Jomon Potters Fire Some of the World's Oldest Pottery
Cord-marked pots and a hunter-gatherer life on the Japanese islands, thousands of years before farming existed almost anywhere
Quick facts
- Period
- c. 14,500 to c. 300 BCE
- Subsistence
- Hunting, gathering, and fishing
- Key evidence
- Cord-marked (jomon) pottery, shell middens
- Largest known village
- c. 100 acres, c. 500 people
What happened
The Jomon period began around 14,500 BCE and takes its name from the cord-marked (jomon) pattern pressed into wet clay before firing, the decoration style found on some of the oldest dated pottery in the world. Jomon people lived by hunting and gathering: their diet, reconstructed from midden sites, included bears, boars, fish, shellfish, yams, wild grapes, walnuts, chestnuts, and acorns rather than cultivated grain. Around 5000 BCE many groups settled into a more sedentary village life even without agriculture, an unusual combination for hunter-gatherers anywhere in the world; the largest known settlement covered roughly 100 acres and held about 500 people. The period lasted more than 10,000 years, ending around 300 BCE when Yayoi rice farming began arriving from the mainland.
Why it matters
A society that built permanent villages and fired pottery for over ten thousand years without adopting agriculture complicates the standard sequence of farming leading to settlement. It sets a very long, slow baseline against which the sudden changes of the following Yayoi period stand out.
How we know
Jomon chronology comes from radiocarbon dating of pottery, shell middens, and settlement remains excavated across the Japanese archipelago; the sheer number of dated pottery fragments recovered is what supports the claim to some of the world's oldest ceramics.
Sources
- World History Encyclopedia. Jomon Period · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- World History Encyclopedia. Jomon Period · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Part of a timelineHistory of Japan34 events · From cord-marked pottery on a Neolithic archipelago to a nuclear disaster on a shaken coastline, sixteen thousand years of islands remaking themselvesView all →