Save the date! Friday, May 18th, Dr. Li Liu of Stanford University will be giving a talk at the Museum of Natural and Cultural History on the UO campus, to discuss her recent research on beer brewing in late Neolithic China. Attempting to recreate a recipe from traces of beer found in archaeological sites, Liu and her students have brewed their own version of this ancient beverage. For a brief introduction to this work, you can check out Liu’s interview with NPR.
Details to come!
In a talk entitled “Jeju, Island of Change and Challenges: Cultural Niche Construction of the Holocene Islanders in Southern Korea,” Dr. Lee presented the recent findings of her fieldwork on Jeju as part of the Stanford Archaeology Center’s workshop series. This was a great opportunity to share preliminary results on the subsistence practices of the Neolithic people of Jeju with the archaeological community at Stanford University.
At the 83rd Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Washington DC last week, Rory Walsh served as co-chair and discussant for a session entitled “Geochemistry and Identity,” along with Dr. Camilla Sturm of NYU. The session was a lightning round, a new format where a panel of scholars gives 3-minute presentations followed by a discussion. Panelists included Dean Arnold, Margaret Beck, Ronald Bishop, Pamela Vandiver, Kostalena Michelaki, Jeffrey Ferguson, John Alden, Heather Walder, Andrew Womack, and UO assistant professor Alison Carter.
The presentations and discussion covered a range of methods and materials for the application of geochemical data to archaeological questions on the social and cultural identity of people in the past. Topics included finding explanations for choices made by craftspeople, managing different kinds of data, and the use of experimentation and ethnography to assist in archaeological interpretation.
Project team member Hyunsoo Lee spent a week at Boston University working with Dr. John (Mac) Marston of the Department of Archaeology to learn about wood anatomy and charcoal identification in the Environmental Archaeology Lab’s annual workshop. Hyunsoo Lee’s research on sites in Northeast China includes analysis of flotation samples that have proven to be rich in charcoal. This training will allow him to bring new perspective to his studies of human-environment interaction in the Neolithic cultures of this region.
Rory Walsh has successfully defended her dissertation, entitled “Ceramic Specialization and Exchange in Complex Societies: A Compositional Analysis of Pottery from Mahan and Baekje.” Her doctoral committee included Gyoung-Ah Lee, Madonna Moss and Stephen Dueppen from the Department of Anthropology, and Jeff Hanes from History.
Dr. Walsh will be continuing her work as part of the KSPS Laboratory in her new role as Postdoctoral Research Associate this coming academic year. She will be expanding her research to new sites, writing journal articles, and working on publishing her dissertation as a monograph.
Our team is in Jeju Island working with the Jeju Archaeological Research Institute to conduct further fieldwork on our project on the origins of the island’s Neolithic culture. We are gathering shell and soil samples, taking aerial photography of important coastal sites, and conducting survey to look for new sites. It is always pleasure to be here in Jeju, and we are excited to make new discoveries with our colleagues this summer!
Hyunsoo Lee (UO), Guentae Park (JARI), and Habeom Kim (UO) in Jeju for fieldwork
Hyunsoo Lee examining the area near a coastal site, with one of Jeju’s familiar basalt walls in view
Part of our continuing work on Jeju Island is gathering data on paleoclimate, the fluctuations in temperature and sea level that affected past populations. One key way to do this is to gather modern and archaeological shellfish specimens and track the changing ratios of carbon and oxygen isotopes, which change in different climatic conditions. We have been collecting samples from shell midden sites, sedimentary deposits, and shallow ocean waters to build a robust database from which to draw conclusions on Jeju’s ancient climate.
Park Guntae of the Jeju Archaeological Research Institute takes shellfish samples from the coast of one of Jeju’s outlying islands
Habeom Kim drills precise sections of marine shells for comparative sampling
Dr. Lee and Rory Walsh were invited by the Center for Korean Studies at UC Berkeley to participate in the conference “Interdisciplinary Approaches to Early Korea,” held in late April. Dr. Lee served as a discussant for the session “Identity in Liminal Spaces,” featuring the research of Rachel Lee, Martin Bale, and Jack Davey. Rory Walsh presented her research on ceramic chemical composition at the sites of Pungnap-toseong and Gwangju Balsan, exploring similarities in Mahan and Baekje political economies.
The conference was extremely successful, providing the opportunity for many US-based scholars of early Korea to address changing understandings of the archaeological societies we study. Plans are in place to publish the gathered papers as a special issue of a journal.
Dr. Lee chaired a symposium at the 2017 Society for American Archaeology Annual Meeting entitled “Island Archaeology in East Asian Perspectives.” Scholars working in island and coastal settings in Korea and Japan came together to discuss common themes and new findings in their research. Two project team members from the Jeju Archaeological Institute were able to join the panel: Research Director Chang-Hwa Kang and Chief Archaeologist Geuntae Park.
Other team members presenting included Dr. Lee herself, Sangtaek Lim, Christopher Bone, Seunggi Kwak, Rory Walsh, Habeom Kim, and Hyunsoo Lee. We were joined by Kaishi Yamagiwa, Gary Crawford, and Hiroto Takamiya.
Rory Walsh’s paper “Experiments on the effects of charring on Setaria italica (foxtail millet)” has been published online in Vegetation History and Archaeobotany. This article identifies morphological trends in archaeological millet seeds and replicates them with experimental charring conditions. It can be viewed now on VHAA’s website, and will be included in an upcoming print issue.