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I recently noticed a rather unassuming museum perched above the Chuo Expressway which runs through Koshu City, Yamanashi. Inside the museum I found prehistoric pottery that defied my notions of what humans were capable of at the time. I knew nothing of the Jōmon* people before entering the museum, but this discovery has led me deep down an internet rabbit hole that I still haven’t fully emerged from. Below is my feeble attempt to make sense of this recent discovery.
There is very little of Jōmon history that is conclusive, but recent advances in genetic analyses have revealed much more than was previously known. It appears that the ancestors of the Jōmon people arrived in the Japanese archipelago at least 38,000 years ago via a land bridge from North East Asia** (modern-day Siberia). This would time their arrival in Japan to about 10,000 years before modern humans began migrating to North America via the Bering Strait land bridge. It also seems likely that they were following migrating megafauna like woolly mammoths when they crossed the land bridge to Japan.
The current understanding is that the Jōmon people were active throughout the Japanese archipelago from 14,000 BCE to 1,000 BCE. Due to warming climatic conditions, and the rudimentary practice of planting food bearing trees and plants nearby their settlements, the Jōmon people enjoyed a relatively “sedentary” lifestyle and this era coincides with the production of the most extraordinary examples of their pottery (about 5000 years ago). This period roughly predates or is contemporaneous with the beginning of the Archaic or Early Dynastic Period of Egypt, long before the construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza.
Artistically speaking, the pottery, doki, seems too whimsical for the Stone Age. In my opinion, this pottery ranks up there with the cave art at Lascaux. Some of these pots were used to store and cook food, but others are far too elaborate for such use. As human remains have been discovered in some pots, it is certain that the pottery had some ritualistic significance in the lives of the Jōmon people. Dare I say, these pots may have been akin to religious art.
Jōmon Dogū (figurine), Minami-Alps City Furusato Bunka Denshokan
Jōmon Dogū (figurine), Yamanashi Prefectural Archaeological Museum
Jōmon Dogū (figurine), Shakadō Museum of Jōmon Culture
Jōmon Dogū (figurine), Hokuto City Archaeological Museum
Today, the indigenous Ainu of Northern Japan and the Ryukyuan people of Okinawa are the most closely related to the ancient Jōmon people. Furthermore, modern Japanese share about 9% to 13% of their genome with the ancient Jōmon people, so there was clearly contact between the Jōmon people and later arrivals from the Asian mainland.
*The Japanese word jōmon, literally, straw rope pattern; is derived from the decoration on early Jōmon pottery.
**It has been theorized by some scholars that the ancestors of the Jōmon people also followed a southern route into Japan.
UPDATE:
The two figurines shown below are on display at the Togariishi Museum of Jōmon Archaeology located in Chino City, Nagano Prefecture. I usually only blog about Yamanashi, but these figurines are far too beautiful to not include in my report on Jōmon art.
The Jōmon Venus from the Tanabatake Site (3000~2000 BCE)
The Masked Venus from the Nakappara Site (2000~1000 BCE)
Please enjoy the following art history lecture about Jōmon-period pottery:
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