Keywords

maritime networks, Asia-Pacific region, resource use

Objectives

Modern humans emerged on the African continent. Around 50,000 years ago they spread to Asia and the islands of Oceania. They crossed the oceans repeatedly to trade natural resources or processed goods and via this trade build vast networks. Throughout Asia and Oceania we find evidence of livelihoods based on maritime networks.
The purpose of this research is to explore from the perspective of the history of humanity, the universal and local character of these networks as reflected in material culture and the use of natural resources and their distribution through space and time. From a temporal perspective, we have archeological evidence spanning 50,000 years and ethnographic evidence spanning a century. From a spatial perspective, we will compare evidence from East Asia including Japan, Southeast Asia, and Oceania. The participating researchers will be a cross section of primarily archaeologists and cultural anthropologists. Through the comparative analysis described above, we will construct a model of humanity’s marine ecology that spans Asia and Oceania, with the goal of producing a book tentatively titled The Human History of Maritime Networks.

Research Results

This research project, which spanned three and a half years, resulted in eleven study meetings and a total of 35 presentations. Of the eleven study meetings, two were public meetings. One was held in Ishigaki City, Okinawa Prefecture in November 2013, and the other was organized as a joint conference with the Japan Society for Southeast Asian Archaeology Convention in November 2014 at Sophia University in Tokyo. In these study meetings, members of this research project presented research outcomes and held discussions. Each member was able to present research results at least once and to deepen overall discussions of respective research themes. We also actively organized presentations and discussions with special guest lecturers.
As a result, it became clear that the sea people of Asia and Oceania and their networked societies had unique characteristics. For example, case studies of the seashores of China and Ryukyu, which belong to Maritime East Asia, revealed that the networks of boat dwellers in Guangdong and Fujian Provinces or Itoman fishing people from the Okinawa Island had strong family, clan, or fraternal relationships and solidarity based on their respective burial systems. In contrast, network formation in Maritime Southeast Asia, which is home to many sea people and boat dwellers, including Sama, Bajau, and Moken people, was founded on the goal of obtaining and using maritime resources of high commercial value, and therefore, communities were formed by people of various origins at locations where such resources were concentrated. In other words, their networking principle focused on commerce rather than family, clan, or blood relations, and as a result, high levels of gathering and scattering were observed. In Oceania, no group could be recognized as boat dwellers; however, on the Solomon Islands and the other islands of Melanesia, groups that can be recognized as sea people with high adaptation to maritime life, and the development of exchange networks of specific maritime resources were observed. However, their network formation principle rested more strongly on the reciprocity factor of collective distribution than commercial interest as seen in the Asian region.
During the research, we discussed the background of the differences among these maritime regions in terms of network formation based on archeological data, from the perspective of the longitudinal and anthropo-historical time axis, and noted the possibility that each maritime region's ecological and geographical environment and its physical distance from and relationship with a continental civilization, such as China and India, are important factors. General and detailed discussions of this possibility are our future challenge.