Jomon - mysteries of the ancient culture of the Japanese archipelago

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Archaeologists from Novosibirsk are investigating the origin of the ancient culture of the Japanese archipelago - the jomon, which existed in the Stone Age for almost twelve thousand years. One of the main mysteries of that era was the high technological and cultural level achieved without reliance on agriculture and livestock raising. It has been hypothesized that Jomon is an alternative civilizational path.

The Stone Age comes to Japan

The culture of Japan is of keen interest in the Western world. The reverent attitude of the Japanese to nature, architecture, ideally inscribed in the landscape, environmentally friendly materials and methods of management, philosophical perception of what is happening find a lively response in the hearts of people with directly opposite values. How did they come to this in the Land of the Rising Sun, where are the origins of such an amazing way of life and way of thinking? Archeology is trying to answer these questions.

Scientists agree that the settlement of the Japanese archipelago began at the end of the Stone Age, about forty thousand years ago (the late Paleolithic period). People most likely arrived on the island of Honshu from the Korean Peninsula - this is evidenced by the similarity of stone tools and radiocarbon dating.

“It was a relatively cold time, the ocean level was much lower than now, the island of Hokkaido was a single whole with Sakhalin and part of the Lower Amur, and Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu were one island - paleo-Honshu. Nevertheless, even at the lowest ocean level, paleo-Honshu has always been separated from the Korean Peninsula by a strait, which suggests the initial settlement of the archipelago using water transport. This is indicated by stone tools for processing wood, which are found in large numbers at the earliest sites in Japan, - explains RIA Novosti Andrey Tabarev, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Head of the Foreign Archeology Sector of the Institute of Archeology and Ethnography of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The first migrants were skilled hunters, gatherers, and fishermen. They very quickly mastered the entire archipelago, which was facilitated by the richness of flora and fauna, an abundance of sources of siliceous shale, jasper, volcanic glass (obsidian) - a strategically important raw material for the people of the Stone Age.

Jomon Cultural Revolution

Two tens of millennia later, about 14 thousand years ago, the descendants of those first settlers made an extremely important technological breakthrough - they switched to making dishes from baked clay, the first artificial material, which marks the beginning of the Jomon era.

"This epoch is subdivided into several periods - initial, initial, early, middle and late (final). About eight thousand years ago, imprints of a braided cord became the leading ornamental element on vessels. Cord in Japanese is" jomon. " there is a gradual transition to a semi- and then to a sedentary lifestyle, various types of dwellings appear - ground and semi-dugouts and outbuildings, the construction of ritual complexes of stone begins, many of which have survived to this day. the islands of Hokkaido and in the northeast of Honshu - more than three hundred! " - continues Tabarev.

The most ancient complexes - rows of stones - appear eight thousand years ago, then - concentric areas lined with boulders around the central stone. For example, the Akyu monument in Nagano prefecture occupies 55 thousand square meters and contains more than one hundred thousand stones, including slabs of volcanic rocks, sandstone, stone pillars leading towards the neighboring Mount Tateshina.

About five thousand years ago, the Jomon people actively build stone complexes within the settlements. In particular, the Gosyono monument in Iwate Prefecture is three large villages of seven hundred dwellings. There are two circles lined with stones.

According to the generally accepted concept, the megaliths, which were often complemented by wooden structures, served for religious purposes. Archaeologists find fragments of pottery, figurines of people and animals, toy-like objects, memorial symbols (for example, a plaque with prints of a child's foot was found on the Yubunezawa II monument in Iwate Prefecture), stone tools, earth graves covered with stone slabs, and urns with the remains of children and adults. Vivid cultural markers of the jomon are sekibo stone wands and dogu clay figurines, symbolizing the male and female principles, respectively.

Scientists believe that some of these ritual complexes of stone (or parts of them) and wooden structures were used for astronomical purposes. The most famous is the Sannai Maruyama monument on the site of a large settlement founded five thousand years ago. There was a three-tiered structure on six wooden piles about twenty meters high.

How they were escorted to other worlds

"The Jomon people had complex and varied burial rituals, which reflects both the local characteristics of groups living in different landscape zones, and the obvious social stratification of the Jomon society - the presence of a tribal elite, clergy, warriors, merchants, especially skillful craftsmen, hunters, builders and so on, "explains Andrey Tabarev.

The problem is that the soils of the Japanese archipelago are very acidic, and this has the most detrimental effect on the preservation of organic matter - anthropological material, wood products, bones, horns. In such a situation, unusual monuments, primarily shell heaps, become especially important.

"Experts have long refuted the idea that shell heaps are only an accumulation of household and commercial waste, a garbage dump. In the Jomon era, especially in the middle and late periods, shell heaps served as burial grounds. There are interesting observations that suggest that they had a certain shape, differed in geometrical parameters and, accordingly, can also be considered as monumental structures, "the scientist notes.

Due to the degradation of organic matter in soils, the DNA of the Jomon has not yet been studied.

"Only recently the situation began to change - Japanese colleagues discovered about thirty well-preserved burials at the Iyai monument in Gunma Prefecture. Now the material is being processed, there will be genetic analyzes, there is a prospect of obtaining both mitochondrial and nuclear DNA," Tabarev says.

The burials at the Iyai monument, which is about 11 thousand years old, belong to the earliest, original period of the Jomon and illustrate an interesting and not yet understandable ritual for archaeologists - cutting the bodies of the deceased in the pelvic region and then laying the skeletons in anatomical order. This is a very clear example of the tradition of manipulating body parts or skeletons prevalent in the ancient cultures of the Pacific Basin - from the Japanese archipelago to Indonesia and from Oceania to the coast of South America.

A special way

Scientists from Novosibirsk, with the assistance of colleagues from Japan, have been studying the Jomon culture for more than ten years. Their goal is to understand how this diversity of the Stone Age cultures of the Pacific Basin developed, how they adapted to the climate and other natural conditions. This year the Russian Science Foundation supported the research with a special grant.

“For a long time, the transition from a hunting-gatherer lifestyle to agriculture and cattle breeding about ten thousand years ago was considered as the main model of the emergence of early civilizations, using the example of the cultures of Western Asia, in the so-called Fertile Crescent. in Turkish Kurdistan with an age of more than 11 thousand years or the cult complex Karal, which appeared on the coast of Peru about five thousand years ago, indicate that there were many more such models. Jomon can be considered one of them, believes Andrei Tabarev.

Modern Japan is the child of two civilizational models: Eastern and Western. In a matter of decades, the country has become the leader of the industrial world, while preserving the original foundations of the ancient culture.

"The Japanese treat the cultural heritage very carefully and touchingly, in which the Jomon era plays a special role - there are the origins of their hard work, a special connection with nature, the ability to live in exceptional harmony," the archaeologist concludes.