The Jōmon () were a prehistoric hunter-gatherer culture that inhabited the Japanese archipelago between approximately 14,000 BC and 300 BC, following which they were largely assimilated by migrants from mainland East Asia of the following Yayoi culture. The Jōmon people lived as sedentary hunter-gatherers, practicing plant foraging, fishing, hunting and to a lesser extent, farming. They also produced stone tools and pottery with distinctive "Jōmon markings". Jōmon ancestry forms a minor amount of the ancestry of the Yamato people (the dominant ethnic group in Japan), and a majority of the ancestry of the Ainu people of Hokkaido.
Etymology , sometimes written as Jomon ( , ), is a Japanese word directly translated as "cord-marked" or "cord pattern". The term was coined by American zoologist, archaeologist, and orientalist Edward S. Morse in his book Shell Mounds of Omori (1879), describing his excavation of the Ōmori Shell Mound near Tokyo and subsequent discovery of sherds of cord-marked pottery at the site in 1877. Morse translated "straw-rope pattern" from English to Japanese as , which he would use to refer to the people living during this period of Japanese history. Other names for Jōmon pottery had been used in the first few decades after the discovery such as "Ainu school pottery" and "Shell mound pottery" before the term Jōmon became the standard term used by the archeological community. Indeed, it was not until 1937 that the Japanese historian Yamanouchi Sugao used the pottery-derived term to refer to the Paleolithic inhabitants of Japan.
Jōmon is a compound word composed of two kanji: and , the pronunciation and semantic value each being derived from their respective Go-on reading.
(jō)meaning "rope" or "cord", specifically "a flexible, heavy cord of tightly intertwined hemp or other fibers." The kun'yomi for this kanji derives etymologically from Old Japanese, from the Proto-Japonic napa, related to the verb (nau, "to plait or twist together into twine or line").Matsumura, Akira, editor (2006), 大辞林 [Daijirin] (in Japanese), Third edition, Tokyo: Sanseidō (mon)meaning "pattern" or "design", as seen in words such as () or (). The word can thus be used as a common noun meaning "cord pattern", or as a shorter proper noun referring specifically to the Jōmon period. These kanji appear in various related terms, creating a lexical field centered around the Jōmon culture, which includes:
(, "Jōmon period") (, "Jōmon ware") (, "Jōmon people") (, "Jōmon pottery")
Lifestyle Like many hunter-gatherer societies, the day to day life of the Jōmon was largely centered around activities like hunting, fishing, foraging for tree nuts, and catching shellfish. However, it has also been suggested that the Jōmon people practiced forms of early agriculture, such as the regular cultivation of adzuki beans and soybeans. The Jōmon people also used pottery, and generally lived in semi-permanent pit dwellings, characteristics more typically associated with late mesolithic or early neolithic agriculturalists.
Settlements The modern Jōmon chronology commonly accepted by scholars generally follows that first laid out by Serizawa in Jōmon Pottery Classification and Chronology, published in 1956. Archaeological evidence suggests that settlements changed throughout the different phases of the Jōmon Period.
Incipient Jōmon settlements were the first sedentary settlements in Japan and consisted only of dwellings. An example of this type of settlement is the Odai Yamamoto 1 Site. Initial Jōmon settlements begin to show signs of cultural complexity on account of the appearance of gravesites during this period. The residential area and the cemetery were separated. An example of such settlement is the Kakinoshima site. Early Jōmon settlements gained more use-specific features: the storage area and the dump area. Sites representative of this period are the Kitakogane site, Tagoyano site, Futatsumori Site, and Korekawa Site. Middle Jōmon saw the development of hub settlements and the division of dump and ritual spaces. Sites representative of this period are the Sannai-Maruyama Site, Ōfune Site, Goshono site, and Korekawa Site. Late Jōmon saw the dissolution of hub settlements into smaller ones with a shared ritual center which also functioned as its cemetery. Some of the sites of this period include the Irie site, Komakino Site, Isedōtai Ruins, and Ōyu Stone Circles. Final Jōmon saw the separation of the ritual site and the cemetery into two separate sites shared by multiple settlements. Some of the sites in this period include the Kiusu Earthwork Burial Circles, Ōmori Katsuyama Site, Takasago Burial Site, Kamegaoka Stone Age Site, and Korekawa Site.
The Korekawa site, in Hachinohe, Aomori Prefecture, is unique because it has three subsites, each from a different Jōmon timeframe: (Early to Middle Jōmon period), (Middle Jōmon period), and (Final Jōmon period). They are near each other on a terrace by the Niida River. Ichioji is the largest of the three subsites, while Nakai is the smallest but has yielded the most artifacts.
The excavation of Sannai Maruyama Site has revealed networks of what are believed to be unpaved, Jōmon-era roadways. In addition to connecting the areas, buildings, and ritual spaces within the settlement itself, it theorized these paths may have also extended to other settlements. On both sides of the roads were aligned graves of various types and characteristics, including pit graves, tumuli, the graves of children, and stone circle graves. Further excavations along these long-forgotten pathways have also revealed both standard and large pit dwellings, dumping grounds, storage pits, unknown pillar-supported structures of various sizes, and a watering place used for soaking Japanese horse chestnuts.
As mentioned, Jōmon people typically resided in pit dwellings, semi-subterranean buildings built by digging a shallow hole in the ground, constructing a roof extending upwards from each side, and placing a hearth in its center. As Jōmon pit dwellings are relatively small compared to other prehistoric cultures, it is believed that each dwelling would have housed a family of four to six people for as long as two to three generations. The roofs enclosing these spaces were made of bark or thatch and may have been covered with soil to provide an extra layer of insulation. Altars may have also been installed in some of them. Pit dwellings longer than 10m are classified as large pit dwellings, which most likely functioned as communal spaces like meeting places, workshops, or shared winter residences comparable to contemporaneous Meso- and Neolithic structures found in Europe and the Americas.
Tools Like other Paleolithic cultures, Jōmon sites display widespread evidence of the use and production of stone tools. Jōmon tools were most commonly fashioned from chipped stone, made of siliceous shale. However, tools made from other types of stone, wood, and rarer materials such as obsidian and jade have also been discovered in Jōmon-period sites.本節の典拠は橋口、前掲書、158–172ページ
These types of tools included but were not limited to: knives, stone drills, spearheads, arrowheads, scrapers sometimes with barbs or stemmed, semi-circular flat chipped stone tools believed to have been used in the preparation of food. In the case of tools built from multiple parts such as spears or arrows, Jōmon toolmakers used bitumen as an adhesive to bind the stone point with its wooden shaft.
However, some stone implements appear to have been made without the normal chipping process. This includes ground stone axes, made from granodiorite, greenstone, or blueschist, abrasion cutting stone tools, whetstones, grindstones with or without grooves, hammer stones, saddle querns, and stone weights.
Antlers and bones were also used for tools such as spatulas, fish hooks, harpoon heads, drills, and needles. Exclusive to antlers were hammers, where the base of the antler was used as the impact surface. Wood was used for making shafts of spears, arrows, harpoons, bows, and digging sticks while strips of bark were used to weave baskets.
Hunting The Jōmon people were incredibly skilled, likely opportunistic hunters capable of tracking, catching, and killing a wide variety of both large and small game endemic to their environment. These included flying squirrels, hares, weasels, martens, foxes, squirrels, tanuki (raccoon dogs), wild boar, deer, bears, sea lions, badgers, apes, snow monkeys, otters, cormorants, albatrosses, pheasants, grebes, geese, and ducks. Hunting techniques included the use of projectile weapons like bows and spears, pitfall traps, and hunting dogs.
The percentage of prey hunted varies from site to site, but generally wild boars and deer were the staple of what was, in the case of the Jōmon, a largely carnivorous diet. However, in the Sannai Maruyama site, flying squirrels and hares are the dominant sources of meat most likely as a result of environmental factors.
Fishing Archaeologists have uncovered the bones of many species of fish and other types of seafood in Jōmon dumping grounds. Given the variety of the species consumed, some of which would have required considerable travel to catch, it has been postulated that the Jōmon were adept fishermen and mariners. Some of the marine species found at Jōmon sites include yellowtail amberjack, right-eyed flounder, various types of sharks, mackerel, herring, flounder, scorpion fishes, globefish, greenling, Pacific sea bream, and Pacific cod. The Jōmon also gathered shellfish, including Japanese oysters, Ezo abalones, clams, crabs, octopuses, squid, mantis shrimp, and other types of crustaceans.
The Jōmon fished using harpoons, spears, lines, and nets. Jōmon harpoon heads were detachable and could be reeled in using ropes tied through their base. Harpoons and spears were used to catch larger prey, line fishing for smaller prey was done using fish hooks fashioned from antler or bone. Jōmon fish hooks generally fall into two categories: single-ended hooks and coupled/combined hooks. The main difference between the two was that coupled fish hooks were barbed while single-ended hooks were not. However, both types had notches to tie the line. Stone weights were attached to nets to act as sinkers.
There is evidence that the Jōmon people built ships out of large trees and used them for fishing and traveling. However, it is still debated whether Jōmon watercraft used sails or paddles as their primary means of propulsion.
Plant foraging and domestication The Jōmon grew trees close to their settlements and gathered edible wild plants. Chestnuts were an especially common part of Jōmon diets, while trees themselves were frequently used as fuel and building material. Other types of flora regularly consumed by the Jōmon include walnuts, Japanese horse chestnuts, adzuki beans, Udo, silver vines, elderberries, wild grapes, mulberries, raspberries, and yams. Roots, tubers such as yams, and other subterranean forage was dug up using digging sticks. However, plant genomics studies have indicated that the adzuki bean was domesticated in eastern Japan between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago, suggesting that, in addition to gathering and cultivating wild plant species, the Jōmon were engaged in early plant domestication.
Food processing Nuts, walnuts, and chestnuts were collected during autumn and were kept in storage pits or indoor inside large earthenware pots. Before use, they were crushed with hammer stones or grinding stone on top of saddle querns. Japanese horse chestnut and other chestnuts with strong scents were soaked in water to mellow their taste. At the Sannai Maruyama Site, archaeologists discovered a reservoir, filled and emptied by a spring, that may have been used to process nuts through soaking. The Jōmon might have also been able to distill alcohol using elderberries.
Cooking