Prehistoric Japan

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Speaker 1 It's 5,000 years ago and a prehistoric community of master foragers are building a great monument for their settlement. It's a stone circle.
a place for ritual and the dead.

Speaker 1 But this stone circle is being built thousands of miles away on another group of islands. We know them today as Japan.

Speaker 1 It's the ancients on history hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and today we're exploring the story of prehistoric Japan.

Speaker 1 We're going to cover tens of thousands of years of prehistory, from some of the earliest evidence for humans reaching the Japanese archipelago some 50,000 years ago, to the fascinating Jamon culture, which lasted over 10,000 years.

Speaker 1 Now the lion's share of this interview will be about the Jamon, as there is a wealth of archaeological material surviving about these people and the incredibly diverse hunter-gatherer lifestyle that they mastered.

Speaker 1 They built stone circles, they were big into foraging wild plants but not cultivating crops, they created beautiful ceramics including human figurines, and much more. Our guest for this episode is Dr.

Speaker 1 Simon Kana from the University of East Anglia. Simon is an expert on prehistoric Japan with a particular focus on the Jamon and he was an absolute joy to interview.

Speaker 1 There is so much to talk about with Japan's prehistory, but hopefully this episode will give you a taster of just how incredible this country's archaeology really is.

Speaker 1 Simon, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast today.

Speaker 15 It's a pleasure to be here.

Speaker 1 What a topic. Japanese archaeology, Simon, first off, it's incredible.
And secondly, I did not realize just how much archaeological work has already been done.

Speaker 1 That's revealing so much about Japan's prehistory.

Speaker 15 There's a huge amount. Archaeology in Japan really kicked off.
It's getting on for 150 years ago now.

Speaker 1 150 years, wow.

Speaker 15 When an American zoologist kind of blagged his way into a job in the University of Tokyo. He was one of a generation of...

Speaker 15 foreign specialists who were employed by the new Meiji government and he'd got interested in archaeology, reading Darwin.

Speaker 15 And he'd been working with a chap called Charles Putnam in the American Southwest.

Speaker 15 And he felt that he could use evolutionary theories combined with archaeology, looking at mollusks to be able to prove the theory of evolution, like Darwin and his earthworms and his beetles.

Speaker 15 And when he arrived in Japan, there's a really lovely story here.

Speaker 15 When he arrived in Japan, he took the then brand new railway line from Yokohama, one of the five ports that had been opened to foreigners, into what is now called Shinbashi Station, before they built Tokyo Station.

Speaker 15 And as he came along on this railway, which actually was designed by a British engineer called Edward Morrell, he lent out, the story goes, he lent out the window and they went through a new cutting, one of the new cuttings.

Speaker 15 And he saw all these white things falling out of the cutting and he recognised them as shells. and he recognized it as a probable shell midden.

Speaker 15 So a year or so after he had arrived, he went back to this place called called O Mori, which these days is on the monorail from Hanoda Airport into central Tokyo.

Speaker 15 And he undertook the first ever what are described as Western-style scientific excavations in Japan.

Speaker 15 But actually, there was a tradition going way back a couple of hundred years back into the Edo period when the shoguns were in control.

Speaker 15 when a lot of people were very fascinated by things they were finding in around them, in the environment around them.

Speaker 1 And so they had already found pots and stone tools and things like that but they just didn't know how old they were they put them in the what they call the age of the gods but morse's work really laid the foundations for yeah 150 years of phenomenal archaeological investigation across the archipelago i mean it's so interesting because you mentioned words like shogun there and the edo period and i think correct me if i'm wrong sign but it feels like when someone mentions like history in japan you think of the samurai and and stuff like that you don't think immediately of of its prehistoric archaeology but what's interesting there it sounds like these archaeological sites, these prehistoric sites, it's not just out in the countryside, they're in the centers of some of the biggest cities in Japan today, which is quite mesmerizing.

Speaker 1 It's quite amazing to think.

Speaker 15 Oh, absolutely. And I had a bit of fun with this.

Speaker 15 Around the time of the Tokyo Olympics, a wonderful colleague of mine, Professor Taimon Screech, who used to teach Japanese art at SOAS at the University of London, had published a book called Tokyo Before Tokyo.

Speaker 15 Now, Tim is a fantastic specialist on the Edo period. And of course, Tokyo only became the metropolis that it was in the Edo period.
The Tokugawa shogun established it as their capital.

Speaker 1 Sorry, is that 16th, 17th century? 1603? Yeah. 1603, okay.
Yep.

Speaker 15 And before that was just a sort of fishing villages in a really undeveloped part of Japan, the initial capital was down in what is now Kyoto called Heian.

Speaker 15 the capital of imperial peace, heavenly peace, sorry. So I thought, well, this is exciting.
Tim's written a book that's going to cover some of the prehistory as well, but he didn't.

Speaker 15 He didn't start until about 1500, really. So I wrote a piece for current world archaeology, looking at some of the really interesting recent sites that have been found in Tokyo.

Speaker 15 And you know, Tokyo, biggest city in the world these days, population, I don't know, 38 million or something crazy like that.

Speaker 15 And has seen massive development, especially since 1945.

Speaker 15 when it was pretty much completely razed to the ground by the firebombing that preceded the dropping of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And a lot of Tokyo has actually been dug up.

Speaker 15 So it's like, you know, a lot of it has actually already been excavated. But there are a few really tantalizing bits left.

Speaker 15 And just, I think it was this year, last year, the British Embassy in Tokyo, which has got the best address in Tokyo, it's got number one Tokyo.

Speaker 15 It's just behind the Imperial Palace, which was the Edo Castle, which was the castle built by the shoguns. And it's where the emperor lives these days.

Speaker 15 And this land behind it, and the British Embassy has been there ever since the 1860s. It's been there since Morse's time, actually.
It's lovely. They've got beautiful gardens.

Speaker 15 But of course, here we are in austerity. The Foreign Office, in their wisdom, decided to sell off a bit of the land associated with the embassy.

Speaker 15 Of course, this is land that hadn't been disturbed, right in the middle of Tokyo, hadn't been disturbed for over 150 years, really.

Speaker 15 And they sold it to a property, a big property developer who decided to put a high-rise block on it. And the Japanese system for archaeology is exactly almost parallel to what we have in England.

Speaker 15 And it operates on the polluter pays principle or the developer pays.

Speaker 15 So if you're disturbing what they describe as important buried cultural properties, then it's the developer's responsibility to record those properly through archaeology or decide, you know, come up with some kind of wonderful in-situ engineering solution.

Speaker 15 So rather wonderfully, they discovered a Jomon settlement and subsequent period, a Yayoi settlement. Now, these things haven't been found in central Tokyo for many, many decades.

Speaker 15 But because of the sensitivities around the site, the development company tried to hush it up a little bit. They didn't hush up the archaeology.
They did the archaeology.

Speaker 15 But in Japan, if you discover something interesting, you have to have what they call the Genshi Setsumekai.

Speaker 15 It's the on-site explanation to the public because that seems a really important part of the process, as it is sometimes here.

Speaker 15 But they didn't want to do that because they wanted to sort of keep it all themselves and there was a huge a huge scandal in the newspapers about oh you know former land or land formerly belonging to the british embassy you know gives up its secrets but we're not supposed to know what's been found there but that was fun the other bit that's been really interesting in tokyo recently is i mentioned the railway line that morse came in on from yokohama so edward morrell designed an embankment which went in between the land and the sea to carry the first railway line into Tokyo.

Speaker 15 And that area of Tokyo called Shinagawa. Now, anybody who's been on the bullet train probably come across Shinagawa.

Speaker 15 It's where the bullet train first bumps into the Yamanote line, which is the circle line that goes all around Tokyo.

Speaker 15 They found a three-kilometer long stretch of the original embankment as part of a major redevelopment of that whole area.

Speaker 15 And I got a letter a couple of years ago from the president of the Japanese Archaeological Association saying, dear Professor Kano, we understand you're interested in Japanese archaeology.

Speaker 15 And so would you like to write to the Prime Minister of Japan and tell him how important it is that we preserve this incredible stretch of embankment?

Speaker 15 And he said, well, we're sure that in the UK, that's what you would do.

Speaker 15 So I had to write back and I said, well, I'm very happy to write to Prime Minister Sugar, but please be aware that it is unlikely that in the UK we would preserve the whole lot.

Speaker 15 We might try and preserve a bit of it. But anyway, it made that the then Prime Minister, Prime Minister Sugar, had to go and visit the site.

Speaker 15 And I believe there are still plans afoot for how much of it they can preserve underneath all the new developments that are going up.

Speaker 1 It sounds like there's a rich archaeological record from Japan but what types of archaeology do you have mainly surviving to learn more about the people who lived in Japan thousands of years ago?

Speaker 15 Well, one of the things that's long intrigued me is the sequence in Japan is a bit different to what we're used to here in Europe.

Speaker 15 And I find that that means when I come back to Europe, I'm asking slightly different questions perhaps about what's going on here.

Speaker 15 And the experience I have in Europe encourages some of our Japanese colleagues maybe to ask different questions to the ones they're normally asking over there.

Speaker 15 So the first human occupation that we know about in the Japanese archipelago is actually relatively recent. It's probably about 50,000 years ago.
It's much longer occupation on the Asian mainland.

Speaker 15 So in China, we know we've got ancestral hominids.

Speaker 15 back to way over a million years ago and in korea on the korean peninsula indeed there are slightly controversial but there there are thought to be lower Paleolithic sites on the Korean Peninsula as well.

Speaker 15 We haven't got anything like that in Japan, despite the fact that over a sort of course of about 25 years in the late 20th century, so the 1980s through to the early 2000s when I was first starting my Japanese archaeology, there were a series of really exciting discoveries made up in northeastern Japan, where they thought they had

Speaker 15 really early Paleolithic sites, again, you know, almost as old as the ones in China. And they were dating them on the basis of volcanic tephra.

Speaker 15 And it's one of the great things we've got in Japan that we don't really have in Europe very much. You can date each volcanic eruption and the ash that that leaves very precisely.

Speaker 15 And of course, we've got hundreds of volcanoes all around Japan, and they've been erupting all through this sequence.

Speaker 15 Tragically, it turned out that a volunteer on one of these, on the program that was investigating all these sites, had been making his own stone tools and then planting them on these sites, underneath these volcanic tephras.

Speaker 15 So that rather blew the reputation of Paleolithic archaeology, which is a real shame because there is amazing Paleolithic archaeology in Japan.

Speaker 15 In fact, just last year, they had this amazing stone called Obsidian in Japan. There's no flint, but they do have a lot of obsidian, which is a kind of a volcanic glass.

Speaker 15 And one of the biggest sources up in Hokkaido, at a place called Shirataki, at a town called Engadu, Massive amounts of obsidian have been recovered from there, and it was exploited all through from the late Paleolithic, all the way through the Jomon period.

Speaker 15 That site has just been made a special site of national importance which makes it in Japanese it's a kokuho which means national treasure and that's the highest level of cultural designation you can get in Japan.

Speaker 15 It's like becoming Lord Obsidian site I suppose it would be as close as I can get.

Speaker 15 People get to be ningen kokuho, they get to be living national treasures but this place First time I've come across where stone tool sites have been given that kind of designation.

Speaker 15 So was that was rather exciting.

Speaker 15 And then, what happens at the end of the so you've got, unlike much of Europe, there's no real glaciation during the last glacial maximum, a little bit, but not very much.

Speaker 1 So, we're talking about ice or snow covering the whole of the islands, are we talking about

Speaker 15 with glaciers and things like that?

Speaker 15 But what you do have, and this is, I think, this is really interesting in terms of current discussions about the impact of climate change, is that sea levels seem to have been between 100 and 150 meters below what they are today.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 15 Now, imagine today we're talking about sea level rise of maybe half a meter. So there's a very different world.

Speaker 15 And at that time, so this is kind of, what would this be, 22,000 years ago through to maybe sort of 10, 11,000 years ago, what we now know as the Japanese archipelago, was connected to the East Asian mainland by land bridges.

Speaker 15 So you could walk from you and the Nauman's elephants and the giant deer and all the other stuff that was around, could walk from the Korean peninsula into the island of Kyushu,

Speaker 15 and you could walk from Hokkaido possibly into Sakhalin and then into what is now the far east of Russia.

Speaker 15 And we find shared tool types, in particular microliths, which we're familiar with from the European Mesolithic, of course. We find similar types across that whole zone.

Speaker 15 And the other thing that we're finding that I think is really exciting, and this is what kicks off the Jomon period, is we've got these phenomenally early dates for pottery, for ceramic containers.

Speaker 15 We know that in Europe we've got ceramic figurines are being made, what, around 20,000, 30,000 years ago, places like Dolny, Vestonici in the Czech Republic, and things like that.

Speaker 15 But that's a relatively short-lived phenomenon.

Speaker 15 What we have in the Japanese archipelago is starting round about 16,000 years ago, so this is, you know, before the end of the Pleistocene, people are already making ceramic containers.

Speaker 15 And it's a bit mind-blowing, really, when we think we always assume pottery comes along with the Neolithic and farming and settled villages.

Speaker 15 What these people are are hunters and fishers living in Pleistocene landscapes who are for some reason making pottery. And we find them in various parts across East Asia.

Speaker 15 So they're in Japan, they're in the Russian Far East, and they're in China. And in fact, it may well be that we've got even earlier stuff from China about 20,000 years ago.

Speaker 1 It's mind-blowing in that regard.

Speaker 1 So that level of archaeology that you have, trying to analyse how people come to the Japanese archipelago, really interesting what you mentioned there about how there is those land bridges, which also makes you think about, you know, the first Homo sapiens to make it across to the Americas too, across the Bering Land Bridge.

Speaker 1 So those are the various types of artifacts you've got. You mentioned lithic, so stone tools, ceramics.
I must also ask about burials. Do we have many bones surviving?

Speaker 1 And is there DNA analysis that's also revealing much about these people and how they lived?

Speaker 15 Great question. And actually, really timely that you asked that right now.
So DNA analysis is taking off in Japan in a really big way.

Speaker 15 The earliest actual skeletal materials we've got are from the southern islands of the Japanese archipelago, what is now Okinawa Prefecture.

Speaker 15 Up until 1873, it was part of an independent kingdom called the Kingdom of the Rudyukyus.

Speaker 15 and there are human remains from around about 18 19 000 years ago modern fully modern human beings homo sapiens sapiens which seem to have fallen down some kind of crevasse and they've been preserved down there there aren't very many other paleolithic human remains however a colleague of mine at kokugaku university in tokyo a man called professor yasuhiro taniguchi He's actually the person who discovered the earliest pottery fragments at a site called Odai Yamamoto in Aomori, right up in the northern tip of Japan, and he did the first AMS dating of those pot shirts.

Speaker 15 And so it was his report from 1999 that really reinvigorated the debate about early ceramics in Japan. He is now digging a site in central Honshu.
Now, Honshu means main island.

Speaker 15 And that's the island, the big island in the middle, biggest island of the Japanese archipelago where Tokyo and Osaka are located, the two biggest cities.

Speaker 15 And the site he's digging is called the Iai, and it's a rock shelter site in the central mountains.

Speaker 15 And he's been finding a whole series of burials which seem to date around about 8,000 to 10,000 years ago.

Speaker 15 These are some of the best preserved early burials that we've got from the Japanese archipelago. I went to visit him while he was doing his digging a couple of years ago.

Speaker 15 And it's phenomenal the way he's got it all set up.

Speaker 15 I was there with a couple of colleagues and we were in a room. We've never seen such an amazingly well-organized excavation.
They're doing all the kind of analyses that one would hope.

Speaker 15 And because the bones are in a very good state of preservation, it is going to be possible to extract DNA from them, from the bone collagen. And this is going to be great.

Speaker 15 This is going to be some of the best evidence that we've got for the earliest peoples living in the archipelago.

Speaker 15 We think there was probably continuity of occupation from the late Pleistocene into the Jomon period. There doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence for big new populations coming in.

Speaker 15 So that's a very different story to, say, what we have in the British Isles, which we know was largely depopulated at the end of the last Pleistocene. And there are other burial sites around Japan.

Speaker 15 Unfortunately, one of the issues that we have is with all those volcanoes, the soils of Japan are very acidic. And human bone doesn't survive very well in very acidic environments.

Speaker 15 So you have to have particular circumstances.

Speaker 15 Rock shelters and cave sites are one of them. And we know that fortunately, these prehistoric people very considerately buried their dead in some of those places.

Speaker 15 And there's also a large number of cemeteries which have been investigated from the Jomon, and later on there are even more spectacular funeral monuments.

Speaker 15 But from the Jomon, we find a lot of human remains from shell middens,

Speaker 15 because shell is a calcium, obviously, very alkali, and that offsets the effect of the acid soils around about.

Speaker 15 And so we find with there's some great burial sites with Jomon, many with all sorts of wonderful grave goods and things as well.

Speaker 1 Before we go and focus on the Jomon period period and the various aspects of it from what they hunted, obviously farming or the absence of farming, that's really interesting, pottery, burial and so on.

Speaker 1 Just one last question on those first humans that we know that arrive on the Japanese archipelago.

Speaker 1 Because you mentioned how evidence of humans and archaic humans in East Asia stretches back some a million years ago and I'm thinking names like Homo erectus.

Speaker 1 And if there was this land bridge, if the sea level was lower at that time, is it rather surprising that it seems to be quite late that humans or group of humans seem to make that journey, that venture to the Japanese archipelago?

Speaker 1 Or do we just think with the rising sea levels that evidence for earlier human occupation just hasn't been found yet? It's now underwater?

Speaker 15 Well, I would like to think that the evidence hasn't been found yet. There is a huge desire, or there was a huge desire, within Japan to discover a decent paleolithic period.

Speaker 15 If it's there in China, why isn't it there in Japan?

Speaker 15 And in fact, it was that desire that drove the, it was the research, you know, the long-standing research programs that led to the first discovery of the Japanese Paleolithic in about 1953 at a site called Iwajuku, which is actually just up the road from the EI site that I was talking about earlier on.

Speaker 15 And you can go there now. They've designed the museum in the shape of a lovely worked stone tool flake.
It's the most amazing building. There's some fantastic museums.

Speaker 15 We can talk about those later on. And then there's been a lot of really interesting work done in the 1970s and 1980s, for example.

Speaker 15 They were able to put put together a really good sequence for the Japanese Paleolithic from about 30,000 years through to the end of the Pleistocene, correlating changes in stone tool types with the development of the Kanto Plane, which is a Holocene plane formation.

Speaker 15 And you've got, you can tie up the changing stone tools with the layering that develops, the different stratigraphy that you find in the lurse that makes up the Kanto Plane.

Speaker 15 Through the 1980s to the early 2000s, I said there were people up in northeastern Japan who thought they were finding very ancient Paleolithic sites.

Speaker 15 But unfortunately, they were just hugely misled by this one individual who was planting these stone tools. 200 sites he affected over a period of about 25 years.

Speaker 15 It means that it's going to be a long time, I think, until there's anybody seriously now looking for ancient, really ancient sites in the Japanese archipelago again. But who knows?

Speaker 15 I'd like to think they're there somewhere.

Speaker 1 It's so interesting with Paleolithic and Pleistocene, the end of the Ice Age period, and how archaeology, well, even in Britain as well, it's more difficult to see.

Speaker 1 And then you get to the last 10,000 years or so, and we have in the UK sites like Starkar, fascinating sites. And also in Japan in this period, do you start to see an increase?

Speaker 1 in sites in the archaeological record with this Jomon period. Now, Simon, just explain to us first of all, I mean, what is the Jomon period? Who are the Jomon?

Speaker 15 Jomon, the Japanese word, is made up of two Chinese characters, because you write Japanese using Chinese ideographs, called kanji, and jor means rope, and mon means pattern.

Speaker 15 So Jomon is a translation of rope pattern, which is the term that was coined by Edward Sylvester Morse back in the late 1870s to describe the type of pottery that he had excavated from the Ormori Shelmin.

Speaker 15 And what it is, is it's basically twisted plant fibers that are impressed on the surface of a pottery vessel before it's fired. And it gives a very distinctive type of core bark pottery.

Speaker 15 So that's what Jomon means.

Speaker 15 There's a discussion in Japan at the moment about whether we should talk about a Jomon period or a Jomon culture or indeed even Jomon people because they would not have identified themselves as Jomon people to themselves.

Speaker 1 It seems like a unified people. We shouldn't be thinking it in that way.

Speaker 15 Bens who you talk to in Japan, my own view on this is it gets a bit complicated, but these Jomon pots or these cord mark pots are made for about 10,000 years.

Speaker 15 The interesting thing is that the pots that I discovered when I was talking about those early ones from Odai Yamamoto, in fact, around that period, there's no cord marking on them. They're plain pots.

Speaker 15 But they're included in the Jomon period, because part of the definition of the Jomon period is when ceramic containers start to be made in Japan.

Speaker 15 And it's from then until the arrival of rice farming, which happens also quite late in the sequence compared with what's happening on the continent.

Speaker 15 And that happens sometime in the first millennium BC.

Speaker 1 Hold on. So the Jomon period, if you're saying like 10,000 BC to 1000 BC, that's 9,000 years, Simon, for, you know, one name.
That's a huge amount of time.

Speaker 1 I'm guessing there's more complexities in it.

Speaker 15 You you can divide it up a bit more than that yeah isn't it great it must be one of the longest periods certainly in the holocene anywhere in the world but of course these are just archaeological constructs so you know who knows what it actually means and in fact it's longer than 10 000 years it's uh that all sounds a bit like the sort of you know like the 10 000 years for the right it's actually about 14 or 15 000 years in length altogether but it's divided japanese archaeologists these days divide it into six sub periods going from the incipient through the initial, early, middle, late, and final Jong-on periods.

Speaker 15 So that makes it a bit easier. But they've also, Japanese archaeologists are phenomenal when it comes to identifying different pottery styles.

Speaker 15 And for that 15,000 years, you get some 70 major pottery styles, mainly involving different forms of cord-marked decoration, and some 400 local styles.

Speaker 15 It's a bit of a headache for somebody coming in from the outside because each of those styles is of course named after the type site where that type of pottery was discovered.

Speaker 15 And the type site is usually a place name which will very often written in some weird kanji, some weird Chinese character, which there's a lot of discussion about how you pronounce those and it varies depending on where you are.

Speaker 15 So, so yes, there's a lot of diversity in the Jomon period. And

Speaker 15 we tend to say that there's many different Jomon cultures, but there are unifying themes, and it's that use of pottery, and in particular, the use of Corbart pottery that does seem to be a tradition that continues for that long period of time.

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Speaker 1 A big question is how did the Jamong live?

Speaker 15 Okay, well, that's a really great question.

Speaker 15 What were they all up to for that long period of time?

Speaker 15 So, I like to think that they don't really fit into many of our categories that we're used to dealing with in European prehistory. So they are broad-spectrum foragers, if you like.
They're exploited.

Speaker 15 They seem to be exploiting the vast majority of wild resources that are available to them.

Speaker 15 And I think they also had a very deep, many of them, maybe not all of them, but many of them seem to have had a very deep awareness of what we describe these days as the affordances of those natural resources.

Speaker 15 So one nice example of that is that they made some of the earliest lacquer that we have from anywhere in the world. You probably know that another word for lacquer is Japan, in fact.

Speaker 1 I didn't know that, Simon. And actually, can you explain to us what exactly is lacquer? I know the word lacquer where, so is that this types of ceramics?

Speaker 15 So lacquer is a kind of sap from the lacquer tree. It's a transparent liquid, which you have to kind of bleed out of the lacquer tree.
It takes a really long time to do it.

Speaker 15 And then you can add pigments and colours and then you'll paint it onto the surface of all kinds of different materials.

Speaker 15 And it gives a kind of a shininess and sometimes a water tightness to those surfaces. And these days, lacquer technology in Japan is phenomenal.

Speaker 15 Some of the most beautiful artworks in the Japanese repertoire are lacquer or Urushi as it is in Japanese.

Speaker 15 It was one of the materials that was very popular when things were first being imported out of Japan. Hence the name Japaning came about.

Speaker 15 And so there are many wonderful collections of lacquerware around the world these days.

Speaker 1 And so these Jamon communities, if they are master foragers, as you've highlighted there, Simon, should we label them that well-known phrase hunter-gatherers?

Speaker 15 Well, I would say master and mistress foragers, probably, because I think there's... role of women and indeed children in these societies was really important.

Speaker 15 That word hunter-gatherers has, I think it's a complicated one for me because it's a bit rooted in ideas of social evolutionism, cultural evolutionism, where we tend to contrast a hunter-gatherer stage of society with a farming stage of society or a herding stage of society.

Speaker 15 And it also is predicated on a a notion of the rest of the world as being divided into wild and domesticated, I suppose.

Speaker 15 And indeed, there's a lot of discussions around the Neolithic about to what extent is this all about domestication.

Speaker 15 The Jomon really blurs all of those categories, I think, because what we find is that they're not,

Speaker 15 I don't believe it's possible to call them farmers.

Speaker 15 And that is a difference which is particularly accentuated in the Japanese case or the East Asian case, because if you're a rice farmer, if you're growing paddy rice in paddy fields, you have to build your paddy fields first and you construct your fields.

Speaker 15 It's rather a different thing that we're used to, say, in Europe, where they're just, you know, scratching into some ground with some arts or something like that.

Speaker 15 But the other thing I would say is that, and it's one of the things that really interests me, is how do we view this world of wild versus domesticated, if you like.

Speaker 15 What we find in Japan is there's been great intensification of

Speaker 15 certain wild food resources at different periods. I guess the use of lacquer would be one way of seeing that.
We know that nuts,

Speaker 15 also there seems to be intensification of nut usage, walnuts, chestnuts, acorns, all of those sorts of things as well. There's arguments that some of the stone tools look like digging sticks.

Speaker 15 So were they actually, were they intense, very intensively encouraging things like mountain potatoes to grow? Or were they actually planting them? Were they interfering with them in some way?

Speaker 15 We don't know. There's a really interesting set of debates around that.
And then in terms of animals, there's a couple of really interesting discussions here. One is around the dog.

Speaker 15 So we've got some of the earliest evidence of domesticated dog anywhere from about 11,000 years ago.

Speaker 15 There are dogs buried in graves at places like Kami Kuroiwa in little island of Shikoku on the Pacific coast. And they're buried in the same way that human beings are being buried.

Speaker 15 And then wild boar. And there's a big discussion these days about the domestication of the wild boar and the pig.

Speaker 15 And we get, for example, you find wild boar these days are not found.

Speaker 15 Their natural range doesn't include the northern island of Hokkaido, for example, and it doesn't include some of the islands that stretch down into the Pacific.

Speaker 15 But we do find wild boar bones from Jomon sites. So maybe these Jomon people are traveling to these far-flung places with a wild boar in their dugout canoe.
Now, can you imagine that?

Speaker 15 Because wild boar, we think, are pretty scary, and there's lots of wild boar in Japan these days. They are big and bad-tempered, and I wouldn't want to be in a dug-out canoe with one.

Speaker 15 So this also speaks to some specific intensification of relationships between human beings and what we in the 21st century regard as wild food resources.

Speaker 1 Simon, it's one thing, isn't it, that we often associate the domestication of certain animals with sedentary societies, with farming societies.

Speaker 1 But it's a great exception to that is the dog, which is domesticated long before farming. And I think there are some arguments that it originates in like Siberia, so in East Asia area.

Speaker 1 So very interesting that you have evidence of domesticated dogs being buried like humans in Japan in the Jomon period too. But it's interesting, isn't it?

Speaker 1 Big into plants, big into like these certain animals, like boar dogs as well. Do we think that, I mean, the Jomon,

Speaker 1 would they have been aware of agriculture happening in East Asia at the same time? But is this very much a choice?

Speaker 1 a choice that they make a deliberate choice just not to adopt that way of life and to have this more is that this kind of more wild way of life almost?

Speaker 15 That's a really interesting question. And let's go back to something you said a couple of minutes ago about sedentary farming villages.
And again, in Europe, we tend to associate those two.

Speaker 1 I'm sorry, I'm bringing in the European mindset here, son of a little bit of a bad person, but I don't understand.

Speaker 15 It's really interesting. It's actually really important.

Speaker 15 Because maybe one of the, as well as ceramics, maybe this ability to lead what we describe as a sedentary lifestyle, if that's, you know,

Speaker 15 came about. Now, during the Joe Mon, it does seem that we've got very early village-type communities developing.

Speaker 15 I spent a lot of my PhD was about sedentism and the identification of sedentism, because at that stage, people were talking about complex hunter-gatherers, and one of the things that complex hunter-gatherers were supposed to do was live in sedentary communities.

Speaker 15 And that was also set in this kind of evolutionary schema, where obviously, if you're living in a village, you're kind of more sophisticated than if you're leading some kind of mobile lifestyle.

Speaker 15 I had a real problem problem with all of those categories, to be honest with you, because we can't prove archaeologically whether people really, really were living in the same place all year round, year on year on year.

Speaker 15 And what does it mean? How many years do you have to stay there before you count a sedentary?

Speaker 15 You know, here in the 21st century, we lead a particularly sedentary lifestyle because we've got chairs to sit on.

Speaker 15 and we spend too much time sitting on them or in our sofas and we don't move around enough. And we've kind of projected that back into prehistory, I feel.
And I think it's problematic.

Speaker 15 And what we really need to be doing is unpicking the evidence for the kind of practices that might have surrounded what we regard as the emergence of these particular types of inhabiting the landscape, I suppose.

Speaker 15 But we do seem to have people spending more and more time in particular locations.

Speaker 15 I like to think that as they did that, perhaps they were also using those locations as places to make long journeys from and then come back.

Speaker 15 So they were getting out of their, you know, their home ranges or whatever, you know,

Speaker 15 we talk about in terms of hunter-gatherers. And they're building dwellings.
They're putting a lot of effort into building buildings.

Speaker 15 And these buildings become some of the biggest projects for the Jomon people. And I really enjoy that.
You look at the scale of some of these buildings. They're enormous.

Speaker 15 They must have, you know, they're monumental and they were paying a lot of date. They're cultural artefacts.
And there's a lot of variation in those buildings, just as there is in the pottery.

Speaker 15 And there's also quite a lot of principles being brought into play in how they build them and how they locate them within their settlement space and how they relate to each other.

Speaker 1 Well, let's explore that now. Let's talk about Jermon settlements, Simon, and what you see and these various types of buildings.

Speaker 1 What should we be imagining with a Jermon settlement and the types of buildings they're constructing, including these great monuments that seem to be taking a lot of time and effort for the community to build?

Speaker 15 But again, you've got quite a lot of diversity. So

Speaker 15 the sort of the small end of the scale, you've got clusters of maybe one or two smallish buildings.

Speaker 15 Imagine something that might be five meters across, you know, maybe a couple of posts holding up a simple thatched roof. Something that they like to do is dig themselves what we call a pit house.

Speaker 15 A pit house. A pit house.
A Tatiana jucutia. Exactly what that means, a pit house.
We're used to pit houses in Europe with the Anglo-Saxons.

Speaker 1 Yes, basically modern for us ancients people.

Speaker 15 Absolutely.

Speaker 15 But we know, if you go to sites like West Stowe, we know from experimental archaeology that these people weren't living in the pit, but the pit was just that they'd put a wooden floor above the pit, and then the pit was used for other purposes.

Speaker 15 In the Jomon buildings, many of them are pits that have been dug in the ground, and they were living in those pits.

Speaker 15 And they've got, some of them have got quite elaborate entranceways. You'll often find a hearth, a fireplace.

Speaker 15 in the in the base you'll find traces of bed-like structures a little bit like what we find at scarabrae i suppose so you've got those they're not made out of stone but we think that they were they were there with probably earth and a sort of a range of material culture from those buildings as well so that would be the small ones and then the biggest settlements the largest one we know about so far is a site called sannai mariyama it's up in aomori right at the northern tip of honshu that main island and um we think that that site about a thousand buildings so far have been recovered from that site.

Speaker 1 That's a big town, basically.

Speaker 15 Well, you said it. That site was occupied for at least 1,900 years.
That's as long as London's been occupied.

Speaker 15 There seem to have been recent work has suggested that there were sort of varying levels of intensity of occupation, maybe some gaps, maybe people going away.

Speaker 15 But there seems to have been quite a level of settlement planning, zoning, if you like. So you've got areas where you've got clusters of buildings that look like family residences.

Speaker 15 You've got some very large buildings, which they describe as long houses. You've got what looks like a street along which are aligned some adult burials, which are really interesting.

Speaker 15 And you've also got a huge middle. Now it's described as a midden area.
Now, this is problematic.

Speaker 15 I think this is really interesting. You know, obviously, one of our concerns in modern-day urban settings, how do you get rid of the rubbish?

Speaker 1 Midden-based, because you said the word midden a few times. I mean, these kind of rubbish dumps is this what we think of.

Speaker 15 Well, we use that term, but actually,

Speaker 15 that in itself is a bit misleading because it seems that even when something is broken in in these Jomon periods, they're still paying it some regard and you're maybe a bit more carefully placing it somewhere.

Speaker 15 I would say

Speaker 15 that's rather the rubbish dumps. It's a bit more like our recycling centers.

Speaker 15 If you think of the effort that goes into a well-organized recycling center, one of these at San Nai Mariama is about five meters deep.

Speaker 15 And the way they've got it set up is you can walk through this midden and you walk through it and it towers above your head and it's stuffed full of pottery shirts and so it's great because what you've got there is is a stratigraphy of all the different pottery designs and you can see how the designs change through time that's amazing the other thing that we find is that you do get these monuments in jormon site and at sannai mariyama they found half a dozen massive chestnut tree posts and the bases were were preserved because they were waterlogged and there's been a lot of debate about how this was how this functions.

Speaker 15 Some people think it's a sort of a series of upstanding posts, which may have been aligned on a sort of a view line across to some of the local mountains, which in turn may have been aligned on mid-winter, mid-summer ideas, things like that, which I think is actually really, rather interesting.

Speaker 15 A lot of the other settlements, not San Diego Median, but many of the other settlements have a kind of a circular pattern to them.

Speaker 15 with a sort of a central space in the middle, which may be where you've got burials or there's different activities taking place there.

Speaker 15 You've then got outside that central circular-ish pattern, you've then got a sort of a residential zone,

Speaker 15 and beyond that zone, you've then got storage facilities, storage pits, raised floor storage facilities.

Speaker 15 And beyond that, you've then got your kind of your middens, if you like.

Speaker 15 But again, not really rubbish dumps, but they're places where things that are no longer being used are placed on the peripheries of the settlement.

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Speaker 1 You mentioned circles there and prehistoric. I can't help but think about certain monuments that are round and circular.
And you've already mentioned places like Orkney.

Speaker 1 And you were talking about building the great monuments and you think about the community effort of that.

Speaker 1 And, you know, sometimes you associate that with farming communities, but obviously not with the Jamon, which is once again really interesting.

Speaker 1 Do we see the equivalent then of stone circles in prehistoric Japan from the Jamon period?

Speaker 15 Well, we really do. And in fact, what I love about it, the Japanese name for them is Kanjo Resiki.
which means kind of circular shaped or arc shaped arrangements of standing stones.

Speaker 15 But in Japanese, there's two ways of writing, well, several ways of writing, but you can either write using these kanji and Japanese, or there's a lot of foreign loan words, and there's a special script for those foreign loan words called katakana.

Speaker 15 And the other word for stone circle is ston sakaru, which is stone circle rendered into this katakana form of Japanese. There are many, maybe

Speaker 15 how many about, maybe 70 or so sites across Japan. where these supposed stone circles have been constructed.

Speaker 15 A couple of years ago we worked with English Heritage and we organized a special exhibition at Stonehenge about these Japanese stone circles and it was loads of fun because they're about the same time, about 3000 BC as when they start up.

Speaker 15 And the stones at Stonehenge obviously in Avebury and the British stone circles are massive, they're megalithic.

Speaker 15 The Japanese ones in a way that I always think is entirely appropriate are quite small so they're kind of they're kind of miniature stone circles i suppose in terms of overall scale, so the diameter of these circles of stone settings are very similar to some of our British stone circles.

Speaker 15 And some of the functions as well seem to be a little bit similar.

Speaker 15 So we now know, for example, that Stonehenge, if you believe Mike Parker Pearson, was really the place where the dead lived, or where the dead were.

Speaker 15 And we know that many of the Japanese Jomon stone circles are actually funerary monuments as well.

Speaker 15 And what you've got is settings of stone set above burial pits, where unfortunately, due to those acidic soils that we talked about earlier, the bones have often disappeared, but you can still see the traces of what was there originally.

Speaker 1 I mean, and one of the other things I always find so interesting with stone circles that I've done a bit of work in the past, I must stress a bit, there are many more archaeologists who are better than me at it, like Professor Jane Downs, et cetera, on Orkney and looking like the Ring of Brodger, that massive stone circle, and then analysing, when you look at the stones up close, how there are different types of stones from different particular quarries.

Speaker 1 And some of these quarries on Orkney are like eight miles away. I know Stonehenge, they're further away.
But do we see that similar thing with these stone circles in Japan?

Speaker 1 Do we know the sources of these stones and are they taken? Are they transported from far away?

Speaker 15 We do and they're not transported anything like the distances at Stonehenge but they're brought from sometimes several kilometers away.

Speaker 15 And there are many hundreds, if not thousands, of these stones are brought. And some of them are really quite big.
And you can go to museums, you can try and pick them up.

Speaker 15 They're kind of river cobbles, I suppose.

Speaker 15 And the largest ones would be maybe you know a meter or something no half a meter in diameter something like that there's some really interesting work going on and perhaps the most famous of the japanese stone circles is a site called oyu in akita prefecture up on the japan seacoast of of honshu where they've been using machine learning to try and understand the original colours of the stones because these stones have changed color over time.

Speaker 15 They're sort of mainly a sort of greeny, greeny-bluey. But some of the stone circles they seem to be selecting for stones of a particular colour, and which is interesting.

Speaker 15 So some more redder ones or some whiter ones. So we're just at the beginning of trying to understand all of this.

Speaker 15 And the work we were doing with Stonehenge was great because, of course, that was a great inspiration for looking into this in more detail.

Speaker 15 But yes, I would say that the Jomon people were deliberately selecting stones from particular sources that were particular colours and of particular sizes, which isn't bad for hunter-gatherers.

Speaker 1 I want to ask about ceramics, because I know you've done a lot of work around ceramics and seems we've got a lot surviving, but what different types of ceramics and earthenware do we see throughout the Jomon period and what different functions did they serve?

Speaker 15 Yeah, you're right. There's a wonderful range and some of them are very striking and look as if they could have been made yesterday and designed yesterday.

Speaker 15 So the basic Jomon container is actually a cooking pot. And we know they're cooking pots because you find carbonized residues inside.
And there's a whole lot of really interesting work.

Speaker 15 Oliver Craig and his colleagues up in York have been doing some fantastic work analysing those food remains in recent years. But you also get a range of other really fascinating ceramic forms.

Speaker 15 So they start out as being cooking pots. So those earliest ones seem to have been cooking pots and they seem to have been cooking up perhaps some of the world's oldest fish stock.

Speaker 15 which is entirely right. If you're learning about Japanese cuisine, you know that dashi is a really important basic ingredient and that's basically fish stock.

Speaker 15 So they've been using that for for 20,000 years or so.

Speaker 15 As you make your way through the Jomon period, you get more serving vessels. Some of the most distinctive ones are kind of spouted serving vessels that look rather like modern-day teapots.

Speaker 15 You find some lovely little cups and things, so clearly serving becomes important there. Some of the ceramics are used as burial urns.
Sometimes they functioned as storage vessels before that.

Speaker 15 Some of them are incredibly highly decorated, mainly abstract decorations, but on occasion, you get some representational decorations on them as well, which are a lot of fun.

Speaker 15 Faces and things like that. And there's a whole tradition which probably relates to that of what they call the dogu, which are ceramic figurines.

Speaker 1 I mean, Simon, I know you've done a lot of work on these, but explain to us what are these dogu figurines?

Speaker 1 Because they look, when you type them into any search engine, they look absolutely remarkable.

Speaker 15 They're amazing. So there's about 20, 25,000 of these things or fragments thereof have been found around Japan over the last 150 years.

Speaker 15 They take all different forms, but they're and they're based on the human form, but they don't look like real people. And so they're an abstracted version of the human form, I guess.

Speaker 15 Some of them have got really elaborate hairdos. Some of them seem to have traces of tattooing.

Speaker 15 Some of them seem to be wearing clothes. There's a big argument about whether they're male or female.
Are they mother goddesses? Are they toys?

Speaker 15 There's a long tradition, there's a contemporary tradition which I particularly like about, which I think I'm intrigued about with these dogu figures these days, which is in Japan for Girls' Day, which happens on the 3rd of March, all girls will put out what they call their Hina Matsuri or their Girls' Day dolls, and they represent all the different levels of Japanese society.

Speaker 15 And we did a couple of exhibitions with these dogu figures a few years ago. And as one of them, we did some survey work amongst young Japanese women to find out what they thought of these dolls.

Speaker 15 Because a lot these days, people go, ah, dogu, they look look really cute. So the whole cuteness thing is really big in contemporary Japan.

Speaker 15 We were sort of going, you know, they don't necessarily look so cute because some of these dogu figures that looks like some of them's got mouths open, look as if they're screaming, and some of them have had sticks stuffed down their mouths and right down through their bodies in pen of their behind.

Speaker 15 And you kind of go, you know, this is not necessarily so cute.

Speaker 15 And the girls came back to us and all of them said, you know, those Hina dolls that we have to put out every year, we're pretty anxious about them. They're They're a bit scary.