The Jomon civilisation

The Jomon culture takes its name from the characteristic rope-pattern (jomon) decoration pressed into the surface of their pottery. Beginning around 13,000 BCE, Jomon communities spread across the Japanese archipelago, developing regional traditions while maintaining long-distance exchange networks for obsidian, amber, jade, and other prestige materials. In northern Japan — Hokkaido and Tohoku — the cold climate supported an exceptionally rich hunter-gatherer economy based on salmon, deer, nuts, and marine resources.

Jomon society challenges the equation of sedentism with agriculture. By 5000 BCE, large Jomon villages of hundreds of people existed in northern Japan, with planned layouts, communal cemeteries, and evidence of sustained year-round occupation. Sannai Maruyama, occupied from c. 5900 to 4200 BCE, housed a community of several hundred people living in pit dwellings and raised-floor structures, trading over distances of hundreds of kilometres. The Oyu and Niida stone circles (c. 2000 BCE) are among the largest megalithic complexes in East Asia, their layout aligned to astronomical events.

Jomon artistic production includes the “dogu” clay figurines — abstract female forms with goggle-shaped eyes unique to this culture — and the elaborate “flame-pot” ceramics of the Middle Jomon period, whose flamboyant modelled rims have no parallel in world prehistoric art. Around 400 BCE, the migration of rice-farming Yayoi people from the continent began to transform the archipelago, gradually absorbing the Jomon population — though their genetic legacy persists strongly in the Ainu and Ryukyuan peoples today.