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Concept
Mumun pottery period
Summary
The Mumun pottery period is an archaeological era in Korean prehistory that dates to approximately 1500-300 BC. This period is named after the Korean name for undecorated or plain cooking and storage vessels that form a large part of the pottery assemblage over the entire length of the period, but especially 850-550 BC.
The Mumun period is known for the origins of intensive agriculture and complex societies in both the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese Archipelago. This period or parts of it have sometimes been labelled as the "Korean Bronze Age", after Thomsen's 19th century three-age system classification of human prehistory. However, the application of such terminology in the Korean case is misleading since local bronze production did not occur until approximately the late 8th century BC at the earliest, bronze artifacts are rare, and the distribution of bronze is highly regionalized until after 300 BC. A boom in the archaeological excavations of Mumun Period sites since the mid-1990s has recently increased collective knowledge about this formative period in the prehistory of East Asia.
The Mumun period is preceded by the Jeulmun Pottery Period (c. 8000-1500 BC). The Jeulmun was a period of hunting, gathering, and small-scale cultivation of plants. The origins of the Mumun Period are not well known, but the megalithic burials, Mumun pottery, and large settlements found in the Liao River Basin and North Korea c. 1800-1500 probably indicate the origins of the Mumun Period of Southern Korea. Slash-and-burn cultivators who used Mumun pottery displaced people using Jeulmun Period subsistence patterns.
The Early (or Formative) Mumun (c. 1500-850 BC) is characterized by shifting cultivation, fishing, hunting, and discrete settlements with rectangular semi-subterranean pit-houses. The social scale of Early Mumun societies was egalitarian in nature, but the latter part of this period is characterized by increasing intra-settlement competition and perhaps the presence of part-time "big-man" leadership.
Official source
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