| In ethnographic cases fishermen share stranding or captured
whales not only within their own settlement but also with other settlement.
I will discuss to what extent this custom prevailed in early whaling of
Japan. The Mawaki site in Ishikawa Prefecture yielded dolphin remains less
than 285 individuals from the layers of the later Early to Final Jomon-period.
I made an individual identification analysis of dolphin humeri and articulated
vertebras respectively from Stratum IX (the later Early to early Middle
Jomon-period about 5,000 B.P.) in an excavation grid of 6m by 15m. As a
result, I found only few examples in which an individual dolphin is represented
by a pair of humeri: or by more than one vertebral unit that was excavated
separated. Based@on these facts I hypothesized that if a catch was poor
for the numbers of neighboring settlements working together in dolphin
"fishing" or usually with reciprocity, it was impossible for
a settlement to have a share of a whole dolphin, and thus different parts
probably of some usefulness were divided and distributed among the settlements.
This interpretation is supported by the fact that a small number of cetacean
remains were sometimes found in archaeological sites located far from fishing
grounds. From this viewpoint, I make a report of the distribution of the
sites with cetacean remains in Chiba and Miyagi Prefectures, in which shell
middens are concentrated. ( I B I REPORTS, 6:63-72, 1996) |
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