Jōmon people
The Jōmon people lived in the archipelago of what's now northeastern Japan, beginning around 14,000 BCE or as early as 16,000. Beginning around 12,000 BCE, they lived as perhaps the world's first sedentary foragers; James C. Scott notes they were "contemporaneous with and likely earlier than the Natufian period in the Fertile Crescent."[1]
By the "Middle Jōmon" period, around 3500 to 2500, the Jōmon supplemented foraging with non-cereal cultivation including "lacquer tree (Toxicodendron verniciflua) and nut tree (Castanea crenata and Aesculus turbinata) management,and probable domestication of barnyard millet and soybean as well as cultivation of bottle gourd and hemp and possible cultivation of Perilla and adzuki."[2]
The Jōmon interacted with neighboring societies in what's now China and Korea, and a tin-bronze knife from northwestern China arrived in the archipelago probably around 2800 BCE. While those societies adopted millet agriculture around 3500 to 2700 BCE, the Jōmon did not adopt cereal cultivation. Only with the transition from the Jōmon to Yayoi culture around 900 or 800 BCE did grain agriculture arise on the archipelago.[3]
Archeologist Chis Gosden argues the Jōmon intentionally rejected grain agriculture as a way of maintaining relative egalitarianism.[4]
In the "Late Jōmon" and "Final Jōmon" periods, from around 2500 to 900 or 800 BCE, a diversity of burial goods may suggest rising inequality and "the use of curved magatama beads as grave goods suggests individual ownership."[5]
Heide Goettner-Abendroth writes:
Japan’s old- est and extremely long cultural epoch is the Jomon era (16,000–300 B.C.E.), when gatherers and hunters came from the north via the island of Sakhalin, lying at the mouth of the Siberian River Amur. In the Middle Jomon phase (4500–2000 B.C.E.), these people developed permanent settlements, the first agriculture (arid rice-growing), beautiful ceramics and a multitude of artistic goddess figurines (the “dogu figurines”). These were most probably made by women, while the men built stone circles in the form of sun-clocks. All this characterizes this phase as Neolithic, and it was Japan’s classical matriarchal epoch. In the Late Jomon phase (2000–300 B.C.E.), the population began to decrease, but the people’s artistic abilities and sensibilities remained.10 Today, descendants of the Jomon people still live on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido: the Ainu, the oldest indigenous people of Japan, who have no patriarchal customs and foster an egalitarian society.[6]
Goettner-Abendroth contends the society became more stratified in the Yayoi Period (300 B.C.E.-300 C.E.), as migrants brought new cultures and agricultural techniques from the south, and became patriarchal in the subsequent Kofun Period began (300–710 C.E.).[7]
- ↑ James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States' (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).
- ↑ Gary W. Crawford, "Advances in Understanding Early Agriculture in Japan," Current Anthropology 52, Supplement 4 (October 2011): S331-345.
- ↑ Mark J. Hudson, Ilona R. Bausch, Martine Robbeets, Tao Li, J. Alyssa White, and Linda Gilaizeau, "Bronze Age Globalisation and Eurasian Impacts on Later Jōmon Social Change," Journal of World Prehistory 34 (2021): 121–158.
- ↑ Chis Gosden, "The commons in prehistory: The case of Japan," in Forty Years in the South Seas Archaeological Perspectives on the Human History of Papua New Guinea and the Western Pacific Region edited by Anne Ford, Ben Shaw and Dylan Gaffney, 339-355.
- ↑ Hudson et al., "Bronze Age Globalization," 125.
- ↑ Heide Goettner-Abendroth, Matriarchal Societies: Studies on Indigenous Cultures Across the Globe (New York: Peter Lang, 2012), 147.
- ↑ Goettner-Abendroth, Matriarchal Societies, 148.
