2014 Habu, J. Post-Pleistocene transformations of hunter-gatherers in East Asia. PP507-520. In Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology and Anthropology of Hunter-Gatherers, edited by Vicki Cummings, Peter Jordan and Marek Zvelebil. Oxford: Oxford University Press. CHAPTER 22 POST- PLEISTOCENE TRANSFORMATIONS OF HUNTER-GATHERERS IN EAST ASIA The fomon and Chulmun JUNKO HABU EAST Asia is an exciting area for the study of post-Pleistocene cultural transformation. Prehistoric hunter-gatherer cultures in East Asia, namely the Jomon culture of the Japanese archipelago (hereafter Japan) and the Chulmun culture of the Korean Peninsula (hereaf- ter Korea) are known for their artistic pottery and other elaborate artefacts, the production and use of which were closely intertwined with changes in Jomon and Chulmun societies (e.g. Cho and Ko 2009; Kaner 2009). Furthermore, Jomon and Chulmun data allow us to test conflicting theories about the mechanisms of long-term culture change. Topics to be examined include the impact of the global and local climate change vs. human activities, domestication vs. environmental management, specialized vs. broad-spectrum economies, sedentism vs. mobility, egalitarianism vs. social stratification, and continuityvs. discontinuity to the following agricultural phase. Finally, but not least importantly, bioarchaeological data from these regions help us to understand not only the population history of these regions but also changes in health conditions and lifeways of these people (e.g. Fujita et al. 2007; Fukase and Suwa 2008; Kimura 2006; Suzuki 1998; Temple 2007; 2008). Overviews of the Jomon and Chulmun cultures are available in such references as Habu (2004; in press), Underhill and Habu (2006), Imamura {1996), Kobayashi (2004), Norton (2007), and Nelson {1993). Rather than repeat the contents of these publications, this chapter concentrates on issues that are key to understanding the importance of East Asian data in world hunter-gatherer archaeology and anthropology. Emphases are on the issues that are relevant to recent discussions in the field of historical ecology (Balee 2006; Thompson and Waggoner 2013). These issues include long-term sustainability, collapses and subsequent recoveries of human socio-economic systems, human impacts on the biosphere, and the examination of the processes operating among temporal scales of varying duration.