Intro to the Jomon

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Most of you might not be familiar with the Jomon cultures of Japan. Thus before moving to specifically talk about Jomon shell mounds; this post will focus on giving you a general background of who the Jomon people were.

Japan in particular is the leading country in the world in terms of archaeological work. The Japanese people have taken a huge interest in their past, thus resulting in a great awareness for archaeological work and a bunch of archeological sites. For instance, Matsui argues that, “Research on Jomon sites has extended over nearly 150 years, involving thousands of excavations and resulting in a vast amount of literature.” (356) Given this, there is a tremendous amount of work that has been published on the Jomon. Thus anyone can easily access more information about them by simply making a quick search online.

The Jomon era began near the end of the Pleistocene and represents more than 12,000 years of the Japanese past (Matsui). The Jomon period is split up into 6 periods. The first being the Incipient Jomon period which is the last period to be recognized and also the one which is less completely understood. The Incipient period is also where one starts seeing the beginning of basic Jomon patterns. The rest are the Initial, Early, Middle, Late and Final periods (Matsui). As discussed by Akira Matsui in the article, Why Didn't Agriculture Develop in Japan? A consideration of Jomon Ecological Style, Niche Construction, and the Origins of Domestication, "Each of the periods is further subdivided into finer units associated with distinctive ceramic assemblages... The Jomon era can be divided into blocks of a few centuries or much less... The material diversity of the Jomon era must mean that it was ethnically diverse and complex in human terms" (358). As it was discussed in Professor Maher's lecture on October 19, 2012, the Jomon people are known for their early and distinctively beautiful pottery. Something else to take from this quote is the fact that Jomon Japan did not have a single cultural entity. One can think of Jomon Japan as a modern country, say Mexico, who are all part of a huge Mexican culture. Within Mexico though, Mexicans throughout the country have a different style of cooking or listen to different music. Just in this way, the Jomon throughout Japan all had distinct regions and forms of making pottery; which was constantly changing. It turns out that pottery is one of the features that makes the Jomon society "complex." As we will discuss later, other aspects of the Jomon culture made them a complex society, but a different type of complex as you find in other parts of Asia and Europe; as the tittle of the article mentioned above states, agriculture, which is a key feature that archaeologists look for when assessing if a society is complex; was not developed in Jomon Japan.

Now that we have a sense of who the Jomon people are and their chronology, we will move on to talk about shell mounds and their implications to this subject of complexity.

Akira Matsui. Why Didn’t Agriculture Develop in Japan? A Consideration of Jomon Ecological Style, Niche Construction, and the Origins of Domestication. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. 2010.