In Akita Prefecture, for example, two hours’ drive from Aomori, I climbed the cedar-covered slopes of an 80 metre high mound which juts emphatically out of the surrounding plains. Its name is Kuromata Yama (Mount Kuromata) and according to local legend it is ‘a pyramid built by an ancient people’.4 Geologists remained sceptical until a multi-disciplinary team of scientists from the Japan-Pacific Rim Studies Association led by Professor Takashi Kato of Tohoku Gakuin University produced detailed radar maps of Kuromata Yama in the 1990s. The maps show that the interior of the mound
consists of seven terraces with stones laid out on each terrace. This is a clear indication that it was shaped by man and is certainly very different from a natural mountain formed by volcanic eruptions or natural weathering.5
The experts concluded that a natural hill had indeed once stood on the site but that this had been deliberately quarried, sculpted and reinforced with stone blocks to create a pyramidial core with seven terraces that was finally covered with ramped earth and then overgrown by vegetation. Thus, ‘Although the mountain is not a pyramid in the Egyptian sense, it was nevertheless made into the shape of one for religious purposes.’6 Since work of such ambition and scale has never previously been associated with the Jomon, it was at first assumed that the construction work was unlikely to be very old – perhaps no older than the eleventh century AD. The Motomiya Shrine of Japan’s indigenous Shinto religion that stands on its summit seems to be linked to that epoch, since it is named after a physician who served Sadato Abe (AD 1019–1062), a local ruler of north-east Honshu.7 On the other hand, since Shinto shrines are completely rebuilt according to a pre-existing pattern every twenty years on sites that in most cases have been sacred ever since records began, this perhaps proves less than it should. At any rate, the excavations by archaeologists on Professor Kato’s team settled the matter with the discovery of fragments of Jomon pottery in the mound and other archaeological evidence which confirmed beyond serious dispute that Kuromata Yama had indeed been landscaped into its pyramidal form ‘in the Jomon era’.8
Equally important was another discovery published a year earlier by team-member Masachika Tsuji of Doshisha University in Kyoto. He showed that four Shinto shrines positioned around the base of Kuromata Yama lie in direct lines pointing north, south, east and west from the summit and incorporate solstitial alignments datable through the accepted formula for changes in the obliquity of the ecliptic to 4000 years ago: ‘The shrines were built relatively recently on what are known to be sacred sites dating from ancient times, suggesting the shrines may have maintained that link since the Jomon Period.’9
Surviving ancient texts enable us to trace the recorded story of Shinto back at the most about 2500 years and realistically probably less than 2000 years; however, at that stage it seems already to have been fully formed. All authorities therefore agree, though lost in prehistory, that Shinto’s origins must be much older than 2000 years. As far as I know, however, the discoveries at Kuromata Yama are the first to demonstrate such a clear relationship between the religious architecture of the prehistoric Jomon and the Shinto religion as it survives and expresses itself to this day – a religion, it is worth reiterating, that is unique to Japan and that is of unknown age and origin.
Perhaps the clearest sign of a family relationship to emerge from the excavations is that the Motomiya Shrine shares the summit of Kuromata Yama with the remains of a previously unknown stone circle constructed by the Jomon. Kuromata Yama is also clearly visible from two further Jomon stone circles that have been excavated at Oyu, 2.2 kilometres to the south-west. Both of these are more oval than circular, one about 35 metres in diameter, the other 20 metres in diameter. Both are about 4000 years old, a little younger than Britain’s Stonehenge. By European ‘megalithic’ standards they are not large and the stones actually used in their construction are puny when compared with Stonehenge or Carnac. Still, they are ‘stone circles’ in every meaningful sense of the term.
The mystery of the pots
Nor were these the only surprises that the Jomon had in store for me. As we’ve already noted, what is truly outstanding and unexplained about these ‘primitive hunter-gatherers’ is that they were the first people in the world to invent pottery – one of the great leaps forward in human culture which, in their case, took place not just hundreds but thousands of years before anybody else. As recently as 1998 most scholars believed that the oldest Jomon pottery was made about 12,500 years ago – itself a staggeringly early date – but so rapid is the pace of new discovery in this field that that the origins of Jomon civilization have had to be continuously revised backwards.
In May 2000, on my second visit to the Aomori area, I held in the palm of my hand four fragments of a broken Jomon pot 16,500 years old. Excavated at a site known as Odayamamaoto No. 1 Iseki, the potsherds had been dated using state-of-the-art AMS technology.
It is still a little-known fact that the Jomon of Japan are the world’s oldest pottery-making culture. But even less well known is the extent to which this prehistoric people maintained a distinct identity as a single, homogeneous group. According to Dr Yasuhiro Okada, the Aomori Prefecture’s Chief Archaeologist at Sannai-Muryama, ‘they were one culture, from beginning to end’.
Imagine that – one culture, probably one language, probably one religion, staying intact for more than 14,000 years. That’s the time-span between the oldest Jomon pottery – 16,500 years old – and the youngest examples – which are about 2000 years old.
Genius or influence?
What happened to the Jomon? If their culture could survive for 14,000 years, how come they aren’t still with us today?
The archaeological record points to the influx into Japan – probably from Korea and probably between 2700 and 2300 years ago – of a larger, more populous and more economically competitive group of people. Named the ‘Yayoi’ by modern scholars (we do not know what they called themselves), these were sophisticated, highly organized rice-growers and it is generally supposed that their way of life simply overwhelmed that of the indigenous hunter-gatherers. Although the Yayoi were a martial culture and the Jomon were not, there is no evidence of military conflict or of genocide. The Jomon were not ‘wiped out’. If anything, the latest archaeology prompts us to envisage something more like an effortless merging and mixing of peoples into the new synthesis that would cross from prehistory into history – from forgotten time into remembered time – in the already complete form of classical Japanese civilization. In a sense, therefore, Jomon culture is still with us and may never have come to an end.
Does it have a beginning? The archaeological record is constantly subject to revision by new evidence. But to the extent that the Jomon are defined by and identified with their pottery-making skills, then the earliest definite evidence for their existence that has so far been discovered consists of that little group of pottery fragments from 16,500 years ago.
Did something happen in Japan at that time that could explain why the Jomon invented pottery millennia before anybody else? Shimoyamu Satoru of the Ibusuki Archaeological Museum on Kyushu island suggests: ‘maybe there was just a Jomon genius who figured it out – you know, clay, open fire, pot. He saw the potential.’ On the other hand, Professor Sahara Makoto, Director-General of the National Museum of Japanese History, believes that ‘there must have been some influence’. Sitting cross-legged on the floor of his office, he drew up a map of Japan, China and Siberia. ‘Here in Japan’, he explained, ‘we have high levels of development – new roads, new houses, even new cities are constantly being built. This means that the soil must be broken and turned over – and every time this happens there is the possibility of archaeological discovery. But in China such activity is much less and in Siberia less still. So it is possible in Siberia, for example, that archaeologists might one day find the traces of an even earlier pot-making culture that influenced the Jomon.’
Technology transfer
What neither scholar appears to take into a
ccount is the peculiar coincidence in dates between the earliest Jomon pottery, about 16,500 years ago, and the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, about 17,000 years ago – which was followed by thousands of years of ice-sheet meltdown and by global sea-level rises. Is this just a coincidence or could there be some weird causative link between the post-glacial floods and the pottery?
Sahara Makoto has already expressed his views on the subject of influence. He thinks the Jomon were influenced by an earlier, probably Siberian, pot-making culture. But to be fair, that is just his guess. It is undoubtedly correct that pottery was being made at a very ancient date in Siberia10 (though not as ancient as the oldest Jomon); however, the idea of pottery, the essential mental work to make the great leap forward, does not require contact with a hypothetical mainland tribe – and what counts against this hypothesis is the palaeogeological evidence. As the archaeologist Douglas Kenrick points out, ‘When the earliest recorded pottery was made, the sea had engulfed any landbridges that might have remained and had created a natural barrier between Japan and the mainland.’11
In other words, if the Jomon were ‘influenced’ 16,500 years ago – to become potters and whatever else – then that influence is more likely to have entered Japan by sea than by land. It could, theoretically, have been passed on by a single survivor, or a handful of survivors, of a shipwreck. And since those were times of global floods the possibility cannot be ruled out that such a ship could have come to Japan from very far away – could, theoretically, have been blown in from almost anywhere. But whether the mariners marooned in Japan were Siberian tribesmen or highly sophisticated survivors of a hypothetical lost civilization it is unlikely that they would have been able to pass on more than a handful of useful ‘civilized’ skills to the primitive local inhabitants.
It goes without saying that the skill of pottery would always be ranked near the top of the list in any such emergency technology transfer.
Time and space
Whatever the source of the original inspiration, there is no doubt that Jomon pottery is very distinctive. Its most characteristic decoration is the cord-mark (indeed, Jomon means ‘cord-mark’ in Japanese and is another name given by archaeologists; as with the ‘Yayoi’ we do not know what the ‘Jomon’ called themselves). This decorative technique requires the potter to press lengths of knotted twine down into the clay before firing and sometimes to roll the cords to produce additional effects. The range of possible combinations is large and these ‘cord-marks’ in their turn are only a tiny part of the full Jomon repertoire of extravagant and unusual designs.
This repertoire, it is worth remembering, exists in four dimensions – in time as well as in space. I say this because on the one hand Jomon pottery is scattered geographically throughout Japan, from the far south, including the Ryukyu archipelago, to the far north, including Hokkaido, and on the other is spread out in time, connecting the world of relatively recent and comprehensible history (2000 years ago) with the world of remote prehistory, 16,500 years ago, when the Ice Age went into meltdown.
Genie in the bottle
Archaeologists in Japan are more accommodating than their Western counterparts. Whereas most of the latter would rather be mummified than have me in their museums, the Japanese are much less snobbish and judgemental. In Japan I have again and again been given the incredible privilege of handling very ancient artefacts – national treasures that in some cases are more than 12,000 years old. At the Sato Haramachi Archaeological Centre near the city of Miyazaki this privilege extended to holding in my hands the oldest piece of painted pottery ever found in the world – part of a fine Jomon pot, painted red on the inside, securely dated to 11,500 years ago.
To touch it was like boarding an express elevator on the way down to the depths of time. I could almost see the ancient artist at work on the same object that now rested in my hands. In a peculiar way, I realized, he – or she – was still alive in this potsherd, like a genie in a bottle. For a moment the 11,500 years that separated us – more than twice the age of the Great Pyramid of Egypt -seemed a small matter.
‘It requires imagination,’ says Douglas Kenrick, ‘to comprehend the length and vitality of the Jomon pottery age. Age leaves its mark on vessels buried for so long, but a feeling of awe at the age of a vessel should not blind us to its beauty.’
In my travels in Japan I have seen a great deal of beautiful Jomon pottery of all epochs. Made without recourse to the potter’s wheel, and always in open fires, it takes on a fantastic variety of forms – from the spectacular ‘flame pottery’ of 5000 years ago, with its grotesque and elaborate rim-work, to austere and simple rounded bowls, more than 12,000 years old that are decorated only with cross-hatch or shell-scrape patterns. The cord-mark motif keeps cropping up again and again. And other patterns repeat, such as distorted human faces sculpted into the shoulders of vases. Pottery masks have been found that replicate their gargoyle expressions and one particular style of mask, with its nose bent at right angles to the side of its face, seems weirdly futuristic; it could almost be a contemporary work in a gallery of surrealist art; instead, it is 4500 years old, as old as the Great Pyramid, and part of an ancient Jomon tradition of representing the human form.
Dogu
Although I have not personally seen examples more than 8000 years old, archaeologists I have talked to in Japan assure me that simple pottery representations of the human figure have been found in strata dating back more than 12,000 years. These earliest figures, and all the later examples, are known in Japan by the generic term dogu.
The best-known dogu date from around 3000 years ago and are better described as ‘anthropoid’ than human – since it is by no means certain that the figures they represent are human beings. They have hands and feet, legs and arms and a head, like human beings, but their features are weirdly distorted -almost as though they are concealed behind some kind of face-mask or helmet. The eyes of these figures are most disconcerting, being depicted as large ovals each with a single horizontal slit.
Other dogu are very different, some seeming to freeze a tortured human face in the act of screaming, some imposing the features of an animal – a cat for example – on to an otherwise human form, some creating the appearance of mythological beings with the body unnaturally elongated or the face lozenge-shaped. There are multiple examples of exaggerated female figures, notably the 5000-year-old ‘Venus of the Jomon’ found recently at Tanabatake Iseki in Nagano Prefecture. With her gigantic thighs and hips, this ‘mother goddess’ is similar in proportion and general appearance (and possibly in function as well) to stone Venus figures found in the megalithic temples and underground labyrinths of the far-off Mediterranean island of Malta (see chapters 16–20).
It is difficult to guess what the Jomon were trying to achieve through the production of so many different kinds of dogu over an unbroken period of at least 10,000 years. It is very likely, but not certain, that these were religious icons of some kind and were meant to stand in alcoves or niches. But it is also obvious, looking at them – and indeed at the whole range of Jomon pottery -that they are the work of a prosperous culture with sufficient surplus to support a full-time, professional artisan class dedicated exclusively to the production of beautiful and sometimes awe-inspiring objects.
The rice bombshell
The next surprise I had about the Jomon concerned their way of life. Since visiting Sannai-Muriyama in 1998 I’d been aware that these ‘hunter-gatherers’, somewhat anomalously, sometimes chose to live in large, permanent settlements. I had assumed, wrongly, that Sannai-Muryama, built about 4500 years ago, was the earliest of these.
Then in April 2000 I visited Uenohara, a much older Jomon site on the island of Kyushu. Kuzanori Aozaki, one of the prefecture’s archaeologists, explained that Uenohara had been a continuously inhabited settlement over a 2000-year period from roughly 9500 to 7500 years ago. ‘They had their lives pretty well worked out,’ he explained. ‘At any one time they had more than 100 people living here
. They were comfortable … I would even say prosperous. All their basic needs were met. They had ample food, good shelter, comfortable, elegant clothing.’
‘And this was a permanent settlement, like a village or a small town?’
‘Yes.’
‘But doesn’t that contradict the idea of the Jomon as simple hunter-gatherers?’
‘Yes it does, because the idea is wrong. The more you get to know the Jomon the more you know that they were many things as well as simple hunter-gatherers.’
Aozaki went on to tell me how in his opinion the Uenohara community had managed to support itself through a kind of organized ‘agriculture’ and ‘harvesting’ of the forest – not quite farming, but certainly a planned husbandry of nature aimed at sustained, long-term survival.
This was not to be the last time during a seven-week journey through Japan in April and May 2000 that I would hear hints of agriculture. At Ofuna C Iseki on Hokkaido the chief archaeologist, Chiharu Abe, told me he was convinced that the Jomon had ‘farmed’ chestnut trees: ‘They imported seedlings from Honshu and then cultivated them here. To all extents and purposes they were doing agriculture.’
Another intriguing recent discovery is that as far back as 8000 years ago the Jomon were cultivating a non-indigenous plant, the bottle-gourd, which palaeo-biological studies indicate must have been imported from Africa. There is also some evidence of the cultivation of beans at a very early date. Indeed, according to Profesor Tatsuo Kobyashi, the Jomon made effective use of nearly every species of available plants and animals – ‘a conscious and rational use of nature’s bounty with a low-level use of less desired species to avoid depletion of preferred ones’.