Jōmon Prehistoric Sites in Northern Japan
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How it came to be
The Jōmon prehistoric sites in northern Japan are 17 archaeological sites in Hokkaido, Aomori, Iwate and Akita. For more than 10,000 years, from about 13,000 BC to 400 BC, the Jōmon people lived in settled communities by hunting, fishing and gathering, without taking up farming.
At Sannai-Maruyama in Aomori city a settlement began around 3900 BC, and 648 pit dwellings have been found there. Around 2600 BC a large building stood on six chestnut pillars, each about 1 m across and 4.2 m apart, and about 2,000 clay figurines were recovered. A Hirosaki domain record of 1623 already notes figurines being dug up. A survey in 1992 for a prefectural baseball stadium uncovered the settlement, and in August 1994 Aomori Prefecture dropped the stadium and chose to preserve the site, which became a Special Historic Site in 2000.
The Kamegaoka site in Tsugaru was found in 1622, when figurines and pottery turned up as Tsugaru Nobuhira, second lord of Hirosaki, began building a castle there. In the Edo period its finds were prized by collectors as Kamegaoka wares, and in 1887 the goggle-eyed dogū figurine was dug up. The sites were inscribed as a World Heritage site in 2021.
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