Why was pottery adopted by Late Mesolithic societies in the northwestern parts of Eurasia? This paper investigates new insights and results from recent studies in Finland. In this region, pottery was initially adopted by hunter-gatherer-fisher communities ca. 5300–5100 BCE, which in local terminology marks the beginning of the Neolithic era, even though other aspects of the Neolithic (e.g., agriculture, animal husbandry) were not yet adopted. Though the introduction of pottery in a non-agricultural sphere has recently been the subject of intense discussion, the motives behind mobile hunter-gatherer-fisher communities adopting pottery remain unsubstantiated. The earliest pottery has commonly been thought to have had a highly specialized function, in particular in the processing of aquatic food resources. To test whether the function of the earliest pottery in Finland was linked to subsistence, or diversified beyond economic necessities, we compared the results of pottery lipid analyses with animal osteological records across inland and coastal sites in the Late Mesolithic (ca. 6200–5300 BCE) and Early Neolithic (ca. 5300–3900 BCE). The zooarchaeological evidence, which remained consistent throughout the period studied, shows a versatile use of animal resources. It did not, however, converge with the inferred pottery function. Organic residues analyzed from ceramic cooking ware point to a non-specialized use of pottery that does not track the overall diet or subsistence among Finnish Stone Age cultures. We hence argue that the uptake of pottery in Finland was not a result of change in economies, but that pottery—a new and useful cooking and storage utensil at the time—was taken into household use in various environments and subsistence strategies. The reason why pottery was not in use in some areas and periods of time may thus be sought elsewhere, e.g., among communities with distinct sociocultural and even ethnic backgrounds.

Island chains provide access to terrestrial, coastal and offshore marine resources, attracting peoples and cultures and serving as conduits for migrations and long-distance exchange networks. Situated between Hokkaido and Sakhalin, Rebun Island connected the prehistoric cultures of northeast Asia in a major “marine highway”. Rebun was repeatedly settled by distinct cultures who originated in different geographic locations and left an imprint on the local ecology. To better understand how these cultures adapted to the local island ecosystems, lipid residues from household cooking containers were investigated across a 1000-year period at the Kafukai river mouth on Eastern Rebun, where a prominent Late Holocene settlement cluster is located. Our study suggests periodical shifts in pottery function, with the Susuya focussed on the processing of intermediate trophic-level aquatic resources, and Early Okhotsk specializing towards isotopically enriched marine products. In the Middle Okhotsk phase, both marine and terrestrial animal, and plant resources were exploited. These findings elucidate changing patterns of household consumption and the range of resources processed between cultural periods. We conclude that pottery lipid analysis can play an important role in island archaeology, clarifying shifting relationships between communities, exploitation of resources and the responses of new cultural traditions to new insular ecological niches.

Archaeological radiocarbon dating in coastal northern Hokkaido is challenged by the marine reservoir effect and the scarcity of materials with terrestrial carbon sources. This has contributed to gaps and general uncertainty in the timing of the region's culture-historical periods. The Late Holocene site of Hamanaka 2 on Rebun Island, featuring a stratified shell midden context with excellent preservation of organic remains, provides an ideal setting for addressing this issue. A Bayesian chronological model was deployed to study the timing of the site using a series of radiocarbon-dated macrobotanical samples. This resulted in narrowed-down estimated ageranges in eight of thirteen phases examined, providing the site with a more accurate radiocarbon chronology than before. These temporal data were consequently integrated with local palaeoecological evidence, revealing synchrony between cultural chronology and human-induced landscape transformations. The study demonstrates that the technique should permit more efficient building of archaeological chronologies in similar maritime environments.

In this thesis, organic residues preserved in ancient pottery are used to reconstruct diversity andchange in the foodways of Late Holocene hunter-gatherer communities in coastal northern Hokkaido(1750 BCE–1250 CE). The Late Holocene period of this region is very dynamic, and characterised by numerous migrations and cultural replacements. The research into these processes has generally focused on typological variation in pottery, which is a device each of the period’s different culturesmade widespread use of. This thesis takes a novel approach, and uses pottery residue analysis to investigate long-term patterns of continuity and change in cooking practices, employing the conceptof cuisine to interpret the results. In particular, the Okhotsk Cultures (400–1100 CE) form a central focus of the thesis, and their complex animal cosmology, diverse subsistence and multifaceted household activities offer a rich context in which to examine changing foodways.The primary goal is understanding long-term and “macro-scale” patterns of continuity and change, and this also requires improving existing chronological frameworks, which largely rely on pottery typologies rather than radiocarbon dating. Refining and improving existing chronologies therefore forms the second goal of the thesis. The third goal is to examine foodways at a morecontextual “micro-scale”. This involves studying how pottery use was organised within the domestic space of a single Okhotsk Culture long-house, and how these practices were informed by social relations and the cosmology of human-animal interactions.The present thesis consists of an extended introduction, which sets the research in a wider regional and culture-historical setting, and also presents the main methods, concepts and approaches. The central research question is whether the close association between use of pottery and the processing of aquatic resources, which was established by the Early Holocene, does in fact persist into these Late Holocene cultures. The core of the thesis tackles this question by presenting five journal articles, which focus on the archaeological sites of Hamanaka 2, Kafukai 1 and 2, and Menashidomari. The overall results indicate that this older pattern was starting to break down, and that a range of new and more diverse cooking practices was emerging. The thesis also demonstrates that these important shifts in cuisine can also be tied into much higher-resolution chronological frameworks using new methods and approaches. Finally, the “micro-scale” analysis of containerfunction within a single household suggests that some sort of symbolic distinction was made between different sources of foods.

Hamanaka 2 is a multi-phase coastal site in Rebun Island with a similar to 3000-year occupation sequence extending from the final-stage Jomon and Okhotsk to the Ainu Culture period (1050 BCE-1850 CE). To examine long-term trends in food processing at the site, we collected 66 ceramic sherds across six distinct cultural layers from the Final Jomon to the Late Okhotsk period for lipid residue analysis. Given the site's beachfront location in an open bay, with ready access to abundant maritime resources, we predicted that the pottery would consistently have been used to process aquatic resources throughout all cultural periods. Though aquatic lipids dominated across the site sequence, the history of pottery use at the site proved more complex. Evidence of plant processing was found in all cultural phases, and from the Epi-Jomon/Late Final Jomon transition onwards 30% of the vessels were being used to process mixed dishes that combined both marine and terrestrial resources. By the start of the Okhotsk phase, separate sets of resources were being processed in different pots, suggesting functional differentiation in the use of pottery, and the rise of new kinds of cuisine - including the processing of millet. We tentatively explain these results as a consequence of the growing incorporation of Rebun Island into wider regional trade and interaction networks, which brought new kinds of resources and different social dynamics to Northern Hokkaido in the Late Holocene.

Paleodietary research is a complex field, which requires large sets of background information. Owing to increasing interest and activity in the field, a substantial amount of archaeological isotope baseline data exist for Northern Europe, consisting mainly of animal bone collagen delta C-13, delta N-15, and delta S-34 values. However, the data are scattered into dozens of publications written in multiple languages and less-accessible formats, making the data laborious to use. This article presents the first compilation work of this data, the open access dIANA database (Dietary Isotopic baseline for the Ancient North; https://www.oasisnorth.org/diana.html), aimed to support (paleo)dietary research in the Baltic Sea area. The database work is complemented with new analyses of archaeological and (pre-)modern domestic and wild fauna from Finland and Russia broadening the selection of analysed species in the database. We present and discuss data examples, which on one hand show existing spatiotemporal isotope patterns related to diet and differences in the environmental carbon sources and on the other, also visualize the current status of baseline research and the need for further analyses in the circum-Baltic area.