Archaeobotany of an Ainu Kotan: from Ethnographic Trope to Empirical Data

Anthropology Lunch Talk with Emanuele Guglielmini — October 21st at 12 noon in Rm 261, Social Sciences 1.

About the talk:. Located at the northern edge of the Japanese archipelago, the island of Hokkaido is often framed as the country’s untouched natural frontier. Its Indigenous inhabitants, the Ainu people, have long been a source of fascination in Western anthropological discourse, in large part due to their distinct way of living that, at the onset of Japanese imperialist expansion, set them apart from the mainland Japanese. Despite decades of research on Ainu ethnography and history in Japan and in the West, the image of the Ainu as a primitive, non-agrarian society has solidified into scientific truth — they are one of several textbook examples of complex hunter-gatherers.

This talk takes an opposite stance to the characterization of Ainu subsistence, rooted in a growing body of archaeobotanical evidence that tells a different story, centered on farming and intentional ecosystem engineering. Recently acquired data, in the form of macrobotanical remains from a kotan, an Ainu village (ca. 1600–1800 CE), are presented and their ecological significance
discussed. The case study offers an example of the value of plants in archaeological scholarship, while also delving into the difficulties associated with identifying species from a fragmentary record.

About the speaker: Emanuele Guglielmini is a doctoral candidate in archaeology at the University of California, Berkeley’s Anthropology department. Trained in archaeobotany and plant science, he investigates the subsistence history of the Ainu, the Indigenous people of northern Japan. His dissertation focuses on the study of macrobotanical remains, wood charcoal and seeds, from the sites of Karinba and Karinba-1 in central Hokkaido. One of the central questions he explores at these sites is the relationship between human subsistence and external social and environmental disturbances, including climate, demography, and the pressures of settler colonialism. His work has been generously supported by the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Japanese Studies, Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the United States National Science Foundation. At Berkeley, he enjoys teaching archaeobotany to undergraduates alongside conducting his research. He is expected to complete his PhD in the spring of 2027.