Abstract

The talk will review what has been done so far and discuss future work still to be done for my PhD. This project applies the stable isotope method to archaeological sites in western Japan in order to investigate if and how diet changed over the Jomon-Yayoi transition in the area where it first occurred. Dietary reconstructions using stable isotope analyses have proven to be useful in archaeology as they provide direct evidence of food consumption. Furthermore, by combining the isotopic data with archaeological data, we can enrich our understanding of human-environment and human-human interactions at sites. In addition to looking at how diet changed, the analyses of Jomon and Yayoi sites will be used to look at how society changed. Investigations of social change and social stratification as related to food consumption in prehistoric Japan have not widely occurred and this will provide a new avenue by which to explore current definitions of “Yayoi”.