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Archaeological sites on the coasts of Korea
are often said to have been based on fishing as their means of subsistence.
This paper takes issue with such a description, by considering the variety of
coastal sites that have been excavated and described along the east and south
coasts of the Korean peninsula, from the Late Pleistocene to the Middle
Neolithic. Besides different amounts and kinds of products extracted from the
sea in the different sites, they are also culturally different. Rather than
having an obvious cultural similarity throughout the Korean peninsula, coastal
sites tend to resemble others in close proximity. Cultural zones obviously were
unrelated to current political boundaries, but did group around similar
landscapes and ecologies. This means that the northeastern sites on the Korean
peninsula have much in common with archaeological sites in the Russian Far
East. Farther south, there are both cultural similarities with sites in the
Japanese islands and actual trade wares from Jomon sites. Some of the
variations in coastal sites include the types of fishing equipment (if any),
other tool types, sea resources available, the fauna found in shell middens
(when they exist), and, for the Neolithic, the types of pottery. Fishing was
almost always carried on at coastal sites in the Korean peninsula, and it still
is, as fish is important in the Korean diet. Thus it is wrong to see fishing as
a stage of subsistence. Rather it is, and probably has always been, related to
the particular marine products available. Land resources, both flora and fauna,
were utilized along with fish, shellfish, marine mammals, and seaweed. As more
detail is recorded from Korean coastal sites, it is likely that it will be
possible to have more nuanced understandings of regional subsistence work.
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