Influence of Environmental Changes on Cultural Events in Manchuria and Primorye During Transition from Bronze to Iron Age

The article discusses how environmental changes associated with directional cooling of the climate and marine regression affected cultural issues in Manchuria and Primorye during the first millennium BC. It was important to analyze how climatic particularities connected with specific stages of cooling affected the subsistence base of advanced farmers inland as well as coastal populations of marine adaptation. The inland farmers were challenged by the weather instability, shortening of the vegetation period, expansion of ponds, bogging, water logging in river valleys, catastrophic alternation of floods and droughts, diminishing subsistence base - all resulted in that excessive mass of population was forced to resettle to maritime zone where the risk of floods or droughts was less unbearable. The maritime groups, in turn, suffered from marine regression that led to landscape transformations and deterioration of customary hunter-fisher subsistence system. The result was depopulation. Phases of cooling and cultural changes correlated in the region. Maritime groups revealed decrease in marine economies along with the depopulation, while agricultural groups experienced an intensified social stratification, became more prone to migrating, began to disperse and form new cultural groups, colonize new lands, and form early states along the Sea of Japan shores. During the time of directional cooling of the climate in the 1 millennium BC the entire East Asia region experienced the shrinkage of agro-climatic resources, not excluding a fertile area occupied by the Bronze Age Xituanshan culture whose economy was basically an advanced farming. Due to competition over resources and probable the pressure from western neighbors the Xituanshan society got more and more stratified, some excessive population migrated in waves north- and southeastwardly. Those waves of migration led to the appearance of a series of related cultures based on advanced agriculture, in some aspects reaching out as far as to the north of Kyushu. The article offers some explanations of the reasons and describes the sequence of peopling the Sea of Japan coastal area by certain archaeological cultures and chronicled tribes.

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