Junko Habu

Because of its large size, many Japanese archaeologists have suggested that the Sannai Maruyama site was occupied throughout the year. However, from the perspective of hunter-gatherer archaeology in North America, this interpretation is not convincing. This is because ethnographic examples of hunter-gatherers from California and the Northwest Coast of North America indicate that large site size itself does not necessarily imply full-year occupation.

Analyses of faunal and floral remains excavated from the site will allow the determination of the seasons during which the settlement was occupied. If the Sannai Maruyama people were fully sedentary, living at the site throughout the year, we would expect to find evidence of balanced subsis-tence activities from all seasons. If they were not fully sedentary (i.e., occupied the site only seasonally), we would expect to only find evidence of restricted, seasonally-specific activities. Analyses of faunal and floral remains are also important in identifying the major food sources used by the people at the site. By identifying the subsistence base of the Sannai Maruyama people, it will be possible to assess whether a particular type of subsistence activity was a causal agent that expedited the development of cultural complexity among hunter-gatherers.

During the summer of 1997, I had an opportunity to conduct an archaeological project at the Sannai Maruyama site with four Berkeley undergraduate students. We spent two and half weeks at the site and collected soil samples. The samples were then water-screened at the site in order to collect faunal and floral remains. These samples are now being analyzed at the Asian Archaeology Laboratory of the University of California at Berkeley. The analysis is conducted in the museum of Natural History in China.

In my opinion, we still have a very incomplete understanding of life for the Sannai Maruyama residents. The large size of the site, as well as the systematic layout of various types of features, stimulate our imagination. However, the tasks of archaeologists are to present the most likely interpretation of the excavated data, and indicate what kind of assumptions they have made before reaching a specific conclusion. In this sense, the interpretation of the Sannai Maruyama site is extremely challenging for archaeologists, including myself.