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Asia-Pacific Magazine
No. 2 May 1996
pp. 47-48.

Sannai Maruyama: A New View of Prehistoric Japan

by Mark Hudson

Recent excavations at a prehistoric site in northern Japan have stimulated intense interest amongst both professional archaeologists and members of the public alike. The site, which is called Sannai Maruyama, is without doubt one of the most important ever to have been excavated in Japan. It is located on a hill overlooking Aomori City, a port town at the northernmost tip of the main island of Honshu. Excavations were begun in 1992 prior to the construction of a Prefectural baseball stadium. By the summer of 1994, however, discoveries at the site had forced the cancellation of the stadium and given rise to an upsurge of nationwide public interest in the remains dubbed `Sannai Maruyama fever'.

Sannai Maruyama belongs to the Jomon period which lasted from about 13000 to 2300 years ago and is marked by a pottery-using hunter-gatherer culture. The Jomon has long been known as an affluent and largely sedentary society, but nothing had prepared us for the scale and complexity of the remains found at Sannai Maruyama. The site is the largest Jomon village so far discovered, covering an estimated area of an incredible 35 hectares. By the summer of 1995 only about 15 percent of this total area had been excavated, but the site had already produced about 600 pit buildings, 100 raised-floor buildings, 800 storage pits, 100 adult and 900 child graves, and 400,000 boxes of artefacts - pottery, stone tools, animal bones, and so on.

One of the most dramatic finds was of a group of six circular holes which were used as foundation pits for wooden posts supporting a large raised-floor building. Each of these pits was approximately two metres in diameter and the remains of huge chestnut posts, one metre in diameter, were still preserved in four of the pits. From these measurements, architectural historians have proposed that the original building may have been as high as ten or even twenty metres, suggesting a level of technical competence far in advance of anything previously imagined for the Jomon period.

Sannai Maruyama dates primarily from the Early and Middle phases of the Jomon, approximately 5500 to 4000 years ago. By this time, of course, both rice and millet agriculture were in full swing in China, but full-scale farming did not spread to Japan until the very end of the Jomon period. It is thought that Jomon people cultivated a number of plants, such as hemp, burdock, bottle gourd and the mint herb Perilla, but that none of these served as major food sources. This assumption seems to hold also for Sannai Maruyama. The site has produced a wide variety of plant and animal remains but the main staples appear to have been fish, small mammals such as hares, and chestnuts. Despite the presence of a few possible cultigens including burdock, bottle gourd and an unidentified bean, Sannai Maruyama was clearly not an agricultural settlement. The fact that such a large village could be maintained without farming has demonstrated that prehistoric hunter-gatherers were far more affluent than the lifestyle of their modern counterparts - now usually confined to marginal environments - would suggest.

The pottery at Sannai Maruyama belongs to the Entö type of elegant cylindrical vessels. This pottery was distributed over northern Honshu and southern Hokkaido during the Early and Middle Jomon, suggesting that the intervening Tsugaru Straits were no barrier to prehistoric communication. Other exotic objects found at the site show that the Sannai Maruyama people had regular contacts with other Jomon groups even further afield: nephrite came from Niigata, asphalt from Akita, amber from Iwate, and obsidian (a black volcanic glass) from central Hokkaido. In contrast, the age of the earliest lacquered artefacts from Sannai Maruyama - at 5500 years ago the oldest from anywhere in Japan - probably means that Jomon lacquer technology was developed independently in Japan rather than being introduced from China as once believed.

For the archaeologist, one of the most interesting questions about Sannai Maruyama is its social organisation. Was this large and complex settlement home to an egalitarian society like the majority of recent hunter-gatherers, or was some sort of social stratification in operation? The presence of wealthy graves is one type of evidence which would support the existence of social strata but grave goods are reportedly almost non-existent, a rare exception being a nephrite pendant from an adult burial. A number of large pit buildings over ten metres long have been found at the site, the largest about 32 metres in length. These could possibly be the residences of chiefs or highly ranked individuals, but such buildings are relatively common in Jomon sites in northern Japan and are usually interpreted as communal work places for use during the long, snow-bound winters. The huge pillared building mentioned earlier is the most enigmatic feature of Sannai Maruyama. Suggestions as to its use have included a watchtower, lighthouse, or ritual facility, but as the superstructure itself has not been preserved we will probably never know its actual function.

Many secrets still await the archaeologist's trowel at Sannai Maruyama, but one thing is already certain: future work at the site will help to rewrite not just Japanese prehistory but the story of hunter-gatherers in general.

Sannai Maruyama is located three kilometres southwest of Aomori JR station. A small on-site museum displays finds, and provides guided tours during the summer months.

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