Evidence for fish cultivation during the Yayoi Period in western Japan

People in the western part of Japan, where the cyprinid fish fauna is very rich, have utilised these fish as a protein resource since the Jomon Period. Abundant cyprinid fish remains have been recovered from archeological sites in western Japan dating from both the Jomon (ca. 12,000 BC–300 BC) and subsequent Yayoi (ca 300 BC–AD 300) times. They captured larger cyprinids, especially Cyprinus carpio and Carassius spp., coming inshore for spawning and processed them as a food stock. One can easily imagine that people who captured cyprinids during the spawning season might also have begun to cultivate those fish sometime during prehistory, but until now there has been no evidence of fish cultivation in ancient Japan. We examined cyprinid pharyngeal tooth remains recovered from an archeological site of the Yayoi Period, the Asahi site in the Nobi Plain near Nagoya. The common carp Cyprinus carpio accounted for more than two-thirds of the recovered pharyngeal tooth remains. There are two peaks in the body length distribution, estimated from tooth size, of common carp from this site, one at 350–450 mm and the other, higher peak at 50–150 mm. We believe that the smaller fish of 50–150 mm in body length were cultivated, because it is very difficult to capture common carp of this size in substantial numbers in the field. We propose that fish cultivation started as a by-product of the artificial control of water levels in the paddy fields used for rice agriculture, which were characteristic of the Yayoi Period in Japan. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.