Jeulmun Pottery Period
| Jeulmun pottery period | |
| Hangul | |
|---|---|
| Hanja | |
| Revised Romanization | Jeulmun togi sidae |
| McCune–Reischauer | Chŭlmun t'ogi sidae |
The Jeulmun Pottery Period is an archaeological era in Korean prehistory broadly spanning the period of 8000–1500 BC. This period subsumes the Mesolithic and Neolithic cultural stages in Korea, lasting ca. 8000–3500 BC ("Incipient" to "Early" phases) and 3500–1500 BC ("Middle" and "Late" phases), respectively. Because of the early presence of pottery, the entire period has also been subsumed under a broad label of "Korean Neolithic".
The Jeulmun pottery period is named after the decorated pottery vessels that form a large part of the pottery assemblage consistently over the above period, especially 4000-2000 BC. Jeulmun (Hangul: 즐문, Hanja: 櫛文) means "Comb-patterned". A boom in the archaeological excavations of Jeulmun Period sites since the mid-1990s has increased knowledge about this important formative period in the prehistory of East Asia.
The Jeulmun was a period of hunting, gathering, and small-scale cultivation of plants. Archaeologists sometimes refer to this life-style pattern as "broad-spectrum hunting-and-gathering".
The origins of the Jeulmun are not well known, but raised-clay pattern Yunggimun pottery (Hangul: 융기문토기; Hanja: 隆起文土器) appear at southern sites such as Gosan-ni in Jeju-do Island and Ubong-ni on the seacoast in Ulsan. Some archaeologists describe this range of time as the "Incipient Jeulmun period" and suggest that the Gosan-ni pottery dates to 10,000 BP. Samples of the pottery were radiocarbon dated, and although one result is consistent with the argument that pottery emerged at very early date (i.e. 10,180±65 BP [AA-38105]), other dates are somewhat later. If the earlier dating holds true, Yunggimun pottery from Gosan-ni would be, along with central and southern China, the Japanese Archipelago, and the Russian Far East, among a group of the oldest known pottery in world prehistory. Kuzmin suggests that more absolute dating is needed to gain a better perspective on this notion.
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