Jomon Fishing Site Discovered

Yomiuri.com ^ | 3-29-2004 | Yomiuri Shimbun

[Doomonyou]

The Great Great Great Great Great Grandfather of Bill Dance.

[blam]

"Any indications when the Jomon began using the Cord Pottery style?"

No. I think the Jomon pottery is the oldest ever found.

[RightWhale]

Is it possible there were humans here 30,000 and that they left again or died out for some reason such as famine or disease?

[blam]

"Any indications when the Jomon began using the Cord Pottery style?"

Some Interesting pottery details here:

Jomon's Women Pottery

Jomon Venus Figure

[blam]

"The Great Great Great Great Great Grandfather of Bill Dance."

That's an Ainu Guy.

[blam]

"Is it possible there were humans here 30,000 and that they left again or died out for some reason such as famine or disease?"

Yes. I expect you have seen the below posting before.

Calico: A 200,000-Year-Old Site In The Americas?

[blam]

Jomon Of Japan, The World's Oldest Pottery

[Fedora]

I've been looking up stuff since my last post and it looks like various sites give different dates for the Jomon period. Here's one site which looks like it goes into some of the details:

The Prehistoric Archaeology of Japan

Now why I'm curious about the date is because I'd heard of corded items in European archaeology--here's a site mentioning a conference which seems to explore that parallelism:

ARCHAEOLOGIES OF CORDAGE ACROSS EURASIA

Organisers:

Simon Kaner (Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, Norwich, United Kingdom)

Noriyuki Yamamoto (Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures Norwich, United Kingdom)

This session commemorates the 90th anniversary of the death of one of the founding fathers of Japanese archaeology, Tsuboi Shogoro, in St Petersburg in 1913. Tsuboi was a pioneer of the scientific study of pottery in archaeology.. This session will investigate how pottery studies, of which Tsuboi was a pioneer in Japan, have shaped archaeological discourse across Eurasia. Along with other scholars of his generation, including Hamada Kosaku who studied seriation with Flinders Petrie, Tsuboi was instrumental in adapting Western archaeological concepts for a Japanese context.

The use of cordage to decorate pottery vessels is one of the defining characteristics of the Jomon period in Japanese prehistory. Cord-marking is also, however, a major attribute of pottery decoration across much of Eurasia, in particular in the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, visible in the Corded Ware cultures that stretch from the Volga to western Europe, including Beakers. This session brings together specialists from Europe, Russia and Japan, to consider the many dimensions of cordage and cord-marked pottery in prehistory.

Papers will consider the technology, symbolism, context, formation processes and function of cordage and cord-marked pottery across Europe and will provide an unprecedented opportunity to place the cord-marked pottery tradition of Jomon Japan in a Eurasian perspective. The session will also address the ways in which European archaeological method and theory have influenced archaeology outside Europe, taking as the focus the changing interpretations of types and technologies and their relationship to prehistoric peoples and cultures.

[blam]

"I've been looking up stuff since my last post and it looks like various sites give different dates for the Jomon period."

Me too. You'll find the same dating situation with the Olmec.

Jomon Pottery Early Period

This style of bowl was common in western Kyüshü during the Early Jömon period. The geometric pattern is extremely similar to the patterns used in Korean pottery from the Pusan area.

[blam]

"The use of cordage to decorate pottery vessels is one of the defining characteristics of the Jomon period in Japanese prehistory. Cord-marking is also, however, a major attribute of pottery decoration across much of Eurasia, in particular in the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, visible in the Corded Ware cultures that stretch from the Volga to western Europe, including Beakers."

James Chatters (of Kennewick Man fame), in his book Ancient Encounters speculates that the genes that produced Kennewick Man also produced the Asians and Europeans. If Cord Pottery is oldest in Japan and is also found later in Europe, this may be some support for his speculation? Europeans were 'hatched' in Asia?

[colorado tanker]

Hmmm. The Jomon must have moved to the Americas when the prehistoric Japanese PETA busted 'em for fishing dolphins.

[blam]

Pottery Of Ancient Japan

"The world's earliest pottery may be from Japan where, at Odai Yamamoto on northern Honshu, shards have been found C14 dated to 13,000 BP, calibrated 16,000 years old.""

[Fedora]

Jomon Venus Figure

That one strikes me as highly significant:

Cian MacFhiarais, "‘Venus’ Figurines in Prehistoric Europe: The Emergence of Art and Belief"

Although there are reported dates for ‘Venus’ figurines ranging from 29,000-14,000 years B.P, by far the majority of the ‘Venus’ figurines appear between 23,000 and 25,000 B.P (Gamble, 1981:97, cited in Dickson, 1990), at a period that is referred to in Eastern Europe as the ‘Gravettian’ and in Western Europe as the ‘Perigordian’. Dickson suggests that the remarkable similarity of the figurines over these vast geographical areas points to these two archaeological traditions being part of the same extended cultural province (1990:65).

[Fedora]

James Chatters (of Kennewick Man fame), in his book Ancient Encounters speculates that the genes that produced Kennewick Man also produced the Asians and Europeans. If Cord Pottery is oldest in Japan and is also found later in Europe, this may be some support for his speculation? Europeans were 'hatched' in Asia?

Or--another possibility that occurs to me--it could be that the European Cord Pottery tradition is older than previously thought and may descend from the same period as the Venus figurines, just as the Cord Pottery and Venus figurines appear together in Japan. BTW, that reminds me of something you posted a few months back:

Prehistoric Oriental 'Venus' Carved On Cliff Discovered In Ningxia

[blam]

Chinese, Japanese Started Prehistoric Exchanges 7,000 Years Ago: Archaeologists

"They compared archeological findings in China's Xinglonggou Relics Site in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, also popularly known as "China's first primitive village", and findings in Japanese sites from the Neolithic age, about 10,000 to 4,000 years ago

. The cultural exchanges occurred on a route from northeast China through coastal Russian areas to Japan's Hokkaido and Honshu over 7,000 years ago, noted Wang Wei, deputy director of the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences"

[lavrenti]

I wonder now where the Celts originated.

Cord pottery design looks awfully familiar.

[Fedora]

Interesting article. This part would also seem relevant to the issue of possible connections with the Olmecs:

The relic site is the earliest and most well-preserved of primitive villages in China and pushed estimates of the country's jade production history back to some 8,000 years ago.

[Petronski]

I think I dated her.

[Fedora]

It made me think of Celtic designs, too.

[blam]

"Or--another possibility that occurs to me--it could be that the European Cord Pottery tradition is older than previously thought and may descend from the same period as the Venus figurines, just as the Cord Pottery and Venus figurines appear together in Japan."

Perhaps. At some point, 12-15k years ago, the people of Japan were 'cut-off' by the rising waters from the Ice Age end.
Trading and contact by sea would be limited. So, what-ever similarities exist between the Jomon and Europeans likely occurred before the ending of the Ice Age...which would fit with the dates of the European Venus figurines, 23-25k years ago.