The search for ancestral roots is common to the historical archaeologies practiced in Korea and Japan where each population views itself as racially homogeneous. Questions of archaeological interest include where the Korean and Japanese ‘peoples’ came from (a question that has led to the sponsoring of archaeological work in Mongolia, Central Asia, and in Northwestern China along the Silk Roads); how their unique cultural practices came into being; and the formation of the states that they consider ancestral to their present-day nations. While they have disagreed on the direction and timing of cultural transmission and influence between the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese Archipelago, they share a common striving to better understand their pasts by using archaeology to invalidate the layers of foreign interpretation imposed through their earliest recording in Chinese histories, and in Korea’s case, Japanese colonial-period interpretations.
The deep time depth of Paleolithic remains in China precludes concern over where Chinese ancestors came from, but archaeology’s early twentieth-century discoveries ensured the discipline’s historical approach. Lothar von Falkenhausen has called archaeology in China ‘‘a handmaiden to history’’, and much effort is spent on locating and investigating the remains of historically documented locations, events, and people (see Historical Archaeology: As a Discipline; Methods).
The historical archaeology of all three nation-states shares one common characteristic: wHile its use to investigate the distant historical past is now recognized and its discoveries of previously unknown texts have revolutionized understandings of these early periods, textual approaches are still the preferred avenue for study of the later historical periods. In the search for earlier deposits, historical remains from more recent periods are commonly stripped from archaeological sites without thorough examination, except where finds are spectacular in nature. Because of their perceived ubiquity, remains of the recent past will be endangered in the future.
World History
