In his foreword to Maritime Prehistory of Northeast Asia, William W. Fitzhugh writes that this volume “begins to redress the terrestrial bias that has obscured the maritime history of Far East and Northeast Asian prehistory” (p. v). Aside from the two research “hotspots” of Japan and the Bering Strait region, the prehistory of maritime Northeast Asia has been slow to receive the attention that it warrants. One of the catalysts for the latter—and this book—is the growing focus on the North Pacific coastal rim among archaeologists in both Asia and North America as a migration route between the two continents. The role of Northeast Asian maritime peoples in the settlement of the Americas is a complementary theme of the book.
The edited volume contains a set of 13 chapters on the archaeology of the Northeast Asian maritime region by an international collection of scholars, with an introduction by Jim Cassidy and double concluding chapters by Ben Fitzhugh. The focus of the introductory chapter is the evidence for early watercraft use in Northeast Asia, which extends back to the early Upper Paleolithic, and its implications for ancient population movements.
The chapters that follow are grouped into sections devoted to Korea and Japan, the inland seas of Japan/Korea and Okhotsk, and Kamchatka and Chukotka. They vary with respect to scope and focus, as well as the quantity and quality of illustration. Jangsuk Kim and Chuntaek Seong provide an overview of the maritime prehistory of Korea, most of which concerns maritime adaptations of the mid and late Holocene. Fumiko Ikawa-Smith's chapter on Japan is entirely focused on the Pleistocene and the Paleolithic, including discussion of the critically important evidence for marine watercraft before 30,000 years ago, based on the distribution of obsidian from Kozu Island. A chapter by Masahiro Fukuda and others summarizes the archaeology and human paleoecology of Hokkaido during the Upper Paleolithic and early post-Paleolithic periods. The section concludes with an overview—based on both archaeological and historical data—of the evolution of Japanese fisheries from its Upper Paleolithic beginnings to the present day by Mark J. Hudson.
The chapters on the inland seas of Japan/Korea and Okhotsk describe the emergence of maritime economies in the Russian Far East, Sakhalin, Hokkaido, and the Kurile Islands. They also vary in scope, focus, and illustration. Alexander Vasilevski and Vyacheslav Grishchenko provide a summary of the Paleolithic and Neolithic records for Sakhalin, Hokkaido, and the Kuriles (most of which were joined together with the Asian mainland until after 12,000 years ago); based on current evidence, a maritime economy developed here at the end of the Pleistocene. By contrast, the three chapters that follow focus on post-Pleistocene marine adaptations in specific areas of southern Primorye (Russian Far East): the Zerkalnaya and Rudnaya Rivers (Cassidy and Nina A. Kononenko) and Peter the Great Bay (both Yuri E. Vostretsov and Alexander N. Popov et al.). The final chapter in this section (Evgeniya Gelman) describes seafaring in the historic Bohai State (AD 698–926), which occupied a large area on the Sea of Japan (now within the conjoined boundaries of Russia, China, and North Korea) and is largely unknown to English-speaking audiences.
The age and morphometrics of the stemmed points from the Ushki sites on Kamchatka are an important part of the discussion about links between the Northeast Asian maritime region and the early settlement of the Americas. These points (radiocarbon dated at ~13,300–12,580 cal BP) were initially discovered by the late N. N. Dikov, who used them to make the case for a coastal migration from Northeast Asia to North America in the 1970s. The research has been continued by Irina Ponkratova, who is the lead author for a chapter devoted to technological comparisons between the Ushki points and similar points from western North America, and author of a separate chapter on Paleolithic and post-Paleolithic movements on Kamchatka. This section also contains chapters on the emergence of a maritime economy in eastern Chukotka during the early and middle Holocene (Sergey V. Gusev) and an overview of early pottery traditions in Northeast Asia (Peter Jordan et al.).
The double concluding chapters by Ben Fitzhugh discuss the issue of maritime adaptation in southern Beringia and present an overview of the maritime prehistory of Northeast Asia, respectively. These chapters provide cogent syntheses of the two principal themes of the book and draw together a rather eclectic set of individual articles. Despite the latter, the book is a major contribution to the prehistory of the Northeast Asian maritime region—especially for English-speaking audiences—and is recommended with enthusiasm.
