Jomon Pottery

The oldest known pottery in the world comes from Japan, and is known as Jomon, which means "cord marks", after its typical decorations made by impressing cords into the wet clay. The earliest Jomon pottery is dated to around 14,000 B.C., considerably earlier than any pottery produced in Europe and western Asia, the earliest of which dates to approximately 8,000 B.C.

Why should the Jomon people have been so inventive? Why were they making pottery so much earlier than anywhere else in the world? Only pottery from China comes remotely close to it in date, and there it is explained by the requirements of rice cultivation. Melvin Aikens, an authority on the Jomon period, believes that Japanese pottery was invented to cook and store the produce of the thick broad-leaved woodlands that had already covered Kyushu, Japan's southernmost main island, by 13,000 B.C. The relationship is evident, he argues, from the simultaneous spread of broad-leaved woodlands and pottery into the northern islands of Japan, both appearing on the northernmost island of Hokkaido at around 7,000 B.C.

There are,however, two problems with this idea. First, there is no necessity for hunter-gatherers to have pottery when living in wooded environments-the inhabitants of other villages of this era, such as Ain Mallaha in western Asia at 12,500 B.C. and Star Carr in northern Europe at 9, 500 B.C., flourished by relying entirely on vessels made from bark, skins, wood, and stone. Pottery no doubt made life easier for those who did the cooking in the woodlands of Kyushu, and we know from food residues that pottery vessels had indeed been used to make vegetable, meat, and fish stews. But people could have easily survived without such vessels.

A second problem for Aikens'theory arose in 1999 when a new sample of pottery was found in northern Honshu(Japan's largest island). Radiocarbon dates on the residues stuck to the interior of the pot dated to 14, 500 B.C., pushing back the origin of pottery by at least another thousand years. At this date Honshu would have had no more than a sparse covering of pine trees. And so the theory that Japanese pottery was invented to store and cook the produce of broad-leaved woodlands cannot be correct.

An archaeologist, Brian Hayden, has proposed an alternative explanation. It provides another example of his belief in social competition as the driving force of social change that he applied in explaining the origin of squash cultivation in Mexico. Hayden suggests that ceramic vessels have a number of important qualities that make them prestigious objects to own and ideal containers for serving food to guests. At the outset, the potter's art would have been difficult to master; clay had to be carefully selected, tempers (materials added to clay to reduce its plasticity)prepared, and construction and firing techniques explored, practiced, and refined. Neighbors and other visitors would have been struck with the amount of labor and skill required to produce a pottery vessel. The display of novel forms with fancy decoration would have impressed them even more. Most striking of all might have been the dramatic smashing of vessels during feasts as an ostentatious display of wealth.

Theatrical smashing of pots may have occurred in the later Jomon period, as immense piles of broken pottery have been found. And as they come in astonishingly elaborate forms, there can be no doubt that many later Jomon vessels were primarily for display. They have spectacular rims modeled as licking flames or serpents winding around the vessel. Sometimes the decoration is so top-heavy that the pots can hardly stand alone. Lacquered (glossy) objects must have been very striking. But we must be cautious about applying such interpretations to the earliest and rather dull specimens of pottery. We currently know too little about the very earliest pottery makers of Japan to decide whether they had been more concerned with impressing their visitors or devising a means to cook vegetable stew. We do know, however, that by 9, 500B.C. many were living sedentary lives in permanent settlements. Although pottery had already been invented, the sedentary lifestyle must have been crucial in enabling ceramic technology to flourish.