A distinct maritime hunter-fisher culture of the Sea of Okhotsk littoral (c. 5th–10th century AD) — southern Sakhalin, the northern and north-eastern Hokkaidō coast, and the Kuril fringe. Reaching Hokkaidō from Sakhalin, its people hunted sea mammals and kept a way of life quite separate from the inland Satsumon culture it lived alongside.
Declined and was absorbed after the 10th century; in eastern Hokkaidō it fused with the Satsumon culture to produce the Tobinitai culture, and its bear-ceremonialism is widely seen as a root of later Ainu religion.
The standard English volume on the Okhotsk culture and its place in the ancestry of the Ainu.
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