Japan's Jōmon made pottery and settled in villages without becoming farmers
Settled villages and pottery usually go with farming. Japan's Jōmon had both for more than ten thousand years while mostly hunting, fishing and gathering nuts. Their name, meaning cord-marked, comes from the rope patterns pressed into their pots, a term coined by an American zoologist digging near Tokyo in 1877.
The Jōmon lived across the Japanese islands from roughly 14,000 BC to 300 BC, when newcomers from mainland East Asia, the Yayoi, largely absorbed them. Their legacy survives in DNA: Jōmon ancestry makes up a small share of the heritage of Japan's majority Yamato people and most of the ancestry of the Ainu of Hokkaido. The label came from Edward S. Morse, who excavated the Ōmori shell mound and in 1879 rendered straw-rope pattern into Japanese as Jōmon.
Homes were pit dwellings, dug into the ground with a roof sloping up from the edges and a hearth in the middle. Each probably sheltered four to six people, sometimes for two or three generations, and buildings longer than 10 metres likely served as meeting halls, workshops or shared winter quarters. Over time settlements grew more organised, adding separate cemeteries, storage and rubbish areas, then large hub villages. At Sannai-Maruyama, excavators found unpaved roads lined with graves and a spring-fed pool that may have been used to soak bitter horse chestnuts until they were edible.
Food came from everywhere. Hunters used bows, spears, pit traps and dogs, with wild boar and deer the usual staples, though at Sannai-Maruyama flying squirrels and hares dominated. Rubbish heaps hold bones of sharks, mackerel and cod along with octopus and oysters, suggesting skilled seafarers who built boats from large trees. Detachable harpoon heads could be hauled back on ropes, and bitumen glued stone points to wooden shafts.
The line between gathering and farming was blurry. The Jōmon tended trees near their homes, especially chestnuts, and plant genome research suggests people in eastern Japan tamed the adzuki bean some 3,000 to 5,000 years ago. Nuts were stored in pits or big clay pots and ground on stone querns, and they may even have made alcohol from elderberries.
Source: Jōmon people
