THE “ROUTINE‐SCAPE” AND SOCIAL STRUCTURALIZATION IN THE FORMATION OF JAPANESE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETIES

Recent archaeo‐botanical research has suggested that the introduction of farming did not immediately cause a sufficient shift in subsistence strategy to form an agrarian society but that the process took as long as hundreds of years. It is therefore suggested that it was not the farming technique in itself but the establishment of routinized day‐to‐day activity patterns and world views associated with farming that eventually led to the formation of a new social structure. The holistic concept of a dynamic day‐today routine and its associated physical and conceptual landscape is termed routine‐scape through which the process of agrarian society formation in Japan is examined around 1000–500 bce when paddy rice farming was introduced from China to Japan. A new crop storage system of a raised‐floor granary was also adopted as a part of the rice‐farming routine, which resulted in changing the Japanese routine‐scape. The community leaders increasingly associated the granary with both symbolic and practical significance; alongside controlling the storage‐related routine they finally gained centralized power. This paper indicates that agriculture brought along a new range of routine activities and their dynamic interactions with landscape produced new social structures.