| Professor Junko Habu has joined the Department of Anthropology with
the 1996-97 academic year, and we are delighted to expand our teaching and research
program to now include her expertise in the archaeology of East Asia. Junko recently
received her PhD from the Department of Anthropology at McGill University. The
dissertation -entitled "Subsistence-Settlement Systems and Intersite Variability in
the Moroiso Phase of the Early Jomon Period in Japan" -was awarded the prize for the
most outstanding dissertation in the Social Sciences at McGill. Junko had previously
earned her MA degree from Keio University with a thesis that was a stylistic attribute
analysis of Jomon pottery. Her BA in archaeology was also from Keoi University, Department
of Ethnology and Archaeology. Junko's primary
research and teaching interests focus on understanding subsistence and settlement systems
of hunting-gathering peoples, the archaeology of East Asia, the relations of archaeology
and society, and ceramic analysis. She has published more than 15 scholarly papers and
reports in Japanese journals and edited volumes. As well, she has an article on her
research into the issue of sedentism among the Early Jomon Moroiso phase in a recent
[1996, volume 33 (2) ] issue of Arctic Anthropology; a co-authored chapter on
"Education and archaeology in Japan" (with C. Fawcett) in The Excluded Past:
Archaeology in Education (1990), edited by P. Stone and R. Mackenzie; and a provocative
piece on "Contemporary Japanese archaeology and society " in the 1989 volume 8
(1) of the Archaeological Review from Cambridge. Junko is currently embarking on
collaborative research in Japan at one of the most popular and amazing archaeological
sites in Japan, the Sannai Maruyma site. This site is located in northern Honshu and
was occupied from the Early to Middle Jomon period, (c. 5500-4000 BP), and a planned
baseball stadium has been halted and re-located in order to preserve the site and to allow
excavations. Parts of the site offer extraordinary preservational contexts, and among the
remains noted so far are postholes of houses and longhouses, adult graves and children's
burial jars, as well as plant and animal remains. Watch for more news about this exciting
research !! This year Junko has pioneered a course here at Berkeley on the archaeology of
East Asia which she will offer again in the Fall 1997 at both the graduate and
undergraduate levels, and she is also teaching a graduate seminar this spring on the
archaeology of complex hunter-gatherers. We are delighted to welcome such a hard-working,
innovative and delightful colleague to Berkeley. |
