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A Review of Coral Studies of the Ryukyu Island Arc to Reconstruct Its Long-Term Landscape History

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Coral Reef Science

Part of the book series: Coral Reefs of the World ((CORW,volume 5))

Abstract

Coral studies of the Ryukyu Island Arc have resulted in the accumulation of a vast knowledge quite relevant to a future reconstruction or interpretation of its landscape history, i.e., the process of viewing a present landscape as a historical artifact contingently and cumulatively changed through interactions between two types of agents, natural and human. For the geohistory of the late Miocene to the late Holocene, in particular, I review three topics: insularization of the Ryukyu Arc, coral growth during the last glacial maximum, and the formation of a coral reef environment in the middle Holocene. The latter two topics are considered in connection with archaeological and anthropological evidence of late Pleistocene and Holocene human settlement and subsistence. The latest phase after the middle Holocene, however, appears to still not be fully examined in geohistorical coral studies; thus, I briefly describe my geoarchaeological surveys of the shallow sea and alluvial land in the Nagura region of Ishigaki Island, the future examination of which will make us aware of the difficulty of simply determining anthropogenic changes as either environmental degradation or landscape enhancement.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Conventionally, the prehistory of Ishigaki Island in the Holocene has been divided into two cultural phases in accordance with archaeological assemblages, along with a cultural blank between these phases: the Shimotabaru (the earlier phase) and the Mudoki (the later phase).

  2. 2.

    A coral skeletal core was bored in a colony of dead Porites and dated at ca. 1200 cal. BP, which has a time window of 10 years. The latest analysis of its Ba/Ca (a proxy of sedimentation and nutrients) shows no cyclical peaks suggesting seasonal activities, such as agricultural activity (Sowa et al. 2014).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ethnology and Archaeology, Keio University, Tokyo, Mita, 2-15-45, Japan

    Toru Yamaguchi

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  1. Toru Yamaguchi
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Correspondence to Toru Yamaguchi .

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  1. Department of Earth and Planetary Science, Graduate School of Science, The University of Tokyo , Tokyo, Japan

    Hajime Kayanne

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Yamaguchi, T. (2016). A Review of Coral Studies of the Ryukyu Island Arc to Reconstruct Its Long-Term Landscape History. In: Kayanne, H. (eds) Coral Reef Science. Coral Reefs of the World, vol 5. Springer, Tokyo. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-54364-0_4

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