A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [30]
The Jomon way of life seems to have been pretty comfortable. They lived near the sea and they relied on fish as a main source of food – food that came to them, so they did not have to move around as land-roaming hunter-gatherers did. They also had easy access to abundant plants with nuts and seeds, so there was no imperative to domesticate animals or to cultivate particular crops. Perhaps because of this plentiful supply of fish and food, farming took a long time to establish itself in Japan compared to the rest of the world. Simple agriculture, in the form of rice cultivation, arrived in Japan only 2,500 years ago – very late, on the international scale; but in pots the Japanese were in the lead.
Before the invention of the pot, people stored their food in holes in the ground or in baskets. Both methods were vulnerable to insects and to all kinds of thieving creatures, and the baskets were also subject to wear and weather. Putting your food in sturdy clay containers kept freshness in and mice out. It was a great innovation. But in the shape and texture of the new pots the Jomon did not innovate: they looked at what they already had – baskets. And they decorated them magnificently. Professor Takashi Doi, Senior Archaeologist at the Agency for Cultural Affairs in Japan, describes the patterns they produced:
The decorations were derived from what they saw around them in the natural world – trees, plants, shells, animal bones. The basic patterns were applied using twisted plant fibres or twisted cords, and there was an amazing variety in the ways you could twist your cords – there is an elaborate regional and chronological sequence that we have identified. Over the years of the Jomon period we can see over 400 local types or regional styles. You can pin down some of these styles to 25-year time slots, because they were so specific with their cord markings.
The Jomon clearly relished this elaborate aesthetic game, but they must also have been thrilled at the practical properties of their new leak-proof, heat-resistant kitchenware. Their menu would have included vegetables and nuts, but in their new pots they also cooked shellfish – oysters, cockles and clams. Meat too was pot-roasted or boiled – Japan appears to be the birthplace of the soup and the home of the stew. Simon Kaner explains how this style of cooking now helps us to date the material:
We’re quite lucky they weren’t very good at washing up, these guys – and so they’ve left some carbonized remains of foodstuffs inside these pots, there are black deposits on the interior surfaces. In fact, some of the very early ones that are now dated to about 14,000 years ago – there are black incrustations, and it’s that carbonized material that has been dated – we think they were probably used for cooking up some vegetable materials. Perhaps they were cooking up fish broths? And it’s possible they were cooking up nuts, using a wide range of nuts – including acorns – that you need to cook and boil for a long time before you can actually eat them.
This is an important point – pots change your diet. New foods become edible only once they can be boiled. Heating shellfish in liquid forces the shells to open, making it easier to get at the contents, but also, no less importantly, it sorts out which are good and which are bad – the bad ones stay closed. It’s alarming to think of the trial and error involved in discovering which foods are edible, but it’s a process that is greatly speeded up by cooking.
The Jomon hunter-gatherer way of life, enriched and transformed by the making of Jomon pottery, did not change significantly for more than 14,000 years. Although the oldest pots in the world were made in Japan, the technique did not spread from there. Like writing, pottery seems to have been