Rice and mountain vegetables
If the village at Nakanishi-Akitsu was of a similar scale and the population a maximum of forty to sixty people, the yield of rice previously estimated could not have supported the whole population of the village.
If the paddy field was 50,000 m2, the yield could not support the population. Only if the consumption of rice during the Yayoi period was much less, half that of the previous estimate, could the 50,000 m2 of paddy field (assumed to produce a harvest comparable to the low-yield geden paddies) have supported the population. The Terasawa group estimated the amount of rice consumed per person per day based on the estimated rice yield. These estimates were c. 2 go (1 go = 180 cc) during the late Yayoi period, 1 go during the middle Yayoi period, and 0.2 go during the early Yayoi period. The Terasawa group concluded that the yield was much less than expected for Yayoi people, and that these small yields must have influenced the consumption of rice greatly, especially in the early and middle Yayoi period. Therefore people during the early Yayoi mainly depended on food sources other than rice for starch, such as millet, wheat and barley, beans, potatoes, and nuts.[831] It may be difficult to imagine, given the apparent scale of the large rice paddy field at Nakanishi, that people mainly depended on food other than rice, but it is easier to understand if we take into consideration the traces of human activities in the buried forest discovered next to the village.
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