Japanese Art with Chelsea, Part 1
Or, The Oldest Pottery, Ever
THE JÅŒMON PERIOD

Flame Style Storage Vessel, c. 2500 BCE, Cleveland Museum of Art

Things are blurry in 10,000 BCE, but right now archaeologists are pretty sure that the oldest pottery vessels ever found come from Japan. Historians tend to have extremely clear dates for the history of Japan, and even though things are muddy way-back-when in the Jōmon period, most historians divide the period into roughly three parts: Early Jōmon, Middle Jōmon, and Late Jōmon — makes sense. Some even divide it further, but there’s really no need to for our purposes. Why is pottery like this interesting? Well, it tells us a lot about the people who made them — stuff we could never know without the vessels’ existence.

Vessel, Early Jōmon Period, Tokyo National Museum

Early Jōmon
First, let’s look at an example of early Jōmon work (what you see above is Middle Jōmon; we’ll get there). These simple, portable vessels (left)were made by hand by hunters and gatherers — that is, a people who moved around, and weren’t settled — using the coil method, around 10,000 BCE. The coil method is a fancy term for rolling ropes of clay and then ‘coiling’ them into a vessel-shape and smushing the sides flat together. Most of these vessels have patterns impressed into them using common objects like fabric or rope — in fact, “jōmon” means rope in Japanese, and thus came the term for the period itself.

Middle Jōmon
A huge shift occurred around 2,500 BCE, when vessels like the one at the top of this article appeared. You can tell these vessels are much more fragile, with elaborate protrusions and more decoration. Moreover, they’re extremely well preserved, not an easy task for delicate low-fired pottery. So, from vessels like these, we can guess that our Jōmon friends became more sedentary, settling in one place long enough to create ceremonies in which vessels like this — dubbed “Flame-Style” — would have been used.

Statuette, Late Jōmon Period, Tokyo National Museum

Late Jōmon
Historians date the final period of Jōmon to around 1,500 BCE. Ceramic dolls like this (right), called dōku, were made as well as vessels, and we believe they were part of an elaborate ritual, perhaps a burial one, or even one that had to do with sympathetic magic, in which the doll would ‘receive’ the illness of a person. Notice in this large-eyed example the missing leg — many of these elaborately decorated dolls have limbs broken off, which hint at its ritual purpose.

Unfortunately, since this stuff is so old, we don’t have concrete information about any of it — no writings of any kind exist. But even though we can’t say with absolute certainty what any of these vessels or dolls were used for, they give us enough clues for us to make very well-educated guesses.

Coming Up: Rice, Bells, and Granaries, Oh My! — The Yayoi Period

1 Comment »

[...] the jar, where one would have held it. Because this is the only decoration (quite a change from the Flame-Style vessels in the Jōmon period, eh?), one really ‘gets’ how to use the pottery — and also [...]

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