Across the Seas in Prehistoric Northeast Asia Obsidian as a Commodity for the Study of Human Migrations

This book provides the current knowledge on prehistoric human contacts and migrations in Northeast Asia (consisting of far eastern Russia, Northeastern Siberia, Korea, Northeast China, and Japan), using obsidian as a commodity. The aim of this book is to reconstruct the patterns of prehistoric exchange and human movements in the Upper Palaeolithic and Neolithic of Northeast Asia.

The proposed book is the first comprehensive summary of obsidian provenance and issues related to prehistoric human contacts/migrations and early seafaring in Northeast Asia. The particular importance of this book is that obsidian is used as a commodity to establish the movements of ancient people that is almost impossible to do using traditional archaeological approaches. The book contains updated information on the vast region with a multitude of obsidian sources and artefacts, based on the author’s first-hand knowledge generated in the last 30+ years. It makes this book a unique source of information derived from Russian, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese publications (as well as English summaries) for comparison between different parts of Northeast Asia.

Obsidian as a Commodity for Studying Prehistoric Migrations, Contacts, and Exchange.- Current Methods of Obsidian Provenance and Exchange Studies.- Basic Information on Prehistoric Cultural Complexes in Northeast Asia.- Obsidian Sourcing in the Southern Russian Far East.- Obsidian Sourcing in Korea and Northeast China.

Yaroslav V. Kuzmin is Russian Geoarchaeologist and Professor from the Sobolev Institute of Geology and Mineralogy, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Prof. Kuzmin’s research interests are paleogeography, obsidian provenance, and paleodiet. He has published widely in both Russian and English over the past decades in the Stone Age cultural complexes in Northeast Asia.