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A brief overview of recent obsidian source studies in Northeast Asia (Japan, Russian Far East, Korea, and Northeast China) is presented. Obsidian was a valuable commodity since the early Upper Palaeolithic, and the length of distances between sources and utilisation sites at that time (ca. 30,000–10,000 BP) was up to 800 km. In the Neolithic of Japan (Jomon), several large exchange networks existed, with obsidian transportation up to 1000 km from source to sites, often across wide-open waters. The use of multiple obsidian sources shows the complex nature of raw material acquisition and use in prehistory.

The exact definition of the term “Neolithic” is discussed and the spatio-temporal coordinates of the two main Neolithic-related phenomena in greater East Asia, pottery and cultivation of plants and animals, are presented. In this part of Eurasia, pottery-making preceded agriculture by several millennia. Pottery may be accepted as the major criterion of the Neolithic epoch in the hunter-fisher-gatherer continuum of East Asian prehistory. This situation differs from that in the Near East, where plant and animal husbandry developed before the emergence of pottery, and Europe, where pottery and agriculture appeared almost simultaneously. Thus today, three main ‘trajectories’ for Neolithisation may be defined in Eurasia. The ultimate reason for the origin of pottery in East Asia remains unclear.

A summary of the results of geoarchaeological research from the 1950s onwards in the Russian Far East is presented. The main issues include the palaeoenvironments and chronology of prehistoric complexes (Palaeolithic and Neolithic stages), and more specific questions involving the emergence of pottery production, maritime adaptation, agriculture, obsidian raw material exchange, and problems related to the geoarchaeology of the region.