Abstract
Global warming experienced during the late Pleistocene transition to the Holocene resulted in an altered paleo-costal landscape. This included the demise of megafauna species, such as mammoth, mastodon and black rhinoceros. Simultaneously the landscape experienced a transition from tundra to that of taiga and coniferous forests that influenced both plant and animal diversity. Rising sea levels inundated the coastal plain and formed enriched ingression bays that supported the propagation of aquatic species, such as shellfish, fish, sea mammals and migratory waterfowl. Some seasonally migratory species, such as salmon, began to penetrate the freshwater streams further inland. The study of maritime adaptations among the prehistoric cultures of the Russian Far East has focused on several problems, including environmental change, the identification of early coastal populations, the transition from land-based hunter-gatherer subsistence practices to the exploitation of river and littoral resources, and accompanying changes in social organization and technology. The late Pleistocene Ustinovka Complex dates to between 22,469 and 10,746 cal BP. This compares to the related Early Neolithic age of the Rudnaya Culture dating between from 8345–6835 ka BP. The presence of bifacial tools, ceramic cooking vessels, fish bones, a stone fish effigy, a carved narwhal effigy, bone harpoon points, marine shell ornaments and buttons, carved bone pendants, light ground structures and lithic caches suggests the function of seasonal base camps engaged in a hunting-gathering-fishing lifestyle that increasingly focused upon aquatic resources.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Yan Gomez Coutouly for permitting the use of an earlier abbreviated version of this article from North Pacific Archaeology Volume 3. We wish to acknowledge the assistance, encouragement, and support provided by the Institute of History, Archaeology and Ethnology of the Peoples of the Russian Far East and the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in Vladivostok. Specifically, we thank Alexander Krupyanko, Andrei Tabarev, Irina Ponkratova, Alla Garkovik, Igor Sleptsov, Olga Sleptsova, Alexei Kononenko, Alexei Korotky, Vladimir Popov, V. A. Tatarnikov and Nikolai Kluev. Our joint Russian-Japanese-American project was partially supported by Hiroshi Kajiwara and colleagues of the Tohoku Fukushi University, Japan. Academic guidance from Michael Glassow, Michael Jochim and Zanna Andreeva was greatly appreciated. This research received financial support from the Tohoku Fukushi University, the University of California Santa Barbara and the Fulbright Foundation. We appreciate the peer review provided by Ian Buvit.
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Cassidy, J., Kononenko, N.A. (2022). The Origins of Aquatic Lifestyles along the Zerkalnaya and Rudnaya Rivers on the Northern Sea of Japan, Primorye Region, Russian Far East. In: Cassidy, J., Ponkratova, I., Fitzhugh, B. (eds) Maritime Prehistory of Northeast Asia. The Archaeology of Asia-Pacific Navigation, vol 6. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-1118-7_7
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