ABSTRACT
Jomon societies are considered to exemplify what have become known as “complex” huntergatherers (Habu 2004; Hayden 1995; Johnson and Earle 1987; Kobayashi 2004; Pearson 2007; Price 1981). The issue of the development and recognition of socio-cultural complexity among hunter-gatherers continues to be a major research theme within prehistoric archaeology (Price and Brown 1985; Price and Feinman 1995). This paper contributes to this debate by considering the complexity of constraints on residential shift practices, i.e. movements or modications of residential buildings, in the course of the occupational histories of Jomon settlements. This provides a framework for understanding the social processes that lie behind these histories (Kaner 2003, 2004). The interpretation presented here does not purport to be a comprehensive statement about the nature of Jomon societies. Although it does allow for the identication of key moments in the social reproduction and transformation of Jomon households and communities, it does not necessarily represent the only key process structuring Jomon social relations. It does, however, facilitate the opening up of debate about Jomon societies, realigning the debate over whether or not Jomon societies were egalitarian or stratied (Kosugi 1991; Watanabe 1990) and the signicance of their sedentariness. The approach set out here involves a re-orientation of the goals of Jomon social archaeology. Rather than searching for chiefdoms, this paper intends to elucidate certain aspects of the social processes of the Jomon period. These include the reproduction and transformation of Jomon social groups, which are detectable in the ways in which buildings, settlements and landscapes were constructed, occupied, re-occupied, modied and abandoned by their inhabitants. These buildings, settlements and landscapes were the settings that played an active role in shaping the existence of Jomon social groups. The histories of these settings, to the extent to which they can be reconstructed from their archaeological traces, provide considerable information about the histories of the social groups that occupied them. These occupational histories were punctuated by events that contained the potential for the reproduction or transformation of the existing spatial and social orders. The events occurred when people moved or modied their buildings, and can be termed residential shifts. They were not random and arbitrary actions on the part of Jomon people, but derive from decisions reached to attain
some intended goal. It is my contention that these residential shift practices represent one of the main social processes of the Jomon period and that understanding them is a vital step in developing a Jomon social archaeology. If we place residential shift practices at the centre of Jomon social archaeology, rather than ask whether Jomon society was egalitarian or stratied, we can break down these types into their constituent parts and see how these parts operated in the social reproduction of Jomon groups. For example, we can ask how power and ideology operated and were used to control the reproduction of social forms through the exercise of constraint over residential shift practices and how this affected the archaeological record. We can take apart the concept of socio-cultural complexity, separating it from the social evolutionism with which it is so often associated. For example, it is accepted that Jomon people lived in rich and diverse natural environments and developed many traditions of elaborate material culture. For this reason they have been termed “afuent foragers,” similar to, for example, the native cultures of the Northwest Coast of North America. The study of this similarity, however, remains at the level of simple formal analogy. What is required to advance our understanding of the appearance of such societies is a way of approaching the social processes that generated such apparent afuence. To what extent can their knowledge about their surroundings and their own place within them be thought to have been complex? How complex were the constraints upon their residential shift practices? What impact did complexity in the structuring principles that underlay Jomon knowledge and social practices have on the development of Jomon societies? Landscapes: Yatsugadake
Residential shift practices at this spatial scale include the founding, reoccupation and abandonment of settlement sites and the colonisation, use and abandonment of regions. These practices mark critical events in landscape histories that leave traces visible in the archaeological record. Jomon archaeologists in their discussions of landscape histories have considered: (1) the geographical denition of a region; (2) the chronological timespan (based on the number of pottery phases); (3) the number of sites per phase; (4) the degree of continuity in the make-up of the landscape (measured in terms of the number of newly occupied sites, abandoned sites and sites occupied for only a single pottery phase); (5) the number of types of site per phase; and (6) the number of contemporary sites within each site group. Teshigahara Akira (1992) surveyed the Early, Middle and Late Jomon archaeological record for Yatsugadake (Figure 11.1). The southwestern slopes of the Yatsugadake volcanic massif are one of the most famous “Jomon landscapes.” Investigated for many decades, a detailed picture has been developed of an inland mountain subculture that ourished during the Middle Jomon (Kidder 1993). Serious archaeological investigation began before the Second World War, with excavations at Togari-ishi and subsequently Yosukeone, and have shaped perception of the nature of Jomon settlement structure and organisation (Kaner 1999b). Extensive eld survey and excavation, by a combination of dedicated amateurs and latterly, professional archaeologists, have revealed a complex sequence of Jomon occupation, with some apparently very high population densities, especially during the Middle Jomon period (Teshigahara 1992, 2004). The name Yatsugadake means “eight” or “many” peaks in Japanese, and reects the multitude of pottery styles that ourished in the region during the Middle Jomon. The whole volcanic massif, located in present-day Nagano Prefecture in the centre of the largest island of the
Japanese archipelago, Honshu (Figure 11.1), comprises some twenty volcanoes, the oldest of which dates to the Tertiary, with activity continuing into the Holocene, although large-scale eruptions ceased by the mid-Pleistocene. The western boundary of the massif forms part of the “fossa magna,” which extends from Itoigawa on the Japan Sea coast to Shizuoka, and the southwestern slopes are characterised by plentiful springs which give rise to a multitude of small streams that have carved out gulleys up to 40m deep, dividing the slopes into a series of parallel ridges which were to become the favoured locations for Jomon settlements (Figure 11.2).
