Jōmon pottery
▶ Explore on the mapThe Jōmon culture of the Japanese archipelago made some of the world's earliest pottery, and its name, meaning cord-marked, comes from the patterns pressed into the wet clay before firing. The oldest sherds, found at the Odai Yamamoto site in Aomori, date to about 16,000 BCE, though the tradition is usually marked here from about 13,000 to 400 BCE. Jōmon communities were hunters, fishers and gatherers who lived in pit dwellings and, from the middle period, in settled villages with ditches and storage pits; the Sannai Maruyama site in Aomori shows a community that lasted a thousand years. They shaped vessels by coiling, without a wheel, and fired them in open fires, producing jars and flared bowls whose rims were often ornamented with applied rope. They also made clay figurines, the dogu, whose purpose is debated, and ground stone tools. Forest management by fire kept nut trees productive, and acorns and chestnuts were staple foods. The culture survived for ten thousand years without agriculture, and later Japanese writers linked its pottery to the origins of the islands' craft tradition. The vessels were not fired in kilns but in open hearths, and their shapes changed slowly over ten millennia, which is how archaeologists date the layers of Jōmon sites.