Jomon people developed their techniques as pottery craftspeople and artists. The pottery reflects the diversity of Jomon regional cultures and lifestyles in the Japanese archipelago, with its abundant natural environment.
Some Jomon pottery vessels symbolize their world views, and others are made with extreme abstract expression. Jomon people applied their artistic technique to create clay figurines (dogu). Most are believed to be modeled on the shape of women and linked to prehistoric fertility rites. Both pottery vessels and clay figurines were embedded in the daily lives of Jomon people.
The Jomon period corresponds to the Stone Age. The stone tools of the Jomon people indicate their adaptations to the environment as well as their exchange and trade activities. Jomon stone toolbox contains hunting tools, such as arrowheads and spears, and food processing tools like stone mortars.
Besides those tools, a large number of stone tools with sharp edges were used for creating other goods: such as fishing tools made of bones and antlers, wooden tools, and other handicrafts made of wood, bark, textile, bone, urushi lacquer, and leather handicrafts.
Jomon people created various stone artifacts, such as stone rods and ornamental beads. Stone tools and handicrafts were made of diverse raw materials, notably obsidian, jade, and amber.
These production sites are very limited, which stimulated the growth of broad exchange and trade networks amongst the Jomon people. Recent developments in the archaeological sciences has revealed long-distance transportations of these stone materials.
The settlement landscapes of the Jomon people were shaped by the production of these goods. They selected specific lands, worked on the earth, and made their living conditions and symbolic landscapes.
Jomon artifacts introduced above encompass essential elements of a way of life that continued for ten thousand years. They evoke not only our curiosity towards a remote, exotic, and lost world but also an affinity between Jomon period as a distant past and the current us, who are drifting between universality and particularity in traveling about the world.
