## Preface
William Wayne Farris frames this book as a social and economic history of Japan from earliest times to 1600, published by the University of Hawai'i Press in 2009. He acknowledges the challenges of writing commoner-centered history when most pre-1600 sources were produced by and for elites. Law codes, court chronicles, aristocratic diaries, and literature often refer only obliquely to ordinary people. A major compensating factor has been Japan's archaeological boom since about 1960, w