A History of Japanese Diaspora Archaeology
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A History of Japanese Diaspora Archaeology Douglas E. Ross 1 Accepted: 21 September 2020/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Japanese diaspora archaeology originated in the late 1960s but reports and publications did not appear until the 1980s. Early studies often included Japanese artifacts or sites within larger surveys, but by the 1990s and 2000s were the focus of targeted research. Most research has been undertaken in western North American and the Pacific Islands. Pre-War farms and work camps and World War II battlefields and incarceration centers emerged as primary topics of study, with the incarceration centers dominating the literature today. Research themes are diverse but emphasize material consumption, concepts of place, and patterns of cultural persistence and change. Keywords Japanese diaspora . History of archaeology . Method and theory
Introduction Like Chinese diaspora archaeology (Ross 2018; Voss and Allen 2008), archaeology of the Japanese diaspora traces its roots to the late 1960s. In contrast, this early work was isolated, incidental, and unreported, and formal reports on Japanese diaspora sites in North America and the Pacific Islands did not appear until the 1980s. The social and regulatory environment that spawned research on Chinese sites applies equally to Japanese diaspora communities, and this temporal lapse is curious. The later arrival and fewer numbers of Japanese migrants (in North America, at least) may have produced fewer archaeological sites, exacerbated by dispossession during World War II that emptied coastal communities of Japanese residents. Most Japanese sites postdate the 1880s, and the lack of research prior to the 1980s and 1990s may also be a product of scholarly and regulatory bias against twentieth-century deposits that were long perceived to lack interest or research potential. Most early studies of Japanese diaspora sites or material culture are technical reports for compliance-based resource management projects, though some address academic/
* Douglas E. Ross [email protected]
1
Albion Environmental, Inc., 1414 Soquel Ave, Suite 205, Santa Cruz, CA 95062, USA
International Journal of Historical Archaeology
educational fieldwork. These early reports can be divided into three major categories: (1) targeted studies of Japanese sites or material culture, alone or part of larger surveys including non-Japanese sites; (2) mixed or multiethnic contexts that include a Japanese component; and (3) Chinese diaspora sites that contain Japanese artifacts. The frequency of research on Japanese diaspora sites increased in the 1990s, though most were geographically scattered one-off studies of limited scope and duration. Exceptions were sustained resource management initiatives at Manzanar and other World War II Japanese incarceration camps sponsored by the National Park Service beginning in the early 1990s. Archaeology of these former camps, accompanied in the 2000s by university-based research, has emerged as a distinct fiel
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