it about a couple of decades ago but in fact many of the villages did not disappear some of them did despite having a hard time but they did not necessarily disappear in the meanwhile in big cities the disparity between the rich and poor began to get widened and that led to some of the young people to think is it really good to live in big cities the number is still small but I can definitely see the changes some of the workers who are working under me in Kyoto when I was running that small scale economies project they had their own community networks of young people who are more interested in living in rural parts of Japan not necessarily really far away from big cities but one or two hours away from big cities by car or by train so it would be interesting to see what will happen but we do not necessarily have to think about continuing centralization in big cities only and I think disasters may actually be a trigger that already people see that COVID-19 is allowing us to do less centralized work we do not have to commute not all of us will have to commute to big cities I never really thought that I could give a Zoom presentation from Japan in this context and this is perfectly fine and I think in a way Zoom has advantages and disadvantages but I think we just have to think about how to take advantages of new situations and really start thinking about what kind of questions are we facing right now Thank you so much Junko This is a wonderful talk I'm glad that I made it on time I had too many slides so I had to zip through and I apologize that I had to go through some of the slides very quickly but this was fun and thank you all and especially thank you Lucy, Sarah and Nicole and Jordan for helping me setting this up Absolutely