Hazards, Impacts, and Resilience among Hunter-Gatherers of the Kuril Islands

Ben Fitzhugh

ARCHAEOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO CATASTROPHIC EVENTS IN THE HUNTER-GATHERER CONTEXT

This chapter explores hunter-gatherer vulnerability in the context of relative isolation and a highly dynamic natural environment. The setting is the Kuril Islands of the Northwest Pacific, and the data set is a 4,000year record of human settlement and environmental history generated by the Kuril Biocomplexity Project, a large, interdisciplinary, and international research effort fielded from 2006 to 2008. The presupposition entering this project was that this relatively isolated, volcanic, earthquake- and tsunami-prone subarctic region should be among the more difficult habitats for hunter-gatherer populations to occupy consistently and, as a result, that the archaeological record should reflect periodic abandonments, at least in the most isolated (and smallest) central islands. The results of this study speak less to this heuristic presupposition than to the idea of resilience in the face of ecological impoverishment, catastrophic events, and climate changes. The history we are uncovering highlights the importance of linked social, economic, and demographic processes in conditioning vulnerability and shaping people's resilience in the environment.

Hazards and disasters are the focus of increasing interest in natural and social science, stimulated by growing media attention to disasters around the world. Calls for improved prediction of catastrophic events have generated enhanced support for retrospective studies of historical pattern and periodicity in earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, floods, drought, climate change, and other natural hazards. Social science has entered this arena to better understand human responses to hazardous events and environmental change, most recently calling for more integrated research into the socio-natural dynamics of disasters (Blaikie et al. 1994; Oliver-Smith 1996;Oliver-Smith and Hoffman 2002; Sidle et al. 2004; Torrence and Grattan 2002). This latest turn recognizes that disasters are complex outcomes of linked social and environmental processes and that these histories often condition the severity of impacts on humans in the aftermath of extreme events.

Efforts to understand the socio-environmental dynamics of disasters have tended to focus on agricultural and industrial societies (but see Saltonstall and Carver 2002; Sheets 1999). From a comparative archaeological study of socioecological responses to explosive volcanic eruptions in Mesoamerica, Payson Sheets (1999) suggests that the impacts of such catastrophic events will scale with the degree of organizational complexity and investment in "built environment." He argues that small-scale egalitarian societies, at least in Central America, had the most organizational resilience. If Sheets is correct in this conclusion, we should expect to see similar degrees of resilience in other contexts in which small-scale societies were exposed to catastrophic events. The Kuril Islands offer another case for investigating the resilience of such societies.

THE KURIL ISLANDS

The Kuril Islands provide a semi-controlled setting for investigating the historical impacts of volcanism, tsunamis, and climate change on maritime hunter-gatherers over the past 4,000 years. As a group of ecologically simple and geographically small volcanic islands stretched across 1,100 km of stormy, subarctic ocean, these islands would seem to epitomize an extremely vulnerable environment for human settlement. The relative isolation of the central Kurils may explain why they were left unoccupied until roughly 4,000 years ago, a barrier rather than a bridge between the Japanese archipelago and Kamchatka (figure 1.1).

In biogeographical terms, the Kuril Islands are "stepping stone islands" between Hokkaido and the Kamchatka Peninsula — serving as both potential conduit and filter for the movement of plants, animals, and people between these larger landmasses. The islands serve largely as a filter to the expansion of land-based plant and animal taxa limited in their ability to disperse across wide channels with fast marine currents. As a result, the islands from Iturup northeast to Onekotan have relatively low terrestrial biodiversity and are dominated by tundra meadow and alpine ecosystems and a few terrestrial mammals uncharacteristically good at colonizing new lands, such as fox and vole. Birds, by contrast, are abundant and diverse in the absence of most predators, and the Kurils support dozens of species of resident seabirds and migratory waterfowl (Hacker 1951). Marine mammals are also well represented today around the shores and near-shore waters of many of the Kuril Islands. Sea lions, fur seals, and harbor seals are the most common species today, especially in the central islands, where they haul out in large numbers and raise pups in the summer. Sea otters are abundant in some areas — especially around the northern and southern islands — while absent in others. Their distribution seems to reflect the ecological differences in shellfish and fish productivity and diversity, which are also highest in the northern and southern ends of the chain compared to the center. The resulting ecological picture is one of higher taxonomic diversity in both terrestrial and marine resources in the southernmost and northernmost islands, which are also the largest and closest to "mainland" sources. The central islands — especially those from the Chirpoi Islands to Onekotan — have low biodiversity, and hunter-gatherers targeted marine mammals, birds (and their eggs), and limited varieties of fish. Archaeological evidence is consistent with a picture of reduced diversity in diets and more limited subsistence options in the central zone compared to the others (Fitzhugh et al. 2004).

The Kuril Biocomplexity Project (KBP) was designed to study the integrated history of humans, flora, fauna, geology, oceanography, and climate as part of a single, coordinated, interdisciplinary research effort. Following preliminary work in 1999 and 2000 (Fitzhugh et al. 2002;Pietsch et al. 2003), KBP started fieldwork in the summer of 2006 with an interdisciplinary team drawn from the United States, Russia, and Japan. The three summers from 2006 to 2008 were spent locating, mapping, and testing archaeological sites; sampling volcanic ash deposits, lake water, and rocks; studying coastal stratigraphy for tsunami deposits; measuring wave run-up elevations from recent and older tsunami deposits; coring lakes and peat bogs for pollens and other climate and ecosystem proxies; and studying modern crustal motion to better understand the dynamics of Kuril seismicity. In the process KBP identified and tested 70 archaeological sites from Kunashir to the Shumshu Islands. Resulting data include site and landscape maps; radiocarbon dates (286 archaeological dates and 17 purely geological dates, all by the AMS method); stone, pottery, and bone artifacts; stratigraphic descriptions of archaeological and geological sediments; physical and geochemical analyses of volcanic ash samples; lake cores from the north, central, and southern islands; and stratigraphically sequenced peat samples from almost every island. Project teams are working from these data to conclusions and combining forces to better understand the integrated Late Holocene history of the Kurils. It is in the context of this emerging synthesis that we seek to draw preliminary conclusions about the hazards affecting human settlement and lifestyle in the Kurils.

KURIL ISLAND ARCHAEOLOGICAL HISTORY

The oldest dated archaeological site in the Kurils is located in central Iturup Island and dated to about 8,000 years ago (ca. 6000 BC) (Vasilevsky and Shubina 2006;Yanshina and Kuzmin 2010; Zaitseva et. al 1993). It was occupied by a culture known as the Early Jomon. This one dated site and surface finds of Early and Middle Jomon pottery indicate the presence of people in the southern Kurils (closest to Hokkaido) during the Middle Holocene (ca. 6000 to 2500 BC). The next oldest radiocarbon dates, also from southern islands, begin to appear around 2500 BC and correlate with apparent stabilization of the local climate and vegetation (Anderson et al. 2009).

Between 1900 and 1400 BC we start to see evidence for settlement on many of the central and northern islands. This expansion conceivably relates to the spread of a more effective seafaring technology into the Japanese archipelago that would have facilitated greater movement into the Kurils, as it apparently did in the previous millennium in Island Southeast Asia (Oppenheimer and Richards 2001). In this very early phase of Kuril occupation, it is possible that people from southern Kamchatka might have colonized the northernmost islands of Shumshu and Paramushir. In general, however, all diagnostic cultural traits (predominantly decorated pottery) in this time and during the rest of history suggest southern origins, either starting in or passing through Hokkaido to get to the Kurils.

Our radiocarbon database indicates an abrupt jump in Kuril occupation beginning around 500 BC. This surge represents the leading edge of almost 1,500 years of more or less continuous settlement during the Epi-Jomon period, with substantial pit-house villages established on many of the Kuril Islands. The Epi-Jomon were a maritime-oriented hunting and fishing people who lived in the Kurils in small pit houses roughly 3–5 m in diameter and left behind cord-marked pottery, a variety of stone tools, and — in rare, well-preserved deposits — distinctive bone and wood artifacts, including barbed and toggling harpoon heads. The Epi-Jomon represent the continuity of Jomon hunting-and-gathering lifeways in Hokkaido and the Kurils at a time when Yayoi rice farmers had assimilated and displaced Jomon lifestyles in more southerly Japan (Habu 2004; Hudson 1999; Imamura 1996).

In the mid-first millennium AD a new culture, known as the Okhotsk, swept the southern shores of the Okhotsk Sea from origins in the Lower Amur, Sakhalin Island, or both (Amano 1979; Ono 2008). The Okhotsk culture colonized the Kurils sometime around AD 800, more or less replacing a waning Epi-Jomon population. From about AD 800 to 1300 the Okhotsk dominated the Kurils from south to north. They used distinctive thick-walled pottery, lived in larger oval to pentagonal houses ranging from 5 to 15 m in diameter, and pursued a range of game, from fish and shellfish to birds and sea mammals. During this interval, southern and central Hokkaido supported a culture known as Satsumon, derived from the assimilation of Hokkaido Epi-Jomon and immigrants from northern Honshu bearing a mixed hunting-gatheringand millet farming subsistence economy (Crawford 1992, 2008; Crawford and Takamiya 1990).

Curiously, archaeological evidence of human settlement in the Kurils disappears around AD 1300–1400, at least for 200 years or so. This gap in evidence for Kuril occupation corresponds to the emergence of cultural traditions recognized as precursors of modern Ainu ethnic culture. In Hokkaido the emergence of the Ainu is characterized by complete abandonment of pit-house dwellings and pottery in favor of aboveground structures and imported iron and lacquer containers. In the Kurils and southern Kamchatka, however, archaeologically identified Ainu material culture includes the continued use of pit houses and the construction of "Naiji" pottery with internal lug handles reminiscent of the iron pots in use to the south.

According to the ethno-historic records beginning at the start of the eighteenth century, the Kuril Ainu ("Kuriles" or "Koushi") lived throughout the northern, central, and southern Kuril Islands. They spoke distinctly northern and southern dialects of the Ainu language, different from those spoken in Hokkaido and southern Sakhalin. The Ainu suffix "-kotan" means village, suggesting that the islands of Onekotan, Kharimkotan, Shiashkotan, and Chirinkotan maintained Ainu villages. Stepan Krasheninnikov (1972) reports that the northern Kuril Ainu lived from Simushir to Shumshu and that the Simushir occupants traveled seasonally to Chirpoi Island to hunt birds and trade with southern Kuril Ainu coming from Urup. On Kunashir and Iturup, Igor Samarin and Olga Shubina (2007) have documented a number of chasi, or fortifications, they attribute to Ainu populations. The ethno-historical data therefore strongly suggest that Ainu lived in the Kurils prior to initial Russian contact in the early eighteenth century, while the archaeological evidence suggests they may not have been there more than a century earlier. Whatever the resolution of this discrepancy, we can clearly say that the Ainu did not maintain the substantial settlements in the Kurils (especially the central Kurils) that the earlier Epi-Jomon and Okhotsk settlers did. Something changed fundamentally in the nature of the human-environmental relationship at this time.

After contact with agents of expanding Russian and Japanese states, Kuril Ainu populations dwindled until the remaining residents were forcibly resettled on Shikotan Island in the Lesser Kurils in 1883. At the end of World War II the conquering Soviets sent the few surviving Kuril Ainu to Hokkaido, where it is believed the last member died in 1960 (Kaoru Tezuka, personal communication 2006). The rapidity of this depopulation in absence of evidence of significant genocide suggests fairly low population levels prior to contact.

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century occupation increasingly came to include Russian and Japanese outposts. These outposts were initially established to take advantage of the lucrative hunt for sea otter and fur seal pelts, but in the twentieth century they served the dual purposes of geopolitical military competition and commercial fisheries. Three towns are currently located in the islands on Kunashir, Iturup, and Paramushir. Remote military bases and outposts strung throughout the Kurils, many initially established by the Japanese combatants in World War II, were occupied by Soviet/Russian military personnel until the late 1990s. The end of the Cold War and the economic collapse of the Russian Federation led to the abandonment of most such outposts. Today, only three of four people live regularly between Urup Island and Onekotan (personal observation 2006–2008).

In summary, archaeological evidence shows that the Kurils were more or less continuously and substantially occupied from approximately 3,000 years ago until about 800 years ago. They were used by what appears to have been a much more limited population since that time. It is likely that the human population was concentrated in the northern and southern ends of the islands for the past 800 years, as it is currently. Hence the central islands once again represent a geographical gap in human settlement, as they appear to have done prior to 1900 BC.

KEY HAZARDS, PAST IMPACTS, AND HUMAN RESPONSES

Geologically, the Kurils are the product of the tectonic collision of oceanic and continental plates at the Kuril-Kamchatka subduction zone. This ongoing process causes relatively frequent volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tsunamis that make life challenging for island residents. In addition, the islands are beset by fog much of the year, subject to dramatic storms, and variably packed with winter sea ice. Changes in climate have implications for the frequency of storms and the productivity of the marine ecosystem. Combined with relative isolation, these conditions make the Kurils hazardous for human occupation, especially when population density was low and social networks harder to maintain between isolated settlements (Fitzhugh, Phillips, and Gjesfjeld 2011). All of these factors make the Kurils (especially the remote and small central ones) seem as though they would be very risky places for anyone to live, especially hunter-gatherers depending on relatively unproductive ecosystems.

Hazard 1: Volcanic Eruptions

There are currently thirty-two known active volcanoes that have erupted at least once in the past 300 years, twenty of them since the end of World War II. While most eruptions are small and disrupt only a limited part of an island, some do produce extensive landslides and pyroclastic flows (slurries of superheated rocks, mud, and other debris) that affect the nearby landscape and ecology. Volcanic ash deposits have less dramatic impacts but can be accompanied by hot and lethal gases that affect organisms living close to an erupting volcano. Ash can then extend great distances, sometimes visibly layering the ground for tens of kilometers away from the eruption. Some ash deposits can be traced for more than 1,000 km through the Kuril chain as a result of favorable wind direction and sufficient volume of ejected matter. Ash can be mixed with toxic gases, and the sediment itself can be dangerous to inhale in large amounts. With sufficient deposition, volcanic ash will smother out plant growth and delay the return of vegetation cover until the ash itself has weathered into a viable soil (Griggs 1918).