Jomon period: content
The Beginnings of Jomon (up to Incipient Jomon) - in progress
The Developments of Pottery - in progress
Occupation of space by the Jomon people - in progress
Subsistence strategies during Jomon - in progress
Everyday life of the Jomon people - in progress
The spiritual landscape and culture of the Jomon - in progress
The last stages of Jomon and the Yayoi transition - in construction
Jomon period: introduction and biography
The Jomon period has for a long time sparked little interest among scholars, at least western ones, and public alike, despite it lasting over 10,000 years and ending some time in the first millenium BC. I can see at least two major reasons for that: one is that Japan doesn't seem to have had relations of a political nature with other countries until way later; the fact that political entities in Japan of consequential size doesn't seem to have developed until later, during the Yayoi and Kofun eras would have obviously prevented that. As a result of this lack of political structure, doubled by the absense of writing and systematic agriculture, Jomon Japan has been given this image of a kind of backwater area, both technologically and culturally. Certainly, the discoveries of Japanese archeologists have challenged this image for a long time now, but differences in methods and ideology between Western and Japanese archeologists, as well as the limited number of publications related to the Jomon era published in any language other than Japanese, haven't allowed these discoveries to change Jomon's image in the collective mind outside Japan, at least not until fairly recently. In fact, there's still some way to go if one considers that the Metropolitan Museum itself still has on its website, to this day (January 2008), the following comment regarding the discovery of potsherds revealed to date back to 10,500 BC circa through carbon-14 testing, in its Timeline of Art History, Japan between 8000 and 2000 BC:
[....]because this date falls outside the known chronology of pottery development elsewhere in the world, such an early date is not generally accepted
Of course, we now know that not only potsherds found in Japan did date back to 10,500 BC, but pottery older than that by several millenia has been discovered since. However, this sentence is very symptomatic of what has been a remarkebly common view among scholars until further testing and the multiplication of similar finds confirmed that indeed, Japan was, if not the first pottery-producing country in the world (some scholars believe that pottery came to Japan from the continent, either China or Siberia), at least one of the first, millenia earlier than, say, the Near East or Mesopotamia. But because the Japanese civilization's curve of development differs widely from that of most other civilizations, integrating large-scale agriculture and writing much later than its neighbors, the Near and Middle East, and Europe, the possibility that such an important technology was adopted, and developed, earlier in Japan than elsewhere seemed ludicrous, or at least very unlikely
It seems that this way of thinking is behind us now. New finds and progresses by Japanese archeologists as well as the multiplication of publications on the subject in English both have contributed to it. I will sum them up here and I hope to add to that, as soon as my knowledge of Japanese allows me to do so, information from Japanese publications as well
Disclaimer
The subject of Jomon falling outside the scoop of my studies, keep in mind that this is the work of a "laywoman", as it were. I do not pretend to break new grounds with this section, but to propose a summary of what is currently known about it, to the best of my abilities, and using as wide a range of sources as I can
Also, at the moment, this part of the site is very much a work in progress, so I apologize if sometimes the text isn't as well articulated as one might wish. Sections that are expected to be worked on quite extensively in the next few weeks are indicated as text in progress; moreover, once I have been through most of the sources currently available to me, it will all go through a major revision to polish things. Thank you for your patience and unerstanding!
03/04/2008: this article contains so far most of my notes from Kobayashi, part of my notes from Imamura (I am currently working on those), and some additional elements, in particular from Prof. Keally's website, as well as the International Jomon Culture Conference
Bibliography
Bibliography is completed as elements I learn from sources are being used in this section
Habu, Junko, "Ancient Jomon of Japan", Cambridge Univeristy Press, Cambridge, 2004
Kobayashi, Tatsuo, "Jomon Reflections", Oxbow Books, Oxford, 2004
Imamura, Keiji, "Prehistoric Japan", University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu, 1996
Japanese Archaeology, by Prof. Charles T. Keally
International Jomon Culture Conference