Prehistoric Japan

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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.
But this stone circle is being built thousands of miles away on another group of islands. We know them today as Japan.
It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and today we're exploring the story of prehistoric Japan.
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 Jomon culture, which lasted over 10,000 years. Now the lion's share of this interview will be about the Jomon, as there is a wealth of archaeological material surviving about these people and the incredibly diverse hunter-gatherer lifestyle that they mastered.
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.
Simon Kaner from the University of East Anglia. Simon is an expert on prehistoric Japan with a particular focus on the Jomon and he was an absolute joy to interview.
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. Simon, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast today.
It's a pleasure to be here. What a topic.
Japanese archaeology. Simon, first off, it's incredible.
And secondly, I did not realise just how much archaeological work has already been done. That's revealing so much about Japan's prehistory.
There's a huge amount. Archaeology in Japan really kicked off.
It's getting on for 150 years ago now. 150 years, wow.

When an American zoologist kind of blagged his way into a job in the University of Tokyo.

He was one of a generation of foreign specialists who were employed by the new Meiji government.

And he'd got interested in archaeology, reading Darwin. And he'd been working with a chap called Charles Putnam in the American Southwest.
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. And when he arrived in Japan, there's a really lovely story here 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 shimbashi station before they built tokyo station and as he came along on this railway which actually was designed by a british engineer called edward mor Morrell, the story goes, he lent out the window and they went through a new cutting, one of the new cuttings.
And he saw all these white things falling out of the cutting and he recognized them as shells. And he recognized it as a probable shell midden.
So a year or so after he had arrived, he went back to this place called Oomori, which these days is on the monorail from Haneda Airport into central Tokyo. And he undertook the first ever, what are described as Western-style scientific excavations in Japan.
But actually, there was a tradition going right back a couple of hundred years back into the Edo period, when the shoguns were in control, when a lot of people were fascinated by things they were finding around them, in the environment around them. 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 what they call the age of the gods. But Morse's work really laid the foundations for 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, Simon, but it feels like when someone mentions history in Japan, you think of the samurai and stuff like that, you don't think immediately 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 centres of some of the biggest cities in Japan today, which is quite mesmerising.
It's quite amazing to think. Oh, absolutely.
And I had a bit of fun with this. 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 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 shoguns established it as their capital I'm sorry is that 16th 17th centuries 1603 yeah 1603 okay yeah and before that was just a sort of fishing villages and a really undeveloped part of japan the initial capital was down in what is now kyoto called heian the capital of imperial peace heavenly peace sorry so i thought oh this is exciting tim's written a book that's going to cover some of the prehistory as well, but he didn't.
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.
And you know, Tokyo, biggest city in the world these days, population, I don't know, 38 million or something crazy like that, and has seen massive development, especially since 1945, 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 so it's like you know a lot of it has actually already been excavated but there are a few really tantalizing bits left and just i think it was this year last year the british embassy in tokyo which got the best address in tokyo it's called number one tokyo it's just behind the imperial palace which was the the edo castle which was the castle built by the shoguns and it's where the emperor lives these days this land behind it and the british embassy has been there ever since the 1860s. It's been there since Morse's time, actually.
Lovely. They've got beautiful gardens, 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. Of course, this is a land that hadn't been disturbed, right in the middle of Tokyo, hadn't been disturbed for over 150 years really and they sold it to a property of 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 and it operates on the polluter pays principle or the developer pays 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

archeology or decide,

you know,

come up with some kind of wonderful in situ engineering solution.

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 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 but in Japan if you discover something interesting you have to have what they call the the Genchi Setsumeikai. It's the it's the on-site explanation to the public because that seems a really important part of the process as it is sometimes here but they didn't want to do that because they wanted to sort of keep it and there was a huge a huge scandal in the newspapers about uh 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. And that area of Tokyo called Shinagawa, now anybody who's been on the bullet train probably come across Shinagawa, it's where the bullet train first bumps into the Yamanote line, which is the circle line that goes all around Tokyo.
They found a three kilometer long stretch of the original embankment as part of a major redevelopment of that whole area. And I got a letter a couple of years ago from the president of the Japanese Archaeological Association saying, dear Professor Kaino, we understand you're interested in Japanese archaeology.
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? And he said, well, we're sure that in the UK, that's what you would do. So I had to write back and I said, well, I'm very happy to write to Prime Minister Suga, but please be aware that it is unlikely that in the UK we would preserve the whole lot.
We might try and preserve a bit of it. But anyway, it made that the then Prime Minister, Prime Minister Suga, had to go and visit the site.
And I believe there are still plans afoot for how much fit they can preserve underneath all the new developments that are going up. 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? 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.
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. 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.
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. So in China, we know we've got ancestral hominids back to way over a million years ago.
And in Korea, on the Korean Peninsula, indeed, there are slightly controversial, but there are thought to be lower Paleolithic sites on the Korean Peninsula as well. We haven't got anything like that in Japan, despite the fact that over a course of about 25 years in the late 20th century, so over 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 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. That'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. And of course, we've got hundreds of volcanoes all around Japan and they've been erupting all through this sequence.
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. So that rather blew the reputation of Paleolithic archae archaeology which is a real shame because there is amazing paleolithic archaeology in japan 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 and one of the biggest sources up in hokkaido at a place called shirataki 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.
That site has just been made a special site of national importance, which makes it, in Japanese, it's a kokuhou, which means national treasure, and that's the highest level of cultural designation you can get in japan it's like becoming lord obsidian site i suppose this would be as close as i can get people get to be ningen kokuhuo 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 so that was rather exciting 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 so we're talking about ice or snow covering the whole of the islands are we talking about right with glaciers and things like that 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 metres below what they are today. Okay.
Now, imagine today we're talking about sea level rise of maybe half a metre. So there's a very different world.
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 of the japanese archipelago was connected to the east asian mainland by land bridges 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, and you could walk from Hokkaido, possibly into Sakhalin, and then into what is now the far east of Russia. 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. And the other thing that we're finding that I think is really exciting, and this is what kicks off the Jomun period, is we've got these phenomenally early dates for pottery, for ceramic containers.
We know that in Europe we've got ceramic figurines have been made what around 20, 30,000 years ago, places like Dognivestunici in the Czech Republic and things like that. But that's a relatively short-lived phenomenon.
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.

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. What these people are are hunters and fishers living in Pleistocene landscapes who are, for some reason, making pottery we find them in various parts across East Asia.
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.
It's mind-blowing in that regard. 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.
So those are the various types of artefacts you've got. You mentioned lithics, so stone tools, ceramics.
I must also ask about burials. Do we have many bones surviving and is there DNA analysis that's also revealing much about these people and how they lived? Great question and actually really timely that you ask that right now.
So DNA analysis is taking off in Japan in a really big way. The earliest actual skeletal materials we've got are from the southern islands of the Japanese archipelago, what is now Okinawa Prefecture.
Up until 1873, it was part of an independent kingdom called the Kingdom of the Wurikus. And there are human remains from around about 18,000, 19,000 years ago, modern, fully modern human beings, Homo sapiens sapiens, which seem to have fallen down some kind of trevasse, and they've been preserved down there.
There aren't very many other Paleolithic human remains. However, a colleague of mine at Kokugakuin University in Tokyo, a man called Professor Yasuhiro Taniguchi, he's actually the person who discovered the earliest pottery fragments at a site called Odae Yamamoto in Aomori, right up in the northern tip of Japan.
And he did the first AMS dating of those pot sherds. And so it's 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.
And that's the big island in the middle, biggest island of the japanese archipelago where tokyo and osaka are located the two biggest cities and the site he's digging is called the ei and it's it's a rock shelter site in the central mountains and he's been finding a whole series of burials which seem to date around about eight to ten thousand years ago 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 and it's phenomenal the way he's got it all set up i i was there with a couple of colleagues and we were in really we've never seen such an amazingly well organized excavation they're doing all the of analyses that one would hope, 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.
This is going to be some of the best evidence that we've got for the earliest peoples living in the archipelago. 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 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 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.
So you have to have particular circumstances. So rock shelters and cave sites are one of them.
And we know that fortunately, these prehistoric people very considerably buried their dead in some of those places. But 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.
But from the Jomon we find a lot of human remains from shell middens, because shell is a calcium, obviously, very alkali, and that offsets the effect of the acid soils around about. And so we find there are some great burial sites with Jomon, many with all sorts of wonderful grave goods and things as well.
Before we go and focus on the Jomon period and the various aspects of it, from what they hunted, obviously farming, or the absence of farming, that's really interesting, possery, burial, and so on. Just one last question on those first humans that we know that arrive on the Japanese archipelago.
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.
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? 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. 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. If it's there in china why isn't it there in japan and in fact it was that desire that drove the it was a 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 talking about earlier on.
And you can go there now, they've designed the museum in the shape of lovely worked stone tool flake. It's the most amazing building.
There's some fantastic museums, 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, they were able to 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 and you've got you can tie up the changing stone tools with the the layering that develops the different stratigraphy that you find in the lures that makes up the Kanto plane.
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. 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. 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? I'd like to think they're there somewhere. It's so interesting with Paleolithic and Pleistocene, the end of the Ice Age period, and how archaeology, even in Britain as well, it's more difficult to see.
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 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? Jomon, the Japanese word, is made up of two Chinese characters, because you write Japanese using Chinese ideographs, called kanji.
And jaw means rope, and mon means pattern. So jawmon 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 Sheldon.
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 cord-mark pottery. So that's what Jomon means.
There's a discussion in Japan at the moment about whether we should talk about a Jomon period, or a Jomon culture indeed even Jomon people because they would not have identified themselves as Jomon people to themselves. So it's not like a unified people we shouldn't be thinking it in that way okay.
Until you talk to in Japan I you know my own view on this is it gets a bit complicated but these Jomon pots or these cord marked pots are made for about 10,000 years. The interesting thing is that the pots that I discovered when I was talking about, those early ones from Odayamamoto, in fact, around that period, there's no cord marking on them.
They're plain pots. 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 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 and that happens sometime in the first millennium BC.
Hold on so the Jomon period if you say like 10,000 BC to 1,000 BC that's 9,000 years, Simon, for, you know, one name. That's a huge amount of time.
I'm guessing there's more complexities in it. 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 a sort of you know like the 10 000 years for the reich 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 German periods so that makes it a bit easier but they've also Japanese archaeologists are phenomenal when it comes to identifying different pottery styles 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.
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, 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 so so yes there's a lot of diversity in the jomon period and i 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 cord-mark pottery, that does seem to be a tradition that continues for that long period of time. Strap in.
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for.

A big question is how did the gemon live okay yeah that's a really great question what were they all up to for that long period of time so i like to think that they don't really fit into many of their categories that we're used to dealing with in European prehistory. So they are broad spectrum

foragers, if you like. They're exploited, they seem to be exploiting the vast majority of wild

resources that are available to them. 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 the, what we describe these

days as the affordances of those natural resources. 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. I didn't know that, Simon.
And actually, can you explain to us what exactly is lacquer? I know the word lacquerware, so is there these types types of ceramics 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 and then you can add pigments and colors and then you'll paint it onto the surface of all kinds of different materials.

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.

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

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.

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

And so these Jomon communities, if they are master foragers, as you've highlighted there,

should we label them that well-known phrase, hunter-gatherers?

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. 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.
And it also is predicated on a notion of the rest of the world as being divided into wild and domesticated i suppose and indeed there's a lot of discussions around the neolithic about to what extent is this all about domestication the jomon really blurs all of those categories i think because what we find is that they're not i i don't believe it's possible to call them farmers 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.
It's rather a different thing that we're used to, say, in Europe, where they're just scratching know scratching into some ground with some arts or something like that 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 what we find in japan is there's been great intensification of on certain of certain wild food resources at different periods i guess the use of lacquer would be one way of seeing that. We know that nuts are 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. So were 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 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 so we've got some of the earliest evidence for domesticated dog anywhere from about 11 000 years ago 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 and then wild boar and there's a big discussion these days about the domestication of the wild

boar and the pig and we get the example you find wild boar these days are not found 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 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? 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 dugout canoe with one.
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. Simon, it's one thing, isn't it, that we often associate the domestication of certain animals with sedentary societies, with farming societies.
But 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 Siberia, so in East Asia area.
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? Big into plants, big into these certain animals like boar, dogs as well.
we think that i mean the jomon would they have been aware of agriculture happening in east asia at the same time but is this very much a choice 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 it's a really interesting question 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 i'm sorry i'm bringing in the european mindset here so you can understand it's really interesting it's actually really important 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 came about now during the jomon it does seem that we've got very early village type communities developing 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 are supposed to do was live in sedentary communities 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. I had real 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 and what does it mean how many years do you have to stay there before you count a sedentary you know here in the 21st century we lead a particularly sedentary lifestyle because we've got chairs to sit on and we spend too much time sitting on them or on our sofas and we don't move around enough.

And we've kind of to sit on and we spend too much time sitting on them or on 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 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.

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

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.

So they were getting out of their home ranges or whatever we talk about in terms of hunter-gatherers.

And they're building dwellings. They're putting a lot of effort into building buildings.
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. They must have, you know, they're monumental.
And they were paying a lot of, they're cultural artifacts. And there's a lot of variation in those buildings, just as there is in the pottery.
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. Well, let's explore that now.
Let's talk about Jomon's settlement, Simon, and what you see in these various types of buildings. What should we be imagining with a Jomon 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? But again, you've got quite a lot of diversity.
So at the small end of the scale, you've got clusters of maybe one or two smallish buildings imagine something that might be five meters across you know maybe a couple of posts holding up a simple thatched roof something they like to do is dig themselves uh what we call a pit house a pit house a tatiana duke or she is exactly what that means a pit house we used to pit houses in europe with the Anglo-Saxons. Yes, basically modern for us ancient people.
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, they'd put a wooden floor above the pit, and then the pit was used for other purposes.
In the Jomon buildings, many of them are pits that have been dug in the ground and they were living in those pits and they've got some of them have got quite elaborate entrance ways you'll often find a hearth a fireplace in the in the base you'll find traces of bed-like structures a little bit like what we find at scarabray i suppose so you've got those they're not made out of stone but we think that they were they were with probably earth. And a sort of a range of material culture from those buildings as well.
So that'll be the small ones. And then the biggest settlements, the largest one we know about so far is a site called Sandai Mariyama.
It's up in Aomori, right at the northern tip of Honshu, that main island. And we think that that site, about a thousand buildings so far have been recovered from that site that's a big town basically well you said it that site was occupied for at least 1900 years that's as long as london's been occupied there seems to have been recent workers suggested that there were sort of varying levels of intensity of occupation maybe some gaps maybe going away but there seems to have been quite a level of settlement planning as a zoning if you like so you've got areas where you've got clusters of buildings that look like family residences 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 is really interesting.
And you've also got a huge, now it's described as a midden area. Now this is problematic, I think this is really interesting, you know, one of our concerns in modern day urban settings, how do you get rid of the rubbish? Midden, because you've said the word midden a few times, I mean, this kind of rubbish dumps, is this what we of well we use that term but actually it's it's that in itself is a bit misleading because it seems that even when something is broken in these jomon periods they're still paying it some regard and you're maybe a bit more carefully placing it somewhere i would say rather that's rather than the rubbish dumps it's a bit more like our recycling centers if you think of the effort that goes into a a well-organized recycling center one of these at sannai mariyama is about five meters deep and the way they've got it set up there you can walk through this midden and you walk through it and it towers above your head and it's stuffed full of pottery shirtserds 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 Sandai Mariamma they found half a dozen massive chestnut tree posts and the bases were preserved because

they were waterlogged.

And there's been a lot of debate about how this was how this functions 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 midw, midsummer ideas, things like that, which I think is actually rather interesting. A lot of the other settlements, not Sandai Mediam, but many of the other settlements have a kind of a circular pattern to them 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.
You've then got outside that central circular-ish pattern, you've then got a sort of a residential zone. And beyond that zone, you've then got storage facilities, storage pits, raised floor storage facilities.
And beyond that, you've then got your kind of your middens, if you like. 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 settlements.
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Well, we really do.

And in fact, what I love about it, the Japanese name for them is kanjo reseki,

which means kind of circular shaped or arc shaped arrangements of standing stones.

But in Japanese, there's two ways of writing, well, several ways of writing,

but you can either write using these kanji in Japanese,

or there's a lot of foreign loanwords. And there's a special script for those foreign loanwords called katakana.
And the other word for stone circle is stone sakaru, which is stone circle rendered into this katakana form of Japanese. There are many, maybe, how many about, maybe 70 or so sites across Japan where these supposed stone circles have been constructed.
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 3,000 BC is when they start up.
And the stones at Stonehenge, obviously, in Avebury and the British stone circles are massive. They're megalithic.
The Japanese ones, in a way that I always think is entirely appropriate, are quite small. So they're kind of miniature stone circles, I suppose.
In terms of overall scale, so the diameter of these circles of stone sitt are very similar to some of our British stone circles. And some of the functions as well seem to be a little bit similar.
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. And we know that many of the Japanese Jomon stone circles are actually funerary monuments as well and what you've got is settings of stone set above burial pits and where unfortunately due to those acidic soils we talked about earlier the bones have often disappeared but you can still see the traces of what was was there originally i mean and one of the other things i always find so interesting with stone circles said 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 etc on orkney and looking like the ring of brodga that massive stone circle and then analyzing when you look at the stones up close how there are different types of stones from different particular quarries and some of these quarries on orkney are about like eight miles away i know stonehenge they're further away but do we see that similar thing with these stone circles in Japan? Do we know the sources of these stones and are they taken? Are they transported from far away? We do.
And they're not transported anything like the distances at Stonehenge, but they're brought from sometimes several kilometres away. And there are many hundreds, if not thousands of these stones are brought.
And some of them are really quite big you can go to museums you can try and pick them up they're kind of river cobbles i suppose 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 perhaps the most famous of the japanese stone circles a site called oiyu in akita prefecture up on the Japan seacoast of Honshu, where they've been using machine learning to try and understand the original colors of the stones because these stones have changed color over time. 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 color, which is interesting, so some more redder ones or some whiter ones.
So we're just at the beginning of trying to understand all of this, 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. 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.
I want to ask about ceramics, because I know you've done a lot of work around ceramics, and it 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? Yeah, you're right. There's a wonderful range, some of them are very striking and look as if they could have been made yesterday and designed yesterday.
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. Oliver Craig and his up in york have been doing some fantastic work analyzing those food remains in recent years but you also get a range of other really fascinating ceramic forms 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 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 so they've been using that for 20,000 years or so.

As you make your way through the Jomon period you get more serving vessels and some of the

most distinctive ones are kind of spouted serving vessels that look rather like modern day teapots.

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've functioned as storage vessels before that some of them are incredibly highly decorated mainly abstract decorations but on occasion you get some representational decorations on them as well which which are a lot of fun. 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. I mean, Simon, I know you've done a lot of work on these, but explain to us, what are these Dogu figurines? Because they look, when you type them into any search engine, they look absolutely remarkable.
They're amazing. So there's about 20,000, 20 25 000 of these things or fragments thereof have been found around japan over the last 150 years 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 some of them have got really elaborate really elaborate hairdos.
Some of them seem to have traces of tattooing. 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? There's a long tradition of the contemporary tradition, which I particularly like, which I think I'm intrigued about with these Dogu figures these days, which is 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 and we did a couple of exhibitions with these doggo figures um a few years ago and as one of them we did some we did some survey work amongst young japanese women to find out what they thought of these dolls because a lot these days people go ah dogoo they they look really cute so the whole cuteness thing is really big in contemporary japan we were sort of going you know we don't necessarily look so cute because some of these dogoo figures that looks like someone's got mouths open looks as they're screaming and some of them have had sticks stuffed down their mouths and right down through their bodies and out of their behinds and you kind of go yeah this is not necessarily so cute 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 a bit scary and i said what do you mean if you don't pay due respect to these things we were brought up and so if you don't wrap them up very carefully afterwards and put them away in their boxes and everything if you disrespect those things wonderful indeterminate bad things will happen to you so i think actually maybe we should understand the dogoo figures in a similar kind of way and in fact there's some earlier archaeologists have commented on this and said you know we tend to think these things are all nice and jolly and you know lovely modern artwork but actually they were probably considered to have very considerable powers that would have impacted on the lives of the people that were making and using them last question before we finish we've covered largely the jomon period and said more than 10,000 years.
So well done, Simon, first off there. The big question, how does it end? And what happens in Japan at that time? Yeah, it's really interesting.
There's a big change that happens during the first millennium BC. So during what for us is the Iron Age, I suppose, and Roman period.
and it's when wet rice farming arrives from the east asian continent from korea from from southern china and if you go to japan today the landscape across japan you'll see paddy fields growing rice wherever you go and there's a kind of an assumption that rice is the staple of japanese cuisine and that without rice you're not properly Japanese if you don't eat rice sort of a couple of times a day. There's a big argument about this and the actual role that rice really does play in Japanese history and there's some really interesting historical work on this as kind of subverting that narrative and that in itself is having an impact on the discussion around the appearance of rice farming in Japan.
You mentioned a few a little while ago, you said, so did Jomon people know about farming? Did they know about rice farming, but they chose not to take it up? I like to think that that's the case, and we're working on that. And we're looking at questions of resistance to rice farming being introduced as well.
Resistance to rice, love it. It's complicated, but it's a set of questions in there that I think we really need to be picking.
And there's a great group of guys in Cambridge at the moment, led by Enrico Kramer, and they've got a nice EU-funded project looking at all of this. And that's producing some really interesting stuff.
So we're getting into some of the nitty-gritty of what was really going on. Rice farming arrives from the continent.
There's a big discussion about who brought the rice. Was it incomers? Was it migrants? Or is it local Jomon people adopting rice farming? There's a lot of questions around that.
Did the Japanese language start around that time? Until relatively recently, to be honest with you, until discoveries like Sandai Mariam in the 1980s and 1990s, it was felt that Jomon people didn't really have much of a place in the Japanese historical ancestry. Japanese people like to sort of see themselves as rice farmers, the metal workers because metallurgy comes in at the same time.
And the Jomon was seen as some kind of aboriginal primitive forebears. Now that's completely changed in the the last 20 or 30 years during which time there's been what they describe as a jomon boom or an interest in jomon culture and jomon is seen as a different way of inhabiting the japanese archipelago than the incredible urbanized hyper modern wonderful in one way is terrible in other ways phenomenon that we see today and it's seen as something which is much closer to nature i suppose different set of social principles in operation and it's seen as an alternative way of living in the same environment now whether those people knew about farming and chose not to take it up is an argument that i think is really interesting one to pursue the joe if you talk to people like professor kobayashi tatsuo who is the the leading living joe monarchy on this 87 years old now but he will say that yeah the joe mon lifestyle kind of dies out during that first millennium and is replaced by this farming farming way of life which is a very different thing, then there's a lot of discussion around exactly what that means.
Should we be regarding the Jomon as the people that have died out in the archipelago? Or are there continuing traits from Jomon culture which have informed what happens in later Japanese culture? For example, that love of the ceramic tradition, which you see very much manifested in modern Japan. And we have only just scratched the surface.
There's so much else we could do, whether it's connections of East Asia. As you say, the origins of rice is another interesting one.
Maritime connections. We did an episode in the past all about the oldest known shark attack when that news came out from a German bearer, which is in the ancient archive too.
So it's wonderful now to go back to prehistoric Japan. But Simon, it just goes to me to say, absolutely wonderful.
Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Pleasure.
Thank you very much indeed. Nice to talk to you.
Well, there you go. There was Dr.
Simon Kainer giving you an overview of prehistoric Japan with a particular focus on the Jomon culture. But as you've heard, there is still so much we could talk to Simon about with prehistoric Japan.
There is still so much about prehistoric Japan that we can cover in future episodes. So no doubt we will return to the story of ancient Japan in the future.
In the meantime, thank you for listening to this episode this episode of the ancients please follow this show on spotify or wherever you get your podcasts it really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favor don't forget you can also listen to us and all of history hits podcasts at free and watch hundreds of tv documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com slash subscribe as a a special gift, you can also get 50% off your

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