S. Kaner
transforming our understanding of chronologies, providing increasingly high resolution dates for
the already high resolution archaeological record of the Jōmon and Yayoi, and fueling controversy
over when these albeit artificial constructs should be regarded as beginning and ending.^20
Jo ̄mon pilgrimages
The many thousands of excavations of Jōmon sites that have taken place over the last half century
have demonstrated that the Jōmon achievement is indeed remarkable: some of the earliest
ceramics in the world; the ability to sustain village- style communities over many generations, in
the case of Sannai Maruyama in Aomori prefecture for nearly 2000 years; an intensive relation-
ship with plants and animals, notably chestnuts, lacquer, and wild boar, but without significant
cultivation or domestication; the maintenance of extensive networks for the exchange of com-
modities, including valued stones such as obsidian and jadeite; an exceptional sense of design
which speaks to modern sensibilities; a highly developed worldview which gave rise to complex
ritual and ceremonial facilities and monuments including stone circles.
The significance of understanding Jōmon archaeology for the history of humanity as a whole
is recognized through the inclusion of a series of Jōmon sites in Japan’s tentative list for UNESCO
World Heritage status. As part of an initiative to attract tourists to make the pilgrimage to ancient
sites during the cultural Olympiad leading up to the Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics in 2020,
the Agency for Cultural Affairs has designated Jōmon sites in Niigata prefecture that have yielded
examples of the elaborate flame style of pottery vessels dating to around 5000 years ago as “Japan
Heritage” sites, in conjunction with the Snow Country along the Shinano River associated with
the eponymous novel by the Nobel laureate Kawabata Yasunari (himself the proud owner of a
Jōmon dogu figure). Our Edo period antiquarians would doubtless have appreciated the oppor-
tunity to travel and encounter such ancient wonders.
The Jōmon culture was identified during Morse’s investigations of the Ōmori shell middens
in 1877, but over a thousand years earlier, the Hitachi fudoki of 713 recorded observations of shell
deposits, which were assumed to be the work of giants, who had gathered up shellfish from the
sea, eaten them, and left behind the shells at a location called Ōgushi. The giant trope recurs in
legends from around Japan.^21 Observations of ancient stone arrowheads were also relatively
common. For example, in 839 stone arrowheads were noticed lying on the ground after heavy
rain in Dewa province (modern- day Yamagata prefecture) and were thus considered to have
fallen from the sky, as recorded in Shoku Nihon k|ki and then later in the 880s in Sandai jitsuroku.
By the later 1700s, the notion that such objects could be of human manufacture were beginning
to circulate, based on observations that stone tools were also found in ancient graves.^22
In 1623, according to the seventeenth- century Eiroku nikki, the first ancient pots were
unearthed at the site of Kamegaoka (“Hill of the Jars”) in Mutsu province (modern day Aomori
prefecture). Parts of ceramic figures were recovered from the Sannai site on the terraces at the
rear of Mutsu Bay. The first major archaeological excavations at Kamegaoka were undertaken by
Satō Denzo in 1895–1896, and by the time Shimizu Junzō of Keio University embarked on his
campaign of investigations in 1950, over 3000 “curious earthenwares” had already been dug out
from the site.^23 Today, the Sannai site is understood to be just one location of the Sannai Maru-
yama settlement complex, the largest Jōmon site yet encountered in Japan. Investigations of the
site began in the 1990s, initially undertaken in advance of the construction of a new prefectural
baseball stadium. But plans for the stadium had to be abandoned part- way through when the true
scale and significance of the site became apparent.
By the time Morse arrived in Japan and undertook his research at Ōmori in 1877, networks of
collectors whose interests included antiquarianism existed in Tokyo, Osaka, and elsewhere.