Jōmon pottery and complex foragers in Japan
- Date
- c. 16,500 – 11,000 years ago (c. 14,500–9000 BCE)
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- East Asia (Japanese archipelago)
- Era
- Prehistory
- Significance
While Levantine foragers were settling down, hunter-gatherers in the Japanese archipelago independently developed one of the world's earliest pottery traditions.
The Jōmon culture — named for the cord-marked decoration pressed into its clay vessels — emerged at the close of the last Ice Age, with fragments from the Odai Yamamoto I site in Aomori dated to around 16,500 years ago, among the oldest ceramics known anywhere. Pottery let people boil, store and process foods such as nuts, shellfish and fish, supporting unusually rich and stable diets. Sustained by the productive forests and coasts of Japan, Jōmon communities achieved a high degree of sedentism and social complexity — substantial settlements, storage, elaborate figurines and large-scale monuments — without adopting farming, persisting as affluent foragers for thousands of years. The Jōmon case shows that key markers once attributed solely to agriculture, including settled village life, ceramic technology and complex ritual, arose among hunter-gatherers in East Asia, providing a vital non-Western, non-Levantine counterpoint to the story of the road to farming.
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Further reading
The wider story
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