縄文人

The tradition & historical record

The Jōmon (Japanese: 縄文) were a prehistoric hunter-gatherer culture that inhabited the Japanese archipelago between approximately 14,000 BC and 300 BC, following which they were largely assimilated by migrants from mainland East Asia of the following Yayoi culture. The Jōmon people lived as sedentary hunter-gatherers, practicing plant foraging, fishing, hunting and to a lesser extent, farming. They also produced stone tools and pottery with distinctive "Jōmon markings". Jōmon ancestry forms a minor amount of the ancestry of the Yamato people (the dominant ethnic group in Japan), and a majority of the ancestry of the Ainu people of Hokkaido. ¹

Jōmon (縄文, Jōmon), sometimes written as Jomon (US: /ˈdʒoʊˌmɑːn/ JOH-mahn, UK: /ˈdʒəʊmɒn/ JOH-mon), is a Japanese word directly translated as "cord-marked" or "cord pattern". The term was coined by American zoologist, archaeologist, and orientalist Edward S. Morse in his book Shell Mounds of Omori (1879), describing his excavation of the Ōmori Shell Mound near Tokyo and subsequent discovery of sherds of cord-marked pottery at the site in 1877. Morse translated "straw-rope pattern" from English to Japanese as Jōmon, which he would use to refer to the people living during this period of Japanese history. Other names for Jōmon pottery had been used in the first few decades after the discovery such as "Ainu school pottery" and "Shell mound pottery" before the term Jōmon became the standard term used by the archeological community. Indeed, it was not until 1937 that the Japanese historian Yamanouchi Sugao used the pottery-derived term to refer to the Paleolithic inhabitants of Japan. Jōmon is a compound word composed of two kanji: 縄 and 文, the pronunciation and semantic value each being derived from their respective Go-on reading. ¹

縄 (jō) – meaning "rope" or "cord", specifically "a flexible, heavy cord of tightly intertwined hemp or other fibers." The kun'yomi for this kanji derives etymologically from Old Japanese, from the Proto-Japonic napa, related to the verb 綯う (nau, "to plait or twist together into twine or line"). 文 (mon) – meaning "pattern" or "design", as seen in words such as moyō (模様) or mon'yō (文様). The word can thus be used as a common noun meaning "cord pattern", or as a shorter proper noun referring specifically to the Jōmon period. ¹

Like many hunter-gatherer societies, the day to day life of the Jōmon was largely centered around activities like hunting, fishing, foraging for tree nuts, and catching shellfish. However, it has also been suggested that the Jōmon people practiced forms of early agriculture, such as the regular cultivation of adzuki beans and soybeans. The Jōmon people also used pottery, and generally lived in semi-permanent pit dwellings, characteristics more typically associated with late mesolithic or early neolithic agriculturalists. ¹

The modern Jōmon chronology commonly accepted by scholars generally follows that first laid out by Serizawa in Jōmon Pottery Classification and Chronology, published in 1956. Archaeological evidence suggests that settlements changed throughout the different phases of the Jōmon Period. ¹

Incipient Jōmon settlements were the first sedentary settlements in Japan and consisted only of dwellings. An example of this type of settlement is the Odai Yamamoto 1 Site. Initial Jōmon settlements begin to show signs of cultural complexity on account of the appearance of gravesites during this period. The residential area and the cemetery were separated. An example of such settlement is the Kakinoshima site. Early Jōmon settlements gained more use-specific features: the storage area and the dump area. Sites representative of this period are the Kitakogane site, Tagoyano site, Futatsumori Site, and Korekawa Site. Middle Jōmon saw the development of hub settlements and the division of dump and ritual spaces. Sites representative of this period are the Sannai-Maruyama Site, Ōfune Site, Goshono site, and Korekawa Site. Late Jōmon saw the dissolution of hub settlements into smaller ones with a shared ritual center which also functioned as its cemetery. Some of the sites of this period include the Irie site, Komakino Site, Isedōtai Ruins, and Ōyu Stone Circles. Final Jōmon saw the separation of the ritual site and the cemetery into two separate sites shared by multiple settlements. ¹

Like other Paleolithic cultures, Jōmon sites display widespread evidence of the use and production of stone tools. Jōmon tools were most commonly fashioned from chipped stone, made of siliceous shale. However, tools made from other types of stone, wood, and rarer materials such as obsidian and jade have also been discovered in Jōmon-period sites. ¹

These types of tools included but were not limited to: knives, stone drills, spearheads, arrowheads, scrapers sometimes with barbs or stemmed, semi-circular flat chipped stone tools believed to have been used in the preparation of food. In the case of tools built from multiple parts such as spears or arrows, Jōmon toolmakers used bitumen as an adhesive to bind the stone point with its wooden shaft. However, some stone implements appear to have been made without the normal chipping process. This includes ground stone axes, made from granodiorite, greenstone, or blueschist, abrasion cutting stone tools, whetstones, grindstones with or without grooves, hammer stones, saddle querns, and stone weights. ¹

Antlers and bones were also used for tools such as spatulas, fish hooks, harpoon heads, drills, and needles. Exclusive to antlers were hammers, where the base of the antler was used as the impact surface. Wood was used for making shafts of spears, arrows, harpoons, bows, and digging sticks while strips of bark were used to weave baskets. ¹

The Jōmon people were incredibly skilled, likely opportunistic hunters capable of tracking, catching, and killing a wide variety of both large and small game endemic to their environment. These included flying squirrels, hares, weasels, martens, foxes, squirrels, tanuki (raccoon dogs), wild boar, deer, bears, sea lions, badgers, apes, snow monkeys, otters, cormorants, albatrosses, pheasants, grebes, geese, and ducks. Hunting techniques included the use of projectile weapons like bows and spears, pitfall traps, and hunting dogs. The percentage of prey hunted varies from site to site, but generally wild boars and deer were the staple of what was, in the case of the Jōmon, a largely carnivorous diet. However, in the Sannai Maruyama site, flying squirrels and hares are the dominant sources of meat most likely as a result of environmental factors. ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Jōmon people”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

Jōmon people is generic name of people who lived in the Japanese archipelago during the Jōmon period, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 3 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²