The Stadium That Changed Archaeology

In the summer of 1992, on the outskirts of Aomori city at the northern tip of Honshū, a construction crew began digging foundations for a new prefectural baseball stadium. The excavator cut into the clayey soil of a river terrace above the Okitate and almost immediately struck a dark layer packed with ceramic shards, animal bones and obsidian blades. Archaeologists were called in. They started with routine test bores and ended with a discovery that forced a rewriting of the textbooks on Japanese prehistory. Over the course of two years of excavation, six hundred and forty-eight pit dwellings were uncovered, along with traces of roads, central plazas, adult graves and nine hundred children’s burial urns – a settlement inhabited continuously for one thousand seven hundred years. The governor of Aomori Prefecture cancelled the construction of the stadium. Forty hectares of land where balls were meant to be hit were handed over to the memory of a culture that had lived and created here thousands of years before the rise of Roman, Egyptian or even Sumerian civilization.

The site bears the name Sannai-Maruyama (三内丸山) and is the largest known settlement of the Jōmon period – a culture that inhabited the Japanese Islands for roughly fourteen thousand years. The Jōmon people created the oldest pottery in the world – vessel fragments from Aomori Prefecture have been dated to sixteen and a half thousand years ago – predating Near Eastern ceramics by six millennia. They fired them in open bonfires, by hand, without a potter’s wheel, at the tail end of the Ice Age. They had no writing. They did not cultivate rice. They did not build cities of stone. And yet they traded jade over distances of five hundred kilometres, planted chestnut forests around their settlements, buried their children in ceremonial urns, and their clay figurines – with goggle-like eyes and deliberately broken limbs – rank among the most enigmatic sculptures of the ancient world.

Fourteen thousand years of continuous culture. Longer than any civilization taught in schools. And yet most of the world has never heard of Jōmon – because the Western filter reserves the word “civilization” for those who had grain, writing and walls. The Jōmon people had none of the three. What they did have were forests they had planted themselves – chestnut trees selectively bred over generations, their nuts growing steadily larger as DNA analysis confirms – thousands of years before anything the West calls agriculture. They had monumental structures of chestnut timbers whose alignment corresponds to the solstices – like Stonehenge. And they had something no great ancient civilization ever achieved: continuity. Pharaonic Egypt lasted three thousand years. Rome – one thousand. Jōmon – fourteen thousand. Then rice arrived from the continent, bronze, writing – and Japan began building the history the world knows. The earlier one, the longer one, the stranger one, the one that reveals ties to the Ainu – it preferred to forget.

A City That Had No Right to Exist

Sannai-Maruyama and the Revision of Everything We Knew About Jōmon

Before the 1992 excavations began, little was known about Sannai-Maruyama – though it cannot be said that nothing was. Traces of pottery and clay figurines from this location were already recorded in the chronicles of the Hirosaki domain in 1623, and the traveller Masumi Sugae described in his 1796 journal the unearthing of roof tiles, jars and clay figurines after an old dam in the village of Sannai collapsed, exposing ancient layers of earth. For centuries, however, nobody could determine what they were dealing with. The first systematic surveys were conducted in the 1950s and 1960s, followed by further work in the 1970s and 1980s – but the investigations focused on the southern portions of the site. Only the stadium construction in 1992 forced a survey of the entire area. And only then did the earth give up what it held.

The numbers that emerged from the excavations are staggering. Six hundred and forty-eight pit dwellings – the so-called tateana jūkyo (竪穴住居) – typical round or square pits three to four metres in diameter, each with a hearth at its centre. One hundred and twenty raised-floor buildings – elevated storehouses that appeared once the inhabitants transitioned to a sedentary way of life and needed to protect their supplies from moisture and rodents. Three hundred and eighty adult graves and nine hundred children’s burial urns – suggesting that children were buried differently from adults, their bodies placed inside large ceramic vessels. Traces of three roads were found, along with two large refuse mounds filled with domestic waste and ritual objects, as well as two ceremonial earthen mounds. Approximately two thousand clay figurines known as dogū (土偶) were recovered, together with tools of bone, antler and stone, lacquerware and wooden artefacts. All of this across an area of thirty-five hectares – one of the largest Neolithic sites in the world.

The settlement was inhabited continuously for roughly one thousand seven hundred years – from approximately 3900 to 2200 BCE. That is longer than the existence of ancient Rome from its founding to the fall of the Western Empire. In the beginning, Sannai-Maruyama functioned as a seasonal camp for hunter-gatherers: people came for a time, made use of the surrounding forests and river, then moved on. This is evidenced by underground storage pits – a favoured form of food storage among mobile populations, since they are easy to conceal. Over the course of centuries, the camp became increasingly permanent. Around 2900 BCE the final shift occurred: the inhabitants abandoned underground storage in favour of above-ground granaries raised on stilts. This is the moment from which archaeologists speak no longer of visiting a place, but of living in it.

The largest residential structure discovered measured thirty-two metres in length and ten metres in width. This is not a hut – it is a hall. Archaeologists speculate it may have served as a meeting house, a communal workshop or multi-family quarters. Similar longhouses, though smaller, are known from European Neolithic contexts, yet here they appeared within a culture that never adopted full-scale cereal agriculture. It is precisely this contradiction – monumentality without agriculture – that makes Sannai-Maruyama so troublesome for Western models of civilizational development.

The diet of the inhabitants was rich and varied. Animal bones recovered from the refuse mounds include deer, wild boar, hare and flying squirrel, as well as vast quantities of fish bones – from both river and ocean species. The cool, moist soil of northern Tōhoku preserved organic remains far better than at most Japanese sites. Nut shells were found – from edible chestnuts, walnuts and horse chestnuts – along with seeds of cultivated plants: perilla (egoma), gourd, burdock and several varieties of beans. Genetic testing of the excavated chestnuts revealed that these were not fruits gathered from wild trees. They had been cultivated. Japanese archaeologists use an evocative term for this: hansaibai (半栽培) – literally “half-cultivation,” something between gathering and farming. The people of Sannai-Maruyama did not plough fields, but they planted nut forests around their settlement, selected superior varieties and managed the landscape. Pollen analyses showed that chestnut groves appeared and disappeared in rhythm with climatic shifts – in warmer periods the edible chestnut dominated, in cooler ones the horse chestnut. This was no accident – it was a strategy.

The settlement did not live in isolation. Objects whose raw materials do not occur in Aomori Prefecture were recovered from the excavations: jade – imported from the Itoigawa region in Niigata Prefecture, over five hundred kilometres away in a straight line. Amber – most likely from Iwate Prefecture. Obsidian – spectrometrically confirmed from several distant sources. This points to a trade network spanning hundreds of kilometres, operating on a permanent basis, not from case to case. Ceramics with stylistic similarities to wares from the Kantō region were also found at the site, and even vessels bearing features reminiscent of the Xinglongwa culture from the Liao River basin in China – earrings and flat-bottomed cylindrical pottery suggesting long-distance contacts, perhaps even overseas ones.

Six Pillars and the Mystery of the Monument

A Structure Whose Purpose We Do Not Know

Of all the discoveries at Sannai-Maruyama, one captured the imagination more than any other. In June 1994, archaeologists came upon six post holes arranged in two parallel rows of three. Each hole measured two metres in diameter and two metres in depth. The spacing between them – exactly 4.2 metres. In four of the six holes, trunks of edible chestnut roughly one metre in diameter had survived, charred at the base. Charring wood is a preservation technique – the carbonized outer layer protects the core from moisture and decay. Thanks to this, the trunks endured for over five thousand years.

The holes were slightly tilted inward, meaning the pillars converged toward the top – supporting a roof, a platform or some form of superstructure. Based on the dimensions of the foundations, the research team estimated the height of the structure at fifteen to twenty metres. That is roughly the equivalent of a five-storey apartment building. The reconstruction that stands on the archaeological park grounds today rises to fifteen metres and is one of the most recognizable symbols of Sannai-Maruyama – a wooden tower with six massive pillars, restored on the basis of archaeological data, though nobody knows for certain what the original superstructure looked like.

What was this building? Archaeologists are not sure. A watchtower? A sea beacon – in Jōmon times the coastline ran closer than it does today? A navigational landmark for sailors? A ritual structure? What is certain is that analogous six-pillar buildings from different periods were found in other parts of the site. Their post holes overlap one another, indicating that these same structures were repeatedly rebuilt in the same location and facing the same direction. This was no accident – it was a tradition, passed down through generations.

More fascinating still is the astronomical context. The orientation of certain structures at Sannai-Maruyama aligns with the directions of the solstices – in a manner analogous to the Ōyu stone circles in neighbouring Akita Prefecture, dated to a similar period. The parallel with Stonehenge is no coincidence: both constructions were built at roughly the same time, both show a connection to the movement of celestial bodies, both are monumental on the scale of their respective cultures. The difference is that Stonehenge is taught in schools from London to Tokyo. The six pillars of Sannai-Maruyama – almost nowhere beyond Japan.

Pottery of the Older World

How a Cord Pressed into Clay Rewrote the Chronology of Civilization

The name “Jōmon” (縄文) literally means “cord pattern” – and refers to the most characteristic decorative technique: pressing twisted cord or rope into wet clay before firing. The term was coined by the American zoologist Edward Sylvester Morse, who in 1877 conducted the first scientific excavation in Japan – at the shell mounds of Ōmori near Yokohama (yes, he was a zoologist, which is a fascinating story in its own right). Morse translated the Japanese phrase “cord pattern” into English, and then back into Japanese as jōmon. The pottery he found, he believed, was a few thousand years old at most. He was off by an entire order of magnitude.

The true age of Jōmon pottery was revealed after the Second World War, when radiocarbon dating entered the archaeological arsenal. Then successive discoveries pushed the boundary ever further into the past. In 1998, at the Odai Yamamoto I site – also in Aomori Prefecture, just a few dozen kilometres from Sannai-Maruyama – forty-six vessel fragments were recovered and dated to approximately 14,500 BCE, that is, roughly sixteen and a half thousand years ago. This makes them among the oldest known ceramic vessels in the world – older than anything from Mesopotamia by over six millennia. The fragments were plain, undecorated, without cord patterns – but it is precisely their rawness that is fascinating. Someone on the northern tip of what is now Japan, in the final phase of the Pleistocene, before the warming that shaped our world had even begun, hit upon the idea of firing raw clay and turning it into a vessel.

This dating is of enormous significance. Fourteen and a half thousand years before the Common Era is a time before the first great warming wave that ended the Ice Age, before the radical shift that ushered in the Holocene. In other words: Jōmon pottery was created in the Pleistocene, under glacial conditions. The people who made it were not sitting in warm villages surrounded by cultivated fields – they were hunter-gatherers living on the edge of the glacier. And yet they invented the pot. This completely upends the traditional narrative in which pottery is a product of the Neolithic Revolution, a consequence of sedentary life, agriculture and food surpluses. Japanese pottery appeared thousands of years before anything we might call farming.

Over the ensuing millennia, it developed with astonishing diversity. Archaeologists have classified over seventy major regional styles and more than four hundred local variants. Early vessels had rounded bases – because they were placed directly in the fire, sunk into sand or ashes. Their sizes grew over time, which researchers interpret as a trace of an increasingly sedentary lifestyle: the less one wanders, the larger the pots one can afford. Eventually flat bases appeared – vessels could now stand on a surface, indoors. Rims became increasingly decorated, undulating, sculpted.

The absolute artistic pinnacle of Jōmon ceramics is kaen doki (火焔土器) – the so-called “flame pottery” of the Middle Jōmon period, dated to approximately 3500–2500 BCE. Its epicentre is the Shinano River valley in Niigata Prefecture, and the site that best represents it is Umataka in the city of Nagaoka. These are vessels whose rims explode into three-dimensional forms: swirling spirals, crests, waves of frozen fire. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York describes them as the pottery of “the oldest known civilization” – and it is hard to disagree, even if the word “civilization” stirs a certain unease here. Every kaen doki vessel is unique, each appearing more sculpture than utensil. Their rims are so irregular that practical use – pouring, cooking, storing – seems at the very least difficult. Some scholars believe the flame vessels served exclusively ritual purposes. Chemical residue analyses, however, revealed traces of cooked acorns on some specimens – so at least a portion of them served a culinary role, regardless of the madness of their form.

Jōmon pottery knew no potter’s wheel. Every vessel was made by hand, by the method of layering successive coils of clay – spiralling from the base upward, then smoothing the walls with the palm, a paddle or a wooden tool. They were fired in open bonfires at temperatures of six hundred to nine hundred degrees Celsius – too low to produce hard ceramics in the modern sense, but sufficient for a vessel to withstand cooking over fire for years. These were not fragile ornaments. They were tools of daily life, manufactured on a mass scale, used for thousands of years. And at the same time – works of art that five thousand years later command the admiration of curators at the world’s finest museums.

Figurines We Cannot Read

Dogū and the Limits of Our Interpretation

The Jōmon period produced yet another category of objects that has given scholars no rest for over a hundred years. Dogū (土偶) – literally “clay figurines” – are small, humanoid or zoomorphic sculptures of fired clay, made exclusively during the Jōmon period. In the subsequent Yayoi era, they vanish entirely. The National Museum of Japanese History estimates their total number at approximately fifteen thousand; the Japan Times puts the figure at eighteen thousand. They have been found across all of Japan except Okinawa, but the vast majority come from the eastern and northeastern parts of Honshū.

The earliest dogū appeared in the Incipient Jōmon phase – simple, schematic figurines just a few centimetres tall. In the Middle Jōmon their production surged and their forms grew increasingly complex. They range from ten to thirty centimetres in height, with broad faces, large eyes, short arms and narrow waists. Most depict female figures – with clearly marked breasts, hips and a protruding belly. The bellies are covered with patterns that may represent tattoos, body ornaments or elements of clothing. Many figurines were painted with red cinnabar.

There are four main types of dogū: “pregnant,” “horned owl,” “heart-shaped face” and the best known – shakōki dogū (遮光器土偶), or “goggle-eyed figurines.” The name shakōki means “light-blocking device” and derives from the extraordinary shape of these figurines’ eyes: bulging, oval, with a horizontal slit down the middle, strikingly reminiscent of Inuit snow goggles. These eyes are so distinctive that for most Japanese the word dogū immediately conjures precisely this type. Shakōki dogū appeared in the Final Jōmon phase, between 1000 and 400 BCE, primarily in the Tōhoku region and southern Hokkaidō. Around three thousand have been found, most in the vicinity of the Kamegaoka site in Aomori Prefecture.

The larger shakōki dogū are hollow inside, their feet too small for them to stand on their own – they were therefore probably held in the hands or laid on a flat surface. And they are almost always damaged. An arm is missing, or a leg, or a head. These are not accidental breakages – archaeologists have noted that in many cases the limbs were deliberately cut or snapped off. Complete figurines are exceptionally rare. One theory holds that dogū served as “substitute bodies”: the part of the figurine corresponding to whatever ailed its owner was broken off, transferring the illness or pain onto the clay. Another theory sees in them representations of a mother goddess, fertility symbols, magical protection during childbirth. Yet another – mannequins for applying tattoo patterns.

The truth is that we do not know. We have no writing from the Jōmon era. We have no narrative context. We have no text whatsoever that would explain what these figurines meant to the people who made them. We have fifteen thousand enigmatic objects, almost always broken, almost always female, with eyes like an astronaut’s goggles – and utter silence all around.

Fourteen Thousand Years Without Agriculture

Why the Western Filter Does Not Fit Jōmon

There is a certain set of criteria taught in ancient history classes at nearly every university in the world: civilization means agriculture, writing and cities. Three pillars. Mesopotamia has all three. Egypt has all three. China has all three. Jōmon has none. And for this reason – for over a hundred years – Jōmon did not exist in global consciousness as a “great civilization.” It was a “culture,” a “period,” “prehistory.” Something before the real history of Japan. A waiting room in which hunter-gatherers bided their time for the arrival of rice, Buddhism and writing from the continent.

Except that Jōmon has something else. It has pottery older than Mesopotamia by several thousand years. It has settlements inhabited longer than Rome. It has trade over distances of five hundred kilometres – jade from Niigata, obsidian from distant sources, amber from Iwate. It has monumental architecture – thirty-two-metre buildings, six-pillar structures fifteen metres tall. It has a complex funerary system – adults were buried differently from children, and graves were arranged according to a clear spatial pattern. It has astronomy embedded in the orientation of buildings. It has social differentiation visible in the sizes of dwellings. It has ritual figurines produced on a mass scale for thousands of years. It has lacquerwork – the oldest known lacquered objects in the world come from Jōmon Japan, dated to over nine thousand years. And it has hansaibai – selective cultivation of nut trees, which is not agriculture in the Western sense but is decidedly more than passively gathering whatever the forest offers.

The problem does not lie with Jōmon. The problem lies with the definition. The Western filter of “civilization = agriculture + writing + cities” was constructed on the basis of the Near Eastern and Mediterranean experience. When V. Gordon Childe formulated his concept of the “Neolithic Revolution” in the 1940s, he had in mind the transition from gathering to cereal cultivation in the Fertile Crescent. That model fits the Sumerians. It fits Egypt. It fits the Indus Valley. It does not fit Jōmon – just as it does not fit the Valdivia culture of Ecuador, the complex societies of the Pacific Northwest, or many other cultures that achieved a high level of social organization without passing through Childe’s template.

The Japanese concept of hansaibai is an excellent example of a third way. The people of Sannai-Maruyama did not clear forests to make arable fields. Instead, they managed the forest – planting chestnut trees, selecting varieties that produced larger nuts, regulating the species composition of the woodland. DNA analysis of chestnuts from Sannai-Maruyama showed that their size increased systematically from the Early to the Middle Jōmon – a classic signal of human-driven selection. Genomic studies of the adzuki bean (小豆, azuki), published in recent years, confirmed that all modern cultivated varieties descend from the wild form in eastern Japan, and that mutations associated with domestication began accumulating as early as ten thousand years ago – long before any traces of field cultivation. Jōmon did not invent agriculture in the Western sense. They invented something for which the Western archaeological vocabulary had no name.

The question “why does the world not treat Jōmon as a great civilization” is therefore really a question about the power over definitions. Who decides what counts as civilization? Western academia, built on the Near Eastern experience. Who sets the criteria? People for whom writing, grain and city walls are self-evident, because they grew up in a tradition where all three emerged together. Jōmon is proof that cultural complexity can arise by another path – without writing, without rice, without walls. Fourteen thousand years of continuous culture is not a waiting room. It is a separate answer to the question of how to live.

The Blood of Jōmon

The Genetic Root of the Ainu and Modern Japanese

For most of the twentieth century, Jōmon was an abstraction – a prehistoric culture separated from the present by an abyss of millennia. Beautiful vessels and enigmatic figurines found their way into museum cases, but nobody connected them with living people. That changed with the development of population genetics, and especially analyses of mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosome.

The key is haplogroup D1b (formerly designated D2) on the Y chromosome. This is a paternal lineage specific almost exclusively to the Japanese Archipelago – it does not occur on the Asian continent to any significant degree. It is, however, extremely common among the Ainu of Hokkaidō – research by Tajima and colleagues in 2004 showed that as many as eighty-seven and a half per cent of Ainu men carry haplogroups D-M55 or D-M125. In the mainstream Japanese population of Honshū the percentage is considerably lower, but still present. The highest frequencies outside Hokkaidō are found in Okinawa – at the opposite end of the archipelago. This distribution makes sense only if we assume that D1b is a Jōmon legacy, preserved most strongly in populations that had the least contact with immigrants from the continent.

The maternal line confirms this picture. Analysis of mitochondrial DNA from Jōmon individuals on Hokkaidō showed that the most frequent haplogroup was N9b1 – found in over fifty-five per cent of the individuals examined. The same haplogroup appears among Edo-era Ainu – at a somewhat lower frequency, around twenty per cent, but enough to speak of genetic continuity. At the same time, mitochondrial haplogroups A, C and Y, typical of Siberian populations, were identified in the Ainu – haplogroups absent from Jōmon people. This is the trace of the Okhotsk culture, which reached Hokkaidō from the north and mixed with Jōmon descendants, creating the genetic mosaic from which the modern Ainu emerged.

A groundbreaking study published in 2020 in Communications Biology presented a full genome analysis of an individual designated IK002 – a person from excavations on the main island of Japan who lived within the context of Jōmon culture in the fifth century BCE. The results showed that IK002 forms a basal lineage for virtually all East Asian and Northeast Asian populations. Moreover, the individual showed strong genetic affinity with the indigenous peoples of Taiwan – suggesting a migratory route along the coast, from Southeast Asia northward. The Jōmon people were thus not an isolated island population. They were part of one of the earliest waves of migration in East Asia – perhaps even one of the first groups to reach these lands.

The “dual structure” model, proposed by the anthropologist Kazurō Hanihara, describes modern Japanese as a genetic mixture of two populations: the indigenous Jōmon people and Yayoi immigrants who arrived from the continent – via the Korean Peninsula – from roughly the ninth century BCE onward, bringing with them wet-rice cultivation, bronze and iron metallurgy, and a new style of pottery. On Honshū and Kyūshū, gradual intermingling of the two populations occurred. On Hokkaidō, where the Yayoi never reached, Jōmon descendants continued their way of life – as the Zoku-Jōmon culture (literally “post-Jōmon”), then Satsumon, and finally – the Ainu. Genetics speaks clearly: Jōmon is not abstract prehistory. It is the root of real, living people.

Forgetting as a Story

Why Japan Is Silent About Its Oldest Inhabitants

For centuries, Japan defined itself through what came from the continent. Buddhism, Confucianism, Chinese script, the ceremonial imperial system, rice cultivation, metallurgy – these elements formed the core of the official historical narrative. Yayoi culture, which introduced agriculture and bronze, was treated as the moment of “birth” of the true Japan. Everything before that – prehistory, mist, people without names. Jōmon had no writing, and so it had no history in the traditional sense. And what has no history is easy to overlook.

It is also significant that Jōmon leads directly to the Ainu – a people who for centuries were marginalized, discriminated against and subjected to assimilation policies. Japanese national identity was built on the myth of ethnic homogeneity – “one nation, one culture, one race.” Acknowledging that the foundation of this culture is a fourteen-thousand-year legacy of a people whose descendants were treated as “barbarians” required a revision for which Japanese society was long unprepared. It was not until 2008 that the Japanese parliament formally recognized the Ainu as an indigenous ethnic group. In 2021, Sannai-Maruyama and sixteen other Jōmon sites in northern Tōhoku and Hokkaidō were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as “Jōmon Prehistoric Sites in Northern Japan.”

The discovery of Sannai-Maruyama in 1992 was a watershed not only for archaeology but for Japanese historical consciousness. Comparative civilization scholar Tetsuro Morimoto said at the time that the discovery compelled a rethinking of “our assumption that Japan imported most of its culture from the continent.” On the other hand, Makoto Sahara, curator of the National Museum of Japanese History, cautioned against excessive enthusiasm: the wealth of Sannai-Maruyama was local and limited to a specific period of climatic optimum, when warm conditions favoured an abundance of forest resources. Both perspectives coexist – and both are necessary. Yet even the most cautious interpretation does not change one fact: people lived in this place for one thousand seven hundred years, built monumental structures, traded over hundreds of kilometres and created a material culture that survived five millennia. This is not a waiting room before history. This is history.

A Wall of Five Thousand Shards

Inside the museum at Sannai-Maruyama there is a wall. It is six metres tall and eighteen metres wide. On its surface, five thousand one hundred and twenty authentic ceramic fragments recovered from the excavations have been arranged. The oldest lie at the bottom, the youngest at the top – like geological strata of time. At the very bottom, fragments from five and a half thousand years ago. At the top – those that someone left behind before the rice paddy, the bronze sword and the first Chinese character reached Japan.

Women in trainers walk inside a reconstructed pit dwelling, duck beneath the low roof, kneel by the stone hearth that has warmed no one for three thousand years. Outside, on the ground where the baseball stadium was to have stood, six wooden pillars of the reconstruction rise – fifteen metres above the grass, dark with preservative, visible from afar like a compass to the past. Nobody knows what they truly were. A tower? A temple? A beacon? Perhaps none of these things. Perhaps something for which we have no word, because our words grew from a different civilization.

Japan stands on fourteen thousand years of history about which it long kept silent. The Jōmon people left behind no texts, no names, no instructions on how to understand them. They left five thousand one hundred and twenty shards of clay on a museum wall in Aomori. And fifteen thousand broken figurines with goggle eyes whose purpose we do not know. And six holes in the earth, with metre-thick chestnut trunks charred at the base so they would endure. They endured.

SOURCES

1. Habu, Junko, “Ancient Jomon of Japan,” Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2004.

2. Tajima, Atsushi et al., “Genetic origins of the Ainu inferred from combined DNA analyses of maternal and paternal lineages,” Journal of Human Genetics, vol. 49, 2004.

3. Kitagawa, Junko; Yasuda, Yoshinori, “The influence of climatic change on chestnut and horse chestnut preservation around Jomon sites in Northeastern Japan with special reference to the Sannai-Maruyama and Kamegaoka sites,” Quaternary International, vol. 123–125, 2004.

4. Ghobadi, Claudia, “Project Holocene: The Clayful Phenomenology of Jōmon Flame Pots,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal, vol. 31, 2021.

5. Habu, Junko; Fawcett, Clare, “Science or Narratives? Multiple Interpretations of the Sannai Maruyama Site, Japan,” in: Habu, Fawcett, Matsunaga (eds.), Evaluating Multiple Narratives: Beyond Nationalist, Colonialist, Imperialist Archaeologies, Springer, New York 2008.

6. 三内丸山遺跡 公式ウェブサイト (official website of the Sannai-Maruyama Site, Aomori Prefectural Board of Education).

7. 縄文時代の概要 (Overview of the Jōmon Period), National Museum of Japanese History, Sakura 2019.

"Strong Japanese Women"

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    未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

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