Beyond “Maritime”: Understanding foodways of the Neolithic coastal dwellers in the Korean Peninsula through the application of organic residue analysis

This study investigates the subsistence and foodways of Neolithic coastal foragers in the in the Korean Peninsula using innovative method of organic chemistry. Throughout the Neolithic period, people occupied islands and coastal regions, creating hundreds of shellmiddens. Since subsistence studies mainly relied on shellmiddens where faunal remains are preserved well, when it comes to the coastal and island settings, Neolithic subsistence practice has been regarded as the ‘maritime hunting-gathering-fishing’. This study tries to obtain new evidence related to prehistoric foodstuffs by directly analyzing potsherds collected from well-known Neolithic coastal and island sites located in the Southern part of the Korean Peninsula with the application of compound specific isotope analysis (CSIA). Our result revealed that the subsistence were more dynamic and varied than is posited by models focused on marine resources.