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This thesis examines the economic vs. social and symbolic importance of fish in the foodways of the prehistoric Jomon culture (16,000-2300 cal BP) of Japan. To achieve this goal, quantitative analyses of fish remains excavated from a water-logged midden of the Sannai Maruyama site (Aomori Prefecture, Japan) are conducted. Dated to the Lower Ento-a phase (ca. 5900-5650 cal BP) of the Early Jomon Period, the midden was associated with large amounts of organic remains, including fish bones. The perspective employed in this dissertation, foodways, emphasizes the importance of social and cultural roles of food. Rather than focus on bio-ecological aspects and nutritional values of food, this thesis regards food as one of the central elements of individual cultures. In Japanese archaeology, food of the Jomon Period has been a central them to the discussion reconstructing the lifeways of prehistoric people of the Japanese archipelago. Large amounts of data, including faunal and floral materials, have been accumulated from numerous rescue excavations of Jomon sites that took place between the 1970s and late 1990s. These archaeological data allowed the development of detailed culture historical studies of the Jomon Period that span over 10,000 years. Within the tradition of Japanese archaeology, however, virtually no scholar has adopted the study of foodways as a theoretical approach. This thesis is one of the few attempts to examine Jomon data from this perspective. In this thesis, the relations between Jomon people and fish as their food are examined through zooarchaeological and ethnoarchaeological analyses. Soil samples from the "Northern Valley" midden of the Sannai Maruyama site were obtained, and fish remains in these samples were separated, identified, and quantified. The results indicate that two taxa were particularly important in the diet of the Sannai Maruyama residents: Cobitidae (loaches) and Seriola (yellowtails). These results are used to address the question of why certain fish taxa were selected when the environment provided a great variety of other animals and fish. Energy investments and returns related to fishing and consumption of these two taxa are calculated, and the results are discussed in the context of energy efficiency, the assumption that lies behind the diet breadth model, one of the optimal foraging models .The results indicate that Cobitidae fishing can be explained by cost-benefit calculation, while an abundance of Seriola in the assemblage requires another explanation .The results of these analyses are discussed in the context of the study of prehistoric foodways.

Early American notions of sympathy, largely shaped by Adam Smith’s theory of rational self-interest and fellow feeling, undergird the period’s dominant narrative tropes, socio-political philosophies, and economic ideologies. In this dissertation, I argue that investments in sympathy structure two “domestic” cultural ideals on a watery globe. The first ideal is of a seamlessly productive shipboard society. The second ideal is of an essentially familial national order. To advance these ideals, common sailors, women writers, and political policymakers uphold sympathy as a corrective to sea-based geological or cultural unruliness. In other words, each asserts that domestic stability in a transoceanic system may be gained via a perfection of moral feeling. As I show in two sections, these discrete sentimental narratives on land and at sea confirm antebellum domesticity’s oceanic entanglements. My first section highlights a shipboard domestic ideal that results from oceanic labors that power a U.S.-backed oceanic economy. Specifically, isolated vessels’ socio-material structures direct sailors’ bodies towards affectively cohesive labor. In short, proper feeling at sea is a technical skill as well as a social one. In this system, ideal “sentimental seamen” know exactly how to feel, how to labor, and how to describe those feeling labors. Sailors use novel materialist, labor-based sentimental forms to stake their relative claims to this economic and social ideal. Ultimately, sentimental seamen embody the forms of regulated and monetized feeling that structure age of sail vessels as historical and literary spaces. My second section tracks an antebellum domestic ideal that results from the nation’s reliance on oceanic cultures and economies. Namely, landed writers debate the domestic nation’s place in a “family of nations” via competing definitions of the “villain of all nations.” Within these debates, “pirates of sympathy” are maritime subjects whose incompatibility with state power is due to their supposed incapacity for moral feeling. For some, such figures’ removal protects an ideal national family; for others, the pirate embodies the effects of state violence. As I conclude, this figure’s pervasive literary-historical presence reflects the antebellum era’s shifting and conflicting moral compasses, particularly in relation to maritime slavery and its inheritances. In tracking sentimental seamen and pirates of sympathy, I place two “domestic” ideals on a watery globe. One is a model for ideal domestic laborers at sea. The other is a foil for ideal domestic citizens on land. Both of these figures are defined by their relation to interior, domestic attachments that ripple across and within transoceanic space. In turn, the study of sentimental seamen and pirates of sympathy provide a glimpse of a field I am tentatively calling “terraqueous domestic studies.” Overall, this field treats early American domestic interiority and attachment as fashioned by earth and water together.