Archaeology and Japan

Archaeology
and
Japan




















Anthropology 4182
> S. Brown
< Chris Brake (aka 200211829)
\/ 16 November 2005
Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . 3
Development of Archaeology . . . . . . . 4
Archaeology under Pressure . . . . . . . 6
Making the Journey . . . . . . . . 9
The Age of Humans in Japan . . . . . . . 10
Dispelling the Myth . . . . . . . . . 11
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . 13
References . . . . . . . . . . 14













Introduction
Japan is an archipelago in the Pacific Ocean that lies off the coast of northern China and Korea. The major islands are named Kyushu, Honshu, and Hokkaido, running from south to north respectively. The climate on the Pacific coast is affected by the tropical Japanese Current which warms the area throughout the year. The continental side along the Japan Sea is subject to weather systems origination from the Siberian interior. This results in a much cooler and more extreme climate compared to the opposite region on the Pacific coast. The topography of Japan is very rough and mountainous with open country limited only to the coasts. The islands are covered in broad-leaved evergreen forests in the south with coniferous-deciduous forests showing up in the north. The forests contain many kinds of edible roots, seeds and nuts, which not only provide food for the small game that lives there today, but would have comprised a major part of the aboriginal diet (Aikens-Higuchi, 1982: 1-3).
Modern Japanese people have a strong sense of uniqueness and are almost obsessive when it comes to learning about their origins. Some of the oldest surviving historical texts in Japan are the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters) and Nihon Shoki (Chronicle of Japan), which deal mainly with the imperial family line and their divine origins (Edwards, 1997). However, documents such as these do little to explain where the Japanese people themselves came from and when they first came to... [continues]

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