Let’s do it ALL: Agriculture, Land and Language in Kofun Japan
Our ALL project examines changing patterns of agriculture and land use in the Japanese Islands and their links to population and language dispersals during the Kofun period of early state formation (250-710 CE). Many earlier historians argued that the rise of the Kofun state can be explained primarily by the high productivity of rice farming. However, recent research has complicated this narrative with evidence for demographic instability and reliance on non-cereal crops during a time of colder climate overlapping with the Late Antique Little Ice Age. Decentralised social complexity in the Japanese archipelago led not only to internal revolts, such as the Iwai War in Kyushu in 527-28, but also to Japanese raids on the Korean peninsula.
A few years ago our group set up a collaborative project with the late Dutch linguist Elisabeth de Boer, identifying dialect dispersals in ancient Japan. However, due to her unexpected death the project was interrupted in the stage of data collection. Building on de Boer’s ideas, we would like to restart the project exploring how these climatic, economic and demographic factors impacted language and dialect dispersals in ancient Japan. Some of the main questions to be investigated include: Can the rise of social complexity and the state in Kofun Japan be explained primarily by land use centred on wet rice farming? Was the spread of the Japanese language driven from areas of high agricultural productivity or by other, decentralised economic processes such as trade and raiding? What was the role of urbanisation in language shift and dispersals? What was the role of non-rice crops such as wheat and barley in the Kofun economy?
The project also considers the relationship between ‘Anthropocene deathscapes’ and languages of power. Although the Anthropocene is generally understood to reflect an expansion in human production systems, from at least the Bronze Age there was an acceleration in landscapes of burial and remembrance that served to communicate information about social power but which exploited rather than generated economic production. Using the example of Kofun Japan, we consider how such deathscapes interacted with other land-use patterns such as settlements, fields and sites of craft production.
