A tall cord-marked Jōmon clay pot with a sculpted rim, made about 3500 to 2500 BCE
Deep Cylindrical Vessel (Fukabachi), ca. 3500–2500 BCE
Marked Sannai-Maruyama, Aomori

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

Jōmon Japan

For more than ten thousand years the Jōmon people of Japan lived by fishing, hunting and gathering, and made some of the oldest pottery in the world, often in flamboyant shapes.

Place
Sannai-Maruyama, Aomori · Ōmori shell mound, Tokyo · Odai Yamamoto, AomoriAsia
Laid out as
A civilisationA society seen from the inside: its rulers, places, work, beliefs and daily life, laid out like the rooms of a house.
Lessons
5 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. IThe oldest pots
  2. IISannai-Maruyama
  3. IIIFlame pots and clay figures
  4. IVShell mounds
  5. VFrom Jōmon to Yayoi

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Edward S. Morse

Objects

  • Flame-style pots
  • Dogū clay figures

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

17,000 years ago to 300 BC. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?