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Island chains provide access to terrestrial, coastal and offshore marine resources, attracting peoples and cultures and serving as conduits for migrations and long-distance exchange networks. Situated between Hokkaido and Sakhalin, Rebun Island connected the prehistoric cultures of northeast Asia in a major “marine highway”. Rebun was repeatedly settled by distinct cultures who originated in different geographic locations and left an imprint on the local ecology. To better understand how these cultures adapted to the local island ecosystems, lipid residues from household cooking containers were investigated across a 1000-year period at the Kafukai river mouth on Eastern Rebun, where a prominent Late Holocene settlement cluster is located. Our study suggests periodical shifts in pottery function, with the Susuya focussed on the processing of intermediate trophic-level aquatic resources, and Early Okhotsk specializing towards isotopically enriched marine products. In the Middle Okhotsk phase, both marine and terrestrial animal, and plant resources were exploited. These findings elucidate changing patterns of household consumption and the range of resources processed between cultural periods. We conclude that pottery lipid analysis can play an important role in island archaeology, clarifying shifting relationships between communities, exploitation of resources and the responses of new cultural traditions to new insular ecological niches.

Archaeological radiocarbon dating in coastal northern Hokkaido is challenged by the marine reservoir effect and the scarcity of materials with terrestrial carbon sources. This has contributed to gaps and general uncertainty in the timing of the region's culture-historical periods. The Late Holocene site of Hamanaka 2 on Rebun Island, featuring a stratified shell midden context with excellent preservation of organic remains, provides an ideal setting for addressing this issue. A Bayesian chronological model was deployed to study the timing of the site using a series of radiocarbon-dated macrobotanical samples. This resulted in narrowed-down estimated ageranges in eight of thirteen phases examined, providing the site with a more accurate radiocarbon chronology than before. These temporal data were consequently integrated with local palaeoecological evidence, revealing synchrony between cultural chronology and human-induced landscape transformations. The study demonstrates that the technique should permit more efficient building of archaeological chronologies in similar maritime environments.

Archaeological radiocarbon dating in coastal northern Hokkaido is challenged by the marine reservoir effect and the scarcity of materials with terrestrial carbon sources. This has contributed to gaps and general uncertainty in the timing of the region's culture-historical periods. The Late Holocene site of Hamanaka 2 on Rebun Island, featuring a stratified shell midden context with excellent preservation of organic remains, provides an ideal setting for addressing this issue. A Bayesian chronological model was deployed to study the timing of the site using a series of radiocarbon-dated macrobotanical samples. This resulted in narrowed-down estimated ageranges in eight of thirteen phases examined, providing the site with a more accurate radiocarbon chronology than before. These temporal data were consequently integrated with local palaeoecological evidence, revealing synchrony between cultural chronology and human-induced landscape transformations. The study demonstrates that the technique should permit more efficient building of archaeological chronologies in similar maritime environments.

The goal of this contribution is to stimulate a wider reflection on the role of food consumption practices throughout prehistory. We focussed on the Jmon communities of Hokkaid Island in Northern Japan since these mobile foragers underwent a process of economic diversification and intensification, eventually leading to higher levels of sedentism across the Pleistocene-Holocene transition. Moreover, dynamic social settings and expansion of the subsistence base at the start of the Holocene would have provided rich opportunities for novel food combinations, and potentially, the rise of diverse regional cuisines. We investigated tool kits and resource landscapes, and sampled pottery from a range of sites, phases and regions. We then applied organic residue analysis to confirm the actual spatiotemporal patterning in cuisine. Although we predicted that ruminants and nuts would have played a major role in local cuisine, especially in inland areas, our results indicate that aquatic resources were central to pottery-based cuisines across the island, and that other food groups had probably been processed in other ways. While organic residue analysis enabled us to reconstruct some major patterns in Jmon cuisine, we conclude that archaeologists will need to look beyond the cooking pot to fully appreciate the full diversity of local foodways.

Hamanaka 2 is a multi-phase coastal site in Rebun Island with a similar to 3000-year occupation sequence extending from the final-stage Jomon and Okhotsk to the Ainu Culture period (1050 BCE-1850 CE). To examine long-term trends in food processing at the site, we collected 66 ceramic sherds across six distinct cultural layers from the Final Jomon to the Late Okhotsk period for lipid residue analysis. Given the site's beachfront location in an open bay, with ready access to abundant maritime resources, we predicted that the pottery would consistently have been used to process aquatic resources throughout all cultural periods. Though aquatic lipids dominated across the site sequence, the history of pottery use at the site proved more complex. Evidence of plant processing was found in all cultural phases, and from the Epi-Jomon/Late Final Jomon transition onwards 30% of the vessels were being used to process mixed dishes that combined both marine and terrestrial resources. By the start of the Okhotsk phase, separate sets of resources were being processed in different pots, suggesting functional differentiation in the use of pottery, and the rise of new kinds of cuisine - including the processing of millet. We tentatively explain these results as a consequence of the growing incorporation of Rebun Island into wider regional trade and interaction networks, which brought new kinds of resources and different social dynamics to Northern Hokkaido in the Late Holocene.