3: Prehistoric networks across the Korea Strait (5000–1000 BCe): ‘early globalization’ during the Jomon period in northwest Kyushu?

Modern insights into globalization processes and their broader implications for societal developments can increasingly and successfully be applied to situations of great temporal-spatial diversity, as this volume attests. Paramount is Tomlinson’s insight (as applied and modied by Jennings) that globalization as complex connectivity – consisting of interregional, interdependent networks linked by ‘a “ow” of goods, information, people and practices’ – triggers social change (Tomlinson 1999: 2; Jennings 2011: 2, this volume). While integration in macro-scale networks may engender many economic, social and cognitive benets, globalization processes, by their very nature, have a transformative eect with unpredictable results, as both Feinman and Robertson (this volume) point out. At the micro-scale level, these may have a lasting impact on social identities, either positively or negatively. Conversely, not all inter-regional interactions automatically bring about ‘complex connectivity’ and social change.