TECH & CULTURE
Pursuing the Prehistoric in Postmodern Tokyo
July 25, 2022
Something was different this time. Over the years there had been many opportunities to excavate on my university campus here in Tokyo, which yielded scatters of artifacts from prehistoric times. But now, after carefully peeling away the topsoil , there suddenly emerged a concentration: hundreds of potsherds and stone tool fragments packed into a bounded, concave area. We had found a Jomon pit dwelling.
The Jomon period begins in the Japanese islands about 15000 years ago with the appearance of some of the world’s oldest pottery. After several thousand years, as the glacial climate eased, an increased local food supply enabled people to settle down. Settlements spread all over the archipelago, but concentrated in the east, where subsistence resources were richest. Although many large settlements have been found, villages were mostly small, estimated to have consisted of between ten and twenty households. In addition to hunting, fishing, and collecting food the Jomon practiced a limited amount of cultivation, but unlike Neolithic societies elsewhere agriculture and animal husbandry are not in evidence. The period ends around 900BC with the emergence of agriculture, led by migrants from the Korean peninsula.
The Jomon period begins in the Japanese islands about 15000 years ago with the appearance of some of the world’s oldest pottery. After several thousand years, as the glacial climate eased, an increased local food supply enabled people to settle down. Settlements spread all over the archipelago, but concentrated in the east, where subsistence resources were richest. Although many large settlements have been found, villages were mostly small, estimated to have consisted of between ten and twenty households. In addition to hunting, fishing, and collecting food the Jomon practiced a limited amount of cultivation, but unlike Neolithic societies elsewhere agriculture and animal husbandry are not in evidence. The period ends around 900BC with the emergence of agriculture, led by migrants from the Korean peninsula.
The Jomon legacy, like the cultures that follow it, is a protected resource of the nation. Cultural preservation in Japan goes back to the 1870s, but for archeology the benchmark is about 1970, when municipalities all over the country organized 'underground cultural property' units to identify archaeologically important areas and create policies to prevent their destruction. That is why we were digging. Our university was planning a new building, but in an area that fell within the city's protected zone; we had to demonstrate that it was safe to proceed with construction. After our initial discovery, were given a week to open up and map the site and remove the artifacts. Following a school tradition of hands-on learning, our team consisted of enthusiastic students. It was a wintery March, and cold shadows fell on the site through most of the day. Yet we worked feverishly to remove the upper soil layers and then start the painstaking work of exposing, then measuring, the features of the dwelling. The only sound was hand labor. Nobody complained.