Evolution of Feasting among Jomon Societies based upon Wooden Artifacts

Summary

Cross-culturally, wooden items such as bowls, ladles and spoons play an important role as ritual offerings to deities and ancestors. Thus, they are keys to understanding feasting and ritual activities, and can provide archaeological signatures of these activities. This paper explores evolution of feasting among Jomon societies focused on the analysis of wooden artifacts. The analysis is based on three sources of information: 1) temporal and spatial distribution; 2) stylistic analysis; and 3) archaeological contexts. For the analysis, a database was created, based upon such attributes as archaeological context, wooden vessel form, and presence/absence of decoration, which were obtained from published sources. This database provides invaluable information to assess the number, type and context of wooden artifacts throughout the Japanese archipelago. Although the most of wooden artifacts represent secondary deposition, items found in housepits, burials, storage pits and elsewhere suggest temporal and spatial variability of feasting among Jomon societies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Feasts and Ritual Structures: Ethnoarchaelogical and Archaeological Perspectives

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15086