This episode kicks off a multi-part series on the Jomon period.  Known to some as Japan's Neolithic period, and named for the distinctive cord-marked pottery found from sites of this time, the Jomon period in Japan spans thousands of years as humans on the archipelago moved from a nomadic to a more settled lifestyle, yet still before any widespread use of full scale agriculture.  In this series we'll examine the early transitional phase into the growth of Jomon culture, we'll then look at the boom period in the Middle Jomon, and then the consolidation into northern and southern regions in the Late and Final Jomon periods, before the coming of the Yayoi.

This episode will focus mainly on the transition into the Jomon period, the Incipient, Initial, and Early periods.  We'll look at the life of the people of this time as well as their homes, rituals, and food.  We'll discuss technological achievements beyond just pottery, such as lacquerware, and we'll see the importance of fishing for coastal settlements.

Next episode we'll look at the boom period in the Middle Jomon, when the Kanto and Chubu regions grew to their most populous, ever.

For more go to: https://sengokudaimyo.com/podcast/episode-2

Rough Transcripts

(Auto-transcription courtesy of listener, Zach)

Greetings, and welcome to Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan. My name is Joshua, and this is Episode 2, the Jomon Period, Part 1. That's right, we're going to spend a little bit of time on the Jomon Period. I'm currently estimating about three episodes, but we'll see how it goes. This first episode, I want to dig into the start of the Jomon Period. What was it? How was society changing? And the general evolution of life in the archipelago. We have a lot of information on the daily life of the people at this time, compared to the previous era, including houses, food, cooking, and more. This should help us paint a more fulsome picture, and even delve into some of the regional differences that emerge and change. As a reminder, the period immediately preceding this one was the Paleolithic period. The sea levels were lower, and the temperatures colder than today. People in the islands were living in small nomadic groups. These were hunter-gatherers, living a relatively unpredictable lifestyle where they could easily find themselves subject to adverse conditions beyond their control, such as weather, the migration paths of various animals, etc. Mostly, they would have been concerned about day-to-day existence, and the nomadic lifestyle was not conducive to carrying a lot of extra accoutrements beyond what they absolutely needed. But at the end of that period, the climate began to warm, and we see marked changes in the archaeological record. So what exactly defined the Jomon Period then? Well on the face of it, the Jomon Period is defined by the distinctive cord-marked pottery found at many of the sites from this era. In fact, Jomon means just that, cord-marked. And it refers to the distinctive use of cords or cord-wrapped dowels to impress patterns into the unfired clay. This was a distinctive, though not universal, artistic tradition, and different from the techniques that we see used on the mainland. So not only is it some of the first pottery in Japan, and honestly, the world, but the distinctive cord-marking and other decorative elements set it apart from most other ceramic traditions. Of course, there is a lot more than that, as it is a change in lifestyle on the archipelago, and indicative of a common culture. Or at least related cultures with common cultural elements. Some might even argue that it extends to the Okinawan island chain. That said, nobody just stood up one day and said, "Hey guys, let's start putting this clay together and make some elaborate pots and stuff. And while we're at it, let's change our entire way of living to do just that." The changes we see are more gradual, and it took thousands of years for things to really come together. And, you know, I just want to touch on this span of time for a second, because as we tell this story, timing is important. You know when you're watching the movie, and they need to cram weeks or months of training or travel into only a few minutes of montage? Well, we're going over the historical equivalent of that. Except instead of weeks or months, we are talking about millennia. I mean, from the Roman Empire until today is only a little over, what, 1500-2000 years? Columbus landed in the Americas only 500 years ago? The United States of America hasn't even been around as a nation for 250 years? So in one millennium, a thousand years, we could see the entire history of the United States of America four times over. Every 2000 years is the distance between us today and some Roman troubles back in Palestine. Think of everything that's happened in that time, and how much must have happened between those same spans of time long ago. So keep that in mind as we talk about this period. Now, in part because the period is so large, and so much change occurs from start to finish, it's traditionally broken up into about five or six different sub-periods. To start with, there is the incipient Jomon, from about 14,500 BC until 7-8000 BCE, covering the end of the Pleistocene period. This was the transition period between the Paleolithic to the new culture that we've come to know as the Jomon, though some argue that we aren't quite there yet. In fact, it is the period from about 8000 to 4000 BCE that is known as the "Initial Jomon Period", when we really see things getting started, and where we begin to see cultural diversity expressed through art. Then from there to about 3000 BCE, so only a thousand years or so, we see what we call the "Early Jomon Period", where changing climate and other factors really allow the Jomon culture to take hold and start to build. Well, it's during this period that we see certain ritual elements really come into play. I expect to cover to about that period of the early Jomon in this first episode. In later episodes, we'll talk about the Middle Jomon Period. This is a period of unprecedented growth, and the culture flourished. At least in the Kanto and Chubu Highlands region. Some consider this to be the height of Jomon culture, and we certainly see some of the largest settlements from this period of time. The population of the archipelago hit its zenith, and the art and complexity of this period is really an indication of the prosperity of the people of that time. That only lasted about 2000 years or so before something changed. And we aren't entirely sure what. The populations of the Chubu Highlands and Kanto region dwindled, and other areas became more prominent. By the late and final Jomon Periods, we see a distinct North-South split in the material culture, which seems to indicate two separate cultural areas. These would continue to develop in their own ways up to the introduction of the Yayoi culture, which appears to have been caused by direct influence from the mainland. There are those who argue, even beyond 300 BCE, for an "epijomon" culture in the Tohoku and Hokkaido regions, and we will eventually touch on that as well. So back to our original question. What is the Jomon Period? Well, most properly, the Jomon Period is generally defined as that era that covers the emergence of pottery in Japan until the emergence of full-scale agriculture, particularly wet rice agriculture, generally associated with the Yayoi Period. It is a period where we see sedentary lifestyle emerging in the form of permanent buildings and dwelling places, but the people are still largely reliant on the natural landscape for their subsistence. Besides the distinctive pottery and dwellings, in particular the pit dwellings that are the most common form of building that we have evidence of, there are also massive shell mounds left behind, especially at coastal sites. Shell mounds are pretty much what they sound like, mounds of shells, fish bones, and other detritus piled up over the years. They were basically large trash heaps or middens, and therefore preserve a lot of information about the cultures of the time. These aren't just the trash from a few decades. In some cases, through their size, etc., they show evidence of thousands of years of continuous use. That's a tremendous record on which to base our conclusions compared to the spotty information we have coming out of Paleolithic sites. Unfortunately, by their very nature, we only find these treasure troves at sites that were at or near a coastal resource, where shells were plentiful, meaning we'll need to consider other evidence when we look at more inland locations. Effectively, this period is considered Neolithic, or New Stone Age Japan. In the European model, the Neolithic is typically defined in a couple of ways. First off, the use of polished stone implements, something that we do see in Japan, but we see it much earlier. In fact, we saw ground and polished stone tools from the era typically referred to as the Paleolithic. The other feature of the European Neolithic is the advent of farming, moving society from a nomadic to a sedentary way of life. In fact, for a long time, the popular European model held that natural growth of civilizations was in just this manner. Small family groups of hunter-gatherers would discover the benefits of raising domesticated plants and animals, which would allow them to settle down in permanent settlements, thus becoming "civilized", a word rooted in the Latin "civitas", indicating a city. Of course, any student of world history can look and see this is a very narrow view of how human cultures have evolved and changed over the years. The people of the Central Eurasian steppes domesticated animals and maintained a nomadic lifestyle that roamed across the continent for just one example. And in the case of Japan, we see settlements, but we don't see the key feature that is supposed to anchor it. Agriculture. There is no evidence of large-scale, purposeful agriculture during this period, and yet it is clear that people were living in large, settled communities. That really just emphasizes that this period is its own thing, and we have to be careful about the assumptions we bring to the table about how things might have happened. So, if it wasn't agriculture that allowed people to live more sedentary lives, what was it? This is something we'll be investigating, particularly in this first episode. All right, then. Back to pottery. What is its relationship to the changes we see? Is it a cause or a symptom? Well, the oldest pottery we have found is dated to about 14,500 BCE. It's just fragments, but it is evidence of the technology on the archipelago. And though no longer considered the oldest pottery in the world (currently that title is held by a sherd from about 20,000 years ago found in Shanren caves in the Asian mainland), it is still an amazing innovation for the time. This pottery is from a time when people were still living nomadic lives, for the most part, or at least that's what the archaeological record appears to indicate. And yet, someone gathered the clay and found a way to fire it into earthenware, likely used to store or cook food of some type. Now, this oldest form of pottery, which was found in Odaiyama-moto in Aomori up in the northeast of Honshu, appears to be pretty simple. In fact, some have argued that it doesn't really count as Jomon at all because it lacks the distinctive markings of later Jomon pottery. Because of this, we refer to this period at the end of the Pleistocene as the "incipient" Jomon period, when pottery was still getting started, but the way of life had not significantly changed for most of the people. At least not at the start. This period is usually measured from 14,500 BC to 7,500 BCE or so, and it saw some tremendous shifts all along the archipelago. Now it may not seem like much to us today, but the arrival of pottery was a huge technical achievement. I mean, this is an age before metals, so if you wanted to cook your food, there were no pots or pans. You might have gourds or wooden bowls, but those would burn up in a fire. You could cook food on a spit or even a hot stone. But with pottery, you suddenly had cookware. You had something that can hold liquids such as water, and which can withstand fire. You can now reliably boil water. And that may not seem like much, but it's pretty darn incredible. Not only that, but pottery can take the shape of whatever is needed. I mean, it's like the plastic of its day. Take some clay, form it into what you need, fire it in the oven. Pottery provides an outlet for human creativity to flourish, allowing people to find new solutions to their problems. We take it almost for granted today, but with something like pottery we can now start to boil food and find new ways to cook. New cooking techniques actually expand what can be eaten, as many foods actually require significant preparation before they are edible. It can soften foods, denature poisons, and make tiny seeds and fish edible. It greatly increases what we can eat, and therefore how many people the land can sustain. During this incipient period, we see changes. Besides pottery, we start to see small-scale settlements, with evidence of permanent or semi-permanent housing. These are what are commonly called pit dwellings. The people would dig down into the earth, several feet, forming the basic walls, and then above that we assume there was some kind of roof. It's unclear exactly what these looked like, though based on examples from other parts of the world and locations of postholes inside the pit itself, we can make a conjecture as to what it was probably like. Unfortunately, very few of the roofs and wall structures actually survive, so most of it has to be reconstructed. We assume it was covered in some variant of a thatched roof, supported on the pillars, which probably supported some type of cross beam or internal structure. We also see continued evidence of habitation in natural formations, such as caves and natural rock shelters, but over time these pit dwellings will become the dominant form of shelter, allowing communities to set up just about anywhere in the archipelago. I'll have a few pictures of some reconstructions of these pit dwellings in the show notes on the website if you want to take a look. This will be the primary type of structure we'll see throughout the Jomon period, and we'll even see examples into the Yayoi and Kofun periods. For now, though, they are just scattered examples, only about 10 pit dwellings total from this entire period. As noted before, some people were using caves and other natural shelters, and it's likely that many groups were still living largely nomadic lifestyles, pitching temporary shelters such as tents at their camps. Overall, there are still very few people on the archipelago. It's been estimated that there are only about 20,000 people in the entire island chain, while today there are over 125 million. But the temperatures do start warming, and we'll see the population grow over the next few millennia. Now, in addition to the remains of these buildings, we also see pits that appear to be specifically for storage of some kind. All of this indicates a move toward a more sedentary lifestyle, but it's unclear if this is permanent habitation, or if these are perhaps seasonal locales that are only occupied for a short time. If they are making pottery, then someone has to be there long enough to pull together the clay, build a kiln, and fire the pottery. But that can all still be brought together pretty quickly if necessary. Pottery exists, but stone tools are still much more prevalent, and with most of the stone tools apparently geared towards more hunting than any kind of plant harvesting or processing, it looks like the hunting-gathering nomadic lifestyle is still in existence, at least in part. So this was life for the incipient period, which is really, as I said before, a transition from the old Paleolithic way of life to a new Jomon way of life. And we'll see this throughout history, most of these historical transitions don't happen all at once, but happen gradually over time. In this case, it was still the Stone Age, with a focus on hunting and gathering, but with some more long-term settlements. Slowly, the world around the people of the archipelago was changing, and they adapted to it. In Kyushu, to the south, they started to process more and more plant-based foods, and this spreads to the north over the ensuing centuries along with the climatic changes that were occurring at the same time. We also start to see more permanent settlements, particularly around areas where food is plentiful. Along the coastal regions, we see settlements where the inhabitants start to build up the shell mounds, large piles of discarded shells and other detritus. These shell mounds would not have occurred without regular habitation at sites over multiple years indicating that people are becoming more and more settled. By about 8000-7500 BCE, we are seeing the true beginnings of a more settled culture, and this is often called the "Initial Jomon Period." It's in this period that we really start to see the cord-marked pottery style come into use, but more than that, we see a change in the lives of the people. Compared to 10 pit dwellings from the entire 6500 years of previous incipient period, we have over 200 spread about in communities of 10-30 dwellings each. In addition to the pit dwellings, we also see pits used for storage and pits used for traps. This moves us beyond simply a hunting culture and one that is cultivating the land, returning to certain areas again and again, but probably not roaming as far afield. After all, a pit trap requires that you check on it regularly, and therefore one assumes you must be in general proximity to your traps for them to be effective. That said, there are still some mysteries to be uncovered, as the early pit traps we have found, such as those near New Tomatown, are not necessarily near any identified permanent settlement. It's possible that these would have been built around seasonal hunting grounds or a part of a continuing nomadic tradition where a band would stay camped in a long-term temporary settlement for a period of time. It's just not clear. Now in this initial Jomon period, we also see another member of society join the archipelago. Dogs. Evidence of domesticated canines comes from this period, the first domesticated animals we see on the islands. It's unclear how the first dogs arrived on the archipelago, likely from continental stock, brought over as trade or with new immigrants. We do know that they fast became a part of the culture, and dogs have been part of the archipelago ever since. In fact, from an early period, dogs were important enough to get their own burials, indicating that even from this era, there was a keen bond. These were generally small to medium sized dogs, nothing approaching the Akita, which were specifically bred in the 17th century for hunting bear. Today there are several breeds of Japanese dog, most of which can trace their lineage back to these first canines. While no single breed can claim to be exactly the same as it was back then, after all there were no kennel clubs and the concept of even a breed of dog was pretty foreign through most of Japanese history, they still lay claim to that ancient lineage and are often classed today as ancient breeds. And if you aren't aware, you've probably seen Japanese dogs, at least on the internet. The famous "doge" meme that took off back in 2013 is of a Shiba Inu, one of the extant Japanese breeds, and today there are people who are working to see if they can't re-engineer, through selective breeding of Shiba Inu, a Jomon Shiba, a dog similar to the dogs we find from this period. Another animal that humans were shaping to their own ends were the island's boar populations. While they did not domesticate them in the same way, we do find evidence that they would capture them, move them elsewhere, and then release them. This is particularly noticeable on the islands in the chain south of Tokyo, a slender chain of islands about 287 kilometers south of modern Tokyo, too far for pigs to have traveled even when the seas were lower. Jomon people, however, were clearly making their way in their dugout canoes to Oshima and down to Hachijoshima. As they went, they took pigs with them and dropped them off on the islands. This is not too dissimilar to the tactics used by European explorers in the 16th to 18th centuries, when they dropped off pigs and similar animals so that future sailors would have a ready supply of meat when they returned. Now I don't know about you, but I've got a pretty hard time imagining setting off in a canoe with a few wild boar, even young ones, for a journey anywhere near as long as it would take to get from one island to the other. But that appears to have been exactly what happened. Now speaking of boats, this is the period when we find our earliest evidence of fish hooks. Now it's possible that there were earlier fish hooks and they just haven't survived, but from this period we can tell that people were definitely fishing and they certainly knew the oceans and what they produced. Even back in the Jomon period, fugu, or puffer fish, was being eaten. I mean, think about what that means. Even today you need to be licensed to legally prepare it, and if a mistake cuts the fish the wrong way and even a pinhead worth of toxin is in the fish, it can be fatal. Forty to fifty people a year are affected by fugu poisoning, with some dying, even with all of our modern medicine. Meanwhile the Jomon people were preparing this fish with nothing more than obsidian knives to work with. They obviously had both the requisite knowledge and skill to properly prepare it. And by the way, boiling wouldn't have helped. In fact, boiling would likely increase the toxin's potency. Of course, it wasn't just puffer fish in the ocean. They then made regular runs back to the streams of their birth, just as they do today. And there is also evidence that the Jomon people were catching bluefin tuna, though they probably were cutting it up and drying it for later rather than slicing it into sashimi right then and there. In fact, along with bonito, which we also find, they were probably drying it out in the sun and it's possible they had already worked out how to make the wood-like blocks of dried fish for katsuobushi, one of the key ingredients in many Japanese broths and seasonings even today. Now it isn't just pottery or fishing innovations that were made at this time. Our oldest lacquerware also comes from this initial Jomon period, from a site at Kakinoshima up in Hokkaido. This is a complex process, requiring one to make cuts in the urushi, or lacquer tree, and gather the sap, then clarify it. It requires specific temperature and humidity control to activate, and on top of that, it's actually rather toxic. Indeed, urushiol, a prominent compound in lacquer, is also found in its sister plants, like poison oak and poison ivy, and it can cause a nasty rash in most people. And yet, lacquer can help make leather, wood, and other materials waterproof, while remaining lightweight. It can be added lightly to provide a waterproof but flexible coating, or in thick, firm coats. It's no wonder that it's been used throughout Asia, right up to the modern day. Unfortunately, for all of its extraordinary qualities, it's still organic, and not nearly as durable as ceramic and stone, and therefore is much less likely to survive over the years. During this early period, we see cultural regions start to develop, identified through the pottery styles that are prevalent in various areas between Kyushu and Hokkaido. Over the entire Jomon period, we can identify roughly ten or so different types of pottery. These fluctuate throughout the entire Jomon period, but there generally seems to be a distinct pottery culture down in Kyushu, one in the Kanto and Chubu Highlands region of Honshu, areas of Tokyo and west towards Nagoya, and another locus up in the Tohoku, or northeast region, heading up into Hokkaido, where Jomon pottery has also been found. This pottery not only shows its own styles, but we also find non-functional, miniature pots. I guess this was the Hot Wheels of its day, a small version of something that played a large part in everyday life. These miniature pots, given the work that went into an otherwise non-functional object, appear to indicate some sort of social use. It could be just a nice gift to give someone, or certain pots might have meaning. Maybe they were the collectible card game of their era and you had to catch 'em all. Whatever their purpose, they fit alongside the other artistic objects we find from this period, like beads and perforated shells that were popular in the Kanto plain. Just as today, they were fashions, and people wanted things probably for no more than the way they looked. Oddly enough, southwest Honshu appears to have had fewer sites than up in the northeast. This could be because the land wasn't suited to the type of lifestyle that developed during this period, which seems to have thrived in the extensive volcanic plains of the rest of the islands, plains which are generally in short supply in southwestern Honshu, but plentiful in places like southern and central Kyushu. Whatever the reason, we do see these centers of regional artistic culture, which would seem to indicate some sort of separate social communication in these regions, though there still appears to be many commonalities across the various social organizations at this time. Settlements of pit dwellings are generally arrayed in a circular fashion, with no evidence of any kind of hierarchy. There is no clear chieftain position, either in the living structure of the settlement, nor in the burial patterns. This would become even more obvious as the cultures transitioned into the period known as the Early Jomon Period, starting around 5000-4000 BCE. During this period, this Early Jomon Period, we start to find figurines and stone circles. And while it is definitely an archaeological cliche to term anything that one doesn't recognize the use of as "ritual", these certainly have a ritual feel to them. These stone circles appear to have a single upright stone in the center, with long rectangular stones arrayed out in a circular wheel around them. While the figurines often demonstrate feminine characteristics, the upright stone is considered to represent the masculine, a common theme in early human religious development around the globe. What rituals and how these objects were used is unclear, and likely varied across the archipelago. But the deliberate creation of ritual objects, along with the permanent ritual installations, would seem to require some amount of social organization. It should be noted that we do find figurines earlier. In fact all the way back in the incipient Jomon Period, but they aren't standardized until much later. Now along with these objects, we also see evidence of dental ablation, similar to what we saw in Minatogawa 1. Here we see more and more evidence of this practice of knocking out teeth in specific patterns, and are even able to see how it progressed over time. For instance, we will see a certain set of teeth that are missing from young men, and then older men will show the same teeth missing, but then also a different set as well. So there appear to have been specific moments in one's life when dental ablation would occur, and we can only surmise that the missing teeth signified something about the individual. Perhaps it was whether or not they were married, or had children. Perhaps it had something to do with their prowess, and some kind of coming of age ritual. Perhaps it indicated inclusion in various groups, or even status as an outsider. Unfortunately we don't have their voices to tell us just why they did it, but it is clear that they were deliberately marking themselves in a way that would be noticeable to anyone who met them. Why they did it, we can only guess. We also find larger buildings around this time, some as long as 30 meters. Whether these were common buildings used by the entire settlement, or whether they were lavish dwellings of elite members of society, is not clear, though the lack of a hierarchical distinction in the burial patterns would seem to indicate we are still dealing with a somewhat egalitarian society, without social distinctions between various people or classes, as we will see in later eras. From this period we also start to get a good idea of just what people are eating, and we see a continued growth in the number of vegetables and plant food processing tools. There are also a diverse number of ceramic vessel shapes indicating specialized functions, though we don't know exactly what they are. Among the vegetables we can identify are mung beans, gourd, rapeseed, burdock, hemp, egoma, siso and more. All of these could possibly be cultivated, but none of them could really be considered a staple crop. They may have been kept in small gardens, but there is no evidence still of widespread purposeful agriculture. Now we also find processed food. This is pretty cool. Cookies or biscuits that were made either as a single kind of cookie or as something more like a sandwich or hamburger containing evidence of meat of some kind. These were made from a flour of chestnuts or walnuts and includes evidence of meat from boar, deer and eggs from wild birds. They are even found decorated with elaborate patterns on their surface, so it is clear that it wasn't just the flavor of the food, but the look that was important as well. Of course, just like today, too many cookies can be bad for you. Teeth from skulls around this time show high amounts of tooth decay, indicating a large amount of carbohydrates in their diet. They may not have had rice or other grains, but they had found carbs. Chestnuts, walnuts, even acorns became much more prevalent during this period and may be one of the key reasons why Jomon society flourished as it did. You see, as the temperatures rose, these trees and their nutrient dense nuts started to spread across the islands, moving from small enclaves in southern Kyushu all the way up to Hokkaido. While not exactly a crop that people could cultivate in the same way as rice or wheat later on, groves of trees could certainly prove to be a much needed food source, helping to support a growing population. It should be noted by the way that these nuts may be more nutritious in terms of the food energy possible from a single plot of land, but they required innovation. You see, acorns are too bitter to be eaten raw, so they require some kind of preparation. Horse chestnuts actually need to be neutralized with alkali. This was probably done using ash from cooking fires. We find both of them buried in storage pits near houses, and it may be that this was as much a part of the preparation as their storage. For acorns, you need to leach the tannins out of them, preferably with cold water if you want to later grind them into flour, making both of these rather labor-intensive crops. And this may be part of the answer to the riddle as to just how these settlements grew and flourished in a time before agriculture. Japan at this point is extremely fertile, providing a bounty on the land and in the sea. Salmon regularly return to the rivers on a seasonal basis, and the nuts from the trees can be preserved for leaner times. This all sets the stage for a stable, largely sedentary way of life. In fact, it's not unlike the Pacific Northwest, where both the salmon runs and the bounty of the forests help provide the backgrounds for its own rich, vibrant, and prosperous culture. I mean, it's easy to imagine, similar to Tlingit, Haida, and others, established permanent settlements from which bands would travel off to fish camp or away from the shore towards the interior of the islands to set up their pit traps and hunt for fresh game. Local to the settlement, they would harvest nuts from the chestnut, walnut, and oak trees. They likely kept small gardens or cultivated patches of wild vegetables that would provide flavor and seasoning. Shellfish would have been harvested along the shore, or perhaps by diving down in the relative shallows along the coast, much as modern pearl divers do today. All of this would have provided a bountiful harvest from the land, one that could support thriving communities who would use their ceramic wares to both store and cook their food. The Jomon Star would continue to rise. In the next episode, we'll talk about the height of the Jomon era, or at least in the area of Eastern Honshu. For now, thank you for listening, and I'll see you next time on Sengoku Daimyo's Chronicles of Japan.