The Jōmon–Yayoi Transition in Eastern Japan:
Enquiries from the Kantō Region
Gina L. BARNES1,2
ABSTRACTThis paper anchors itself in the spread of Yayoi culture from Kyushu into eastern Japan during the
Early Yayoi period. The transition from Jomon culture to Yayoi culture at the end of Early Yayoi into
Middle Yayoi periods in the Kantō region is then inspected through the lenses of jōkonmon 条痕紋(scraped surface) ceramics, then secondary jar burials and settlement in Gunma Prefecture, andﬁnally subsistence. In particular, the ﬁnds of non-rice grain impressions in pottery are beginningto illuminate lifeways before the adoption of irrigated rice agriculture from the mid-Middle Yayoi
period onwards. Signiﬁcantly in Gunma, irrigated rice agriculture is not thought to have evolved
locally through western inﬂuences or borrowing but was brought in by newcomers from Nagano
Prefecture, resulting in the disappearance of Jōmon–Yayoi transitional lifeways and dominance of
the Yayoi ‘package’ as in western Japan. This particular situation in Gunma deﬁes the traditional
interpretation of the spread of rice agriculture into eastern and northern Japan without migration.
Data from other Kantō areas undoubtedly offer comparative material to obtain more comprehensive
views on the north-eastern Yayoi culture and should be combined with what is presented here.
KEYWORDS: Japanese archaeology, Yayoi period, rice agriculture, Kantō prehistory, jōkonmon
pottery, secondary burials, dry-ﬁeld crops

1.

Agricultural beginnings

Forty years ago, as indicated in Figure 1, Yayoi subsistence in eastern Japan was assumed
to have been based primarily on millet rather than rice agriculture. In addition to having
no bronzes, Eastern Yayoi was thus deemed quite different from the Western Yayoi cultureof intensive wet-rice agriculture that supported large moated villages equipped with irontools and bronzes both weaponry and ritual items. In the intervening decades, research on
the introduction and consequent spread of agriculture throughout the Japanese Islands from
Kyushu in the west has been revolutionized, and new dates for the introduction and spreadof metals eastwards have also been obtained. There is now a gap of ca. 550 years between
the start of irrigated rice agriculture in North Kyushu and north-eastern Japan. This paper
deals with that timespan.
1 Professor Emeritus, Durham University & Afﬁliate, Earth Sciences, Durham University, UK
2 Professorial Research Associate, SOAS University of London, UK(gb11@soas.ac.uk)
Category: Original Article (solicited)

Accepted: 28 June 2019

JAPANESE JOURNAL OF ARCHAEOLOGY 7 (2019): 33–84

Gina L. BARNES

Figure 1. Yayoi woman processing millet in Gunma Prefectural Museum installation, circa 1979,
Takasaki City (photo by author)

1.1

From Kyushu eastwads

The initial phase of wet-rice production was limited to just the Karatsu and Fukuoka Plainsof the northern Kyushu coast, introduced from the southern Korean Peninsula (Miyamoto2019). Miyamoto (2018) concludes that the transition from Jōmon to Yayoi culture occurred(within that limited region) during Yuusu I–II ceramic phases, but the typical attributes of
Yayoi culture (paddy ﬁelds, moated villages, wood-cofﬁn burials in linear arrangements,
continental-style tool-kits, etc.) were not consolidated until the Itazuke ceramic phaseas known from the Itazuke 板付 type site. These attributes are referred to by Miyamotoas the Yayoi ‘complex’ but are also known in English as the ‘Yayoi package,’ following
Mizoguchi’s volume (Mizoguchi 2013) documenting the Jōmon–Yayoi transition in North
Kyushu. Miyamoto (2019) considers this consolidated Itazuke-style Yayoi culture to markthe beginning of the Yayoi period at 5–6th centuries BC and thereafter spread from North
Kyushu throughout the Inland Sea region and beyond during Itazuke Ib–IIa phases (cf.
Kaner & Yano 2015).
Long before the Itazuke excavations in 1951–1954, Itazuke-style pottery was foundthroughout western Japan and known as Ongagawa pottery by analogy with artefacts
dredged from the Onga River in North Kyushu. Thus ‘Ongagawa’ pottery (Itazuke Ia–
IIb) has been traditionally used to track the diffusion of Yayoi culture throughout most of
western Japan during the ﬁrst phase of expansion. FUJIO Shin’ichirō dates this expansion
from 700 BC, reaching the Kinai area by 600 BC (Fujio 2014, ﬁg. 12), while MIYAMOTO
Kazuo postulates it reaching the Kinai by the 5th century BC (Miyamoto 2018).
In the initial modelling of the spread of rice agriculture (Figure 2), Akazawa (1981)
postulated that Yayoi peoples travelled eastwards from the incubation area in northern© Japanese Archaeological Association

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THE JŌMON–YAYOI TRANSITION IN EASTERN JAPAN

Figure 2. Hypothesised spread of rice agriculture by Akazawa Takeru (Akazawa 1982, Figure 14,
modiﬁed by author)

Kyushu (Figure 2, hatched area), colonizing the Inland Sea coastal regions where thelowlands supplied plenty of water for wet-rice cultivation. However, this ﬁrst stage ofdiffusion ended at the curved line near the Waist of Honshū [my term] (Figure 2, dottedline); from there, the spread of rice agriculture was hypothesized to have transited throughthe interior mountain basins, avoiding the coasts along the Japan Sea and the Paciﬁcseaboard where Jōmon lifestyles prevailed in large ﬁshing communities (Akazawa 1981,
ﬁg. 15, 1982, ﬁg. 4.6). In his 1981 illustration, the rice distribution arrow points straight to
Mt Asama, one of the active volcanoes in landlocked Gunma Prefecture (our target area),essentially presaging the later route of the Tōsandō trunk road established in the Nara
Period (710–794 AD). From Gunma, Akazawa’s arrows branch northwards into Tōhoku andeastwards down the Toné River. He quotes KANASEKI Hiroshi and SAHARA Makoto as saying“The second diffusion traveled inland—through the basins and valleys of Yamanashi andNagano Prefectures, along the base of Mt. Asama to northern Kantō and on to Fukushima
Prefecture in northern Japan, but it never reached the large southern Kanto Plain” (Akazawa
1981, p. 241).
In the very year of Akazawa’s publication, rice paddies were excavated at the Sunazawa
and Tareyanagi sites in far northern Aomori Prefecture, immediately invalidating his
hypothesis. Established ca. 380 BC, they only lasted 300 years before failing, and the
inhabitants are thought to have reverted to Jōmon lifestyles (Fujio 2017, p. 8). More AMS
dating of the diffusion of rice agriculture has revealed not a steady spread but some hop© Japanese Archaeological Association

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Gina L. BARNES

scotching along the coasts. KOBAYASHI Ken’ichi has produced a graph of 14C dates calibrated
with IntCal04 that shows wet-rice was adopted in Kochi (ca. 830 BC) before Oita (ca. 680
BC), Kobe (ca. 600 BC) then Osaka–Kawachi (ca. 580 BC), Nara and Aichi simultaneously(ca. 510 BC), but then Aomori (ca. 450 BC) and Sendai (ca. 310 BC) before Kanagawa (ca.
200 BC) (see Barnes 2015, ﬁg. 11.12; Kobayashi 2014, 2017). This sequence essentiallyagrees with the new presentations in the renewed exhibitions at the National Museum ofJapanese History (‘Rekihaku’ hereinafter). The dates, however, are based on limited sample
sizes which will be ﬁlled out with continuing research, and there is some controversy overwhat is meant by “adopting” rice agriculture.
Excavations in Kanagawa Prefecture have indicated a stop-start pattern for the
introduction of rice (Kanagawa Kyōi 2012; Odawara-shi Kyōi 2017), where farming villages
have been established multiple times by incoming migrants but initially failed—as at the
Aomori sites. It was not an easy process, exacerbated by the old adage ‘Given that huntergatherers can obtain their food within four hours a day, who would want to become a farmer
with 10-hour working days?.’ In addition, the social relations between migrant rice farmers
and the local peoples who were continuing Jōmon lifestyles are just beginning to be worked
out, region by region.
In western Japan, Jōmon and Yayoi peoples are ﬂagged by their respective pottery shapes:
Ongagawa cooking pots (kame 甕) and new shapes such as storage pots for the incoming
farmers, versus tottaimon 突帯文 cooking pots ( fukabachi 深鉢) for the locals (Fujio 1991).
Note that different terms are applied to cooking pot shape-types in the different traditions(kame vs fukabachi); this helps in the discussion of their comparative attributes—thoughsome researchers have overridden these distinctions (Satō 2002). Neither Ongagawa nor
tottaimon are Jōmon ‘types’ or Yayoi ‘styles’ in terms of the standard ceramic chronologies:
the Ongagawa derivation was explained above, while tottaimon refers to a Jōmon-lineage
cooking pot that bears appliqué bands on the rim and shoulder; the raised bands are often
notched or pinched in pie-crust mode.
Fujio (2009) has researched ceramics in the Kinai region (especially Osaka Bay) during
the period of rice introduction, revealing—by innovative juxtapositioning of ceramic
chronology with calibrated radiocarbon dates—that there was a span of 100–150 years
during which cooking pots of both tottaimon and Ongagawa potteries were used together
in most sites. The Ongagawa cooking pots, along with the new shape-types of jars andpedestaled bowls, are hypothesized to have been brought in by few migrants who thenintegrated into Jōmon villages. Fujio hypothesizes that the makers of the Ongagawa andJōmon-style cooking pots were not different peoples (migrants vs locals) but that theceramics could be made by both and that everyone used both (Fujio 2009, pp. 397–8) until adistinctive regional style developed from the middle of Early Yayoi.
These convoluted situations have raised many problems of terminology—not only about© Japanese Archaeological Association

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THE JŌMON–YAYOI TRANSITION IN EASTERN JAPANthe people using these different potteries but about their subsistence means and cultural
afﬁliations. In particular, Fujio (2017) tracks the different concepts used in past researchin formulating the common concepts of ‘Yayoi period’ and ‘Yayoi culture.’ The post-war
deﬁnition of Yayoi culture based on the trinity of wet-rice agriculture, metal use, andmoated settlements was ﬁrst discarded in favour of Sahara’s deﬁnition of the Yayoi Period(Sahara 1987), which was based purely on rice agriculture with no other attributes deemednecessary. This deﬁnition is now causing great problems not only due to emerging evidenceof non-rice agriculture, especially millets, but also because of the growing realization that
aspects of the formal Yayoi complex could be adopted separately, e.g. rice can be grownwithout paddy ﬁelds (e.g. Nasu & Momohara 2016).
Fujio clariﬁed distinctions in Yayoi culture across the archipelago based on FUJIMOTO
Tsuyoshi’s framework of the naka no bunka (中の文化 ‘central culture’). This approach ﬁrst
postulates a Yayoi cultural system based on irrigated rice agriculture that, once instituted,
cannot be reverted back to earlier lifestyles (as happened in Aomori Prefecture, mentioned
above). In Fujio’s scheme, for the ﬁrst 250 years after inception, the Central Culture is
conﬁned to the region around Genkai Bay (Fukuoka Prefecture in Kyushu). Then by
the mid-6th century BC, it had spread southwards to the border of Miyazaki Prefectureand eastwards to slightly beyond the Waist of Honshu (Fujio draws the line from Fukui
Prefecture to the Tenryū River in Shizuoka Prefecture [Fujio 2017, p. 14, ﬁg. 4]). By the 3rd
century BC, the Central Culture had penetrated to the Toné River in Gunma Prefecture.
This two-stage process of diffusion out of North Kyushu resulted in two variations of theCentral Culture (I-A, I-B), plus another three cultural regions that were peripheral, all ofwhich co-existed until the beginning of the Kofun period in 250 AD. I-A and I-B have incommon: irrigated wet rice agriculture and dry-ﬁeld farming, moated villages and warfare,bronzes and moated-precinct burials with grave goods; but I-B is lacking in bronze ritual
goods. I personally have always made a distinction between Western Yayoi with bronzes
and Eastern Yayoi without bronzes, but this only holds for the Early and Middle Yayoi sincenon-ritual bronzes are now known in eastern Japan in Late Yayoi. It is area I-B, between the
Waist of Honshu and the Toné River, that we are concerned with in this paper.
Within these spatially deﬁned cultural areas, Fujio has also monitored the temporal(vertical) transitions from Jōmon to Yayoi culture, which happen at different rates in every
sub-region (horizontally). These are illustrated such that Yayoi cultural traits became‘denser’ through time in the west (Fujio 2017, ﬁg. 2). At ﬁrst there are ‘blurred’ regions
as local Jōmon and Yayoi traits are mixed, then comes the ﬁrm adoption of irrigation
agriculture, then moated settlements, and ﬁnally bronzes. This succession becomes lessroutinized in north-eastern Honshū and bronzes were mostly absent. There even arises thequestion whether the Tōhoku cultures can be considered Yayoi, which stimulated the 2017
Yayoi Research Group symposium in Sendai on the theme “Didn’t Yayoi Culture Exist in© Japanese Archaeological Association

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Gina L. BARNES

Sendai Plain?”A most important part of Fujio’s presentation is that he treats the Yayoi period as acontainer that holds many different cultures through time: Jōmon culture(s) continued toexist throughout large parts of the country in the Yayoi period (Fujio 2017, ﬁg. 2) until
irrigated rice agriculture was adopted; thus, the period is Yayoi but there are cultures inparallel existence. I myself have tried to represent the cultural transformation by a diagonalline between the Jōmon and Yayoi periods (cf. Barnes 2015, table 0.1a), instead of the more
traditional drawing of a horizontal line between Jōmon and Yayoi periods at one speciﬁctime. Shitara, on the other hand, describes the changes from Jōmon to Yayoi in stepwise
fashion (Shitara 2014, table 1), with the Yayoi period beginning at different times indifferent areas; this results in different periods in parallel existence, similar to my diagonal
rendition. For the Chūbu (central mountains) and South Kantō regions, Shitara assigns all
pottery styles during and before the temporal equivalent of Itazuke IIb to the Jōmon period.
These are three different conceptual solutions to the problem of addressing the gradualspread of irrigated rice agriculture: how should we deal with these problems of whether
culture=period or not?
• Are the people still following Jōmon lifeways, after the formation of the Yayoi package in
the Yayoi Period, Yayoi people? Most would say no because by deﬁnition, the migrating
Yayoi farmers are a genetic admixture of immigrants from the Korean Peninsula and local
Jōmon populations (hereafter referred to as admixed type). The local peoples (zairaijin 在来人), still following Jōmon lifeways, stand in opposition to these incomers.
• Are they then Jōmon people? Many would say no because they live in the (formalized)
Yayoi Period, but Gunma archaeologists and Shitara (2014) are adamant in maintainingthat the locals are Jōmon people until they themselves adopt rice agriculture and become
Yayoi by acculturation (if not genetically).
• Satō (2002) has documented the occurrence of Ongagawa cooking pots (kame) in Tōhoku
and notes that there then begins a process of local production of such pots (‘Ongagawalike pottery’); he suggests that when this happens, there is a cultural shift because thekame cooking pot represents a particular cuisine=rice. Are the people then Yayoi?
Fujio acknowledges that people who use only tottaimon pottery are Jōmon, but do tradeceramics count for acculturation, or do their own ceramics have to change as documented
by Satō?
• When jōkonmon 条痕紋 pottery from, for example, the Tōkai region is imported into
Gunma, does it signify the Yayoinization (another term from Mizoguchi 2013) of the local
Jōmon?
• Until then, should we call the locals Epi-Jōmon or Zoku-Jōmon, a term already inexistence for followers of Jōmon lifeways in northern Tōhoku and Hokkaidō from 400 BC
or so? HAYASHI Kensaku proposed such as long ago as 1987 (Shitara 2014, p. 451).
© Japanese Archaeological Association

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THE JŌMON–YAYOI TRANSITION IN EASTERN JAPAN

Figure 3. A Yayoi-type jar from Gunma featuring a tottaimon (notched, raised band) rim andjōkonmon (scrape-marked) body ﬁnish (Photo by author, modiﬁed, at Gunma ArchaeologicalResearch Foundation exhibit)• And then, what about their ceramics: should Yayoi-period tottaimon and jōkonmon
potteries (Figure 3), which retain many Jōmon ceramic features and are different from
Ongagawa pottery, be called Epi/Zoku-Jōmon pottery?
These are difﬁcult questions, and often the answers cannot be broad-brushed but need
to be applied site by site. We need a new vocabulary with which to discuss encounters
between genetically and culturally different people within the Yayoi period (if we adopt
Fujio’s ‘period as container’ approach, which I now think is the most satisfactory). There
was confusion of multitudinous peoples, cultures, subsistence patterns and ceramics during
the Yayoi period; these must be acknowledged during incremental cultural change—fromhorticultural practices to farming different dry-crops with the ﬁnal stage being the adoptionof irrigated rice, even though rice does not represent the entire subsistence system. As
Shitara’s (2014) title implies, Yayoi culture is a complex of multiple farming cultures.
Although Ongagawa ceramics remain a ﬂag for irrigated rice transmission, pots can travel
through trade and exchange, and they may hold other grains such as millet and barley, which
prove themselves to be easier to grow than obtaining the technology for wet-rice agriculture(paddy ﬁelds, specialist tools, social management techniques). As we shall see below,
acculturation may ﬁrst involve millets rather than rice and still lead to a ‘farming culture.’© Japanese Archaeological Association

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Gina L. BARNES

But is that Yayoi culture or not?
Despite the modern Japanese self-identiﬁcation with rice as formulated by Ohnuki-Tierney(1993), in the last 25 years archaeologists are coming to acknowledge that rice was always
accompanied by several other grains (the historic gokoku 五穀, ‘ﬁve grains’) (Ando 2014;
Shitara 2014; Hamada 2019). Also, hunting, ﬁshing, and gathering of wild plant and animal
foods are known to have continued much longer than the Jōmon Period per se (e.g. Shitara
2006, p. 142). Dry-ﬁeld farming of vegetables and some grains in specialized gardenplots is well-established in the historic literature (cf. von Verschuer 2016) and is now
becoming accessible archaeologically. Ando’s critical review of rice-orientated researchand interpretation (Ando 2014) also challenges the unreﬂective use of the ‘culture’ concept
in trying to deal with the multitude of possibilities in gradual and localized cultural change
as intimated above.
Excavations have mainly produced data on paddy ﬁelds because they are large, substantial
features that can be preserved in the archaeological record. On the other hand, paddies are
rare: they are only preserved when buried intact by ﬂooding or volcanic activity, as NOTO
Takeshi maintains. Moreover, their sparse recovery does not inform on potential dry-ﬁeld
agriculture for which ﬁeld systems are even more ephemeral until the raised ridge (畝 une)gardens of the Kofun Period. Rice is assumed to have arrived into Kyushu slightly before
other grains, but Shitara asserts that probably all the grains spread through the archipelago
together; nevertheless, he proposes that initial farming efforts in the Kantō involved avariety of grains rather than a focus on rice alone (Shitara 2014, p. 458, p. 463).

1.2

The view from Gunma

Gunma is not a mountain basin but entails the farthest northwest corner of the Kantō Plains.
The Japanese deﬁnition of ‘plains’ (平野 heiya) takes in alluvial lowlands, riverine terraces,
alluvial fans, and rolling uplands (cf. Barnes 2010). The translation here of daichi 台地
as ‘tableland’ rather than ‘plateau’ reﬂects their low relative elevation and low separation(ca. 2–5 m) from the adjoining alluvial ﬂats. Gunma is a land-locked prefecture, isolated
from sea routes along the Paciﬁc coast and the Japan Sea. The Somagahara-Maebashi
tableland (Figure 4-a), supporting Takasaki and Maebashi cities, is bounded on three sides
by mountains (somewhat like an inland peninsula). From its northern hinterlands ﬂows the
Toné River (Figure 4-1), one of the two major suppliers of alluvium in the western Kantō
Region—the other being the Arakawa River (Figure 4-2), originating in the Chichibu
Basin. These rivers cut through the thick layers of volcanic ash and pumice deposited by
the volcanoes surrounding the Kantō Plains: the major ones being Asama, Haruna, andAkagiyama all in Gunma, and Fuji and Hakone in south Kantō. Akagiyama ceased activity
in the Pleistocene, but the others are active volcanoes and have deposited tephra several
times within the Holocene (see Barnes & Soda 2019). Tephra deposits form the uplands of© Japanese Archaeological Association

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Figure 4. The geomorphology of the Kantō Plains, illustrated with the Toné River ﬂowing in its
original course directly into Tokyo Bay near Edo Castle (after Kaizuka et al. 2000, map 3, modiﬁedby M. Inoue and author; base map by Kokudo Chiri'in). River reconstructions approximate
1 Tone River; 2 Arakawa River; a Somagahara-Maebashi tableland; b Fujioka-Kushibiki tableland;c Ōmama alluvial fan; d Tatebayashi-Ōta tableland; e Ōmiya tableland; f Irima-Musashino tableland

the Kantō Plains: the Somagahara-Maebashi tableland and downstream where Tokyo andSaitama cities spread over the Irima-Musashino and Ōmiya tablelands (Figure 4-e,f). Parts
of Kanagawa Prefecture are also included in the southern Kantō Plains.
Unlike the coastal regions along the oceans and Inland Sea, the alluvial ﬂats of the large
rivers running through the Kantō Plains were constantly at risk of alluviation throughﬂooding and erosion; thus the alluvium was avoided for settlement until modern times.
The upland areas were also problematic, being mostly devoid of water and offering few
opportunities for paddy construction. This reality is reﬂected both by the positioning of the
Edo-period castle (Figure 4) at the edge of the Musashino Bluffs, and by the fact that theMusashino Plains to the west (Figure 4-f) were not highly colonized even at that time.
The Kantō Plains form a pivotal point between north-east and south-west Japan and© Japanese Archaeological Association

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constitute an experimental laboratory forevaluating the mechanisms and progressin the spread of Yayoi culture from thesouth-west under less than ideal conditions.
Within the Kantō region, Gunma provides
an interesting case study in the transition toagriculture in the Early and Middle Yayoi
periods.

2. Early to mid-Middle Yayoi(YI to mid-YIII) in the Kantō
region2.1

The ceramic evidence

Kanagawa researchers (Kanagawa Kyōi
2012; Odawara-shi Kyōi 2017) still recognize
the boundary of this ﬁrst dispersal during
Yayoi I (by 350/280 BC) near the Waist of
Honshu as proposed by Akazawa in 1981.
This is because from there eastwards, theformer Jōmon peoples (the Epi-Jōmon?)employed a surface ﬁnish named jōkonmon
rather than the hakeme (刷毛目) marks of
the Ongagawa pottery [Note: the techniqueof hakeme (‘brush mark’) surface ﬁnish
was adopted before it was discovered thatthe marks were actually made by dragging
a small tablet of wood over the surface,with the wood grain producing the marks(Yokoyama 1978). It should be morelogically called ita no mokume (板の木目), Figure 5. Final Jōmon to Middle Yayoi jar
and pot shapes, decorations, and formation
wood-grain ﬁnish]; jōkomon characterizes
traces in Gunma (after Maebashi-Takasaki
the pottery of the Early Yayoi Period in this 2013, modiﬁed by author)
region by having a surface scraped with abivalve (clam) shell or bunched plant stems(Nagai 2007), and often the pot base bore a fabric impression. Like tottaimon, jōkonmon isneither a type nor a style [Note: ‘Type’ is used for Jōmon pottery, ‘style’ is used for Yayoi
pottery] but a formation technique shared across a wide area. The main jōkonmon shape© Japanese Archaeological Association

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THE JŌMON–YAYOI TRANSITION IN EASTERN JAPANtypes were jars (often a modiﬁed version of the open-mouthed pot) and wide-mouth cooking
pots ( fukabachi) of a continuing Jōmon shape (Figure 5-A). Nagai divides the developmentof jōkonmon-lineage pottery into four stages: it spread inland ﬁrst—to the north-east into
Gifu Prefecture—before travelling up the Tōkai coast to Shizuoka and then inland into
Yamanashi. By the end of the second stage, it had penetrated throughout the earlier Final
Jōmon pottery sphere characterized by grooved lines ( fusenmon 浮線紋) and with somelocal modiﬁcations (e.g. brushing with pine needles in southern Tōhoku).
The earliest pottery styles of the formal Yayoi period in the Kantō region (Figure 5-B)
were inﬂuenced by jōkonmon formation techniques from the western Tōkai region in Nagai’s
second stage. OOKI Shinichirou of GARF (pers. comm. 16may’19) notes that althoughjōkonmon jars as developed in Aichi Prefecture were used only for storage, imported or
copied jōkonmon jars in Gunma Prefecture were mainly used as cooking pots. The newjōkonmon-ﬁnished ceramics are named Dōyama-style in Kanagawa and Iwabitsuyama 岩
櫃山-style in Gunma. Iwabitsuyama-style pottery appears in Early Yayoi sites of northwest
Kantō: at Oki 沖 II and Kami(no)kubo 上(ノ)久保 sites in Gunma and Nyoraidō 如来堂C and
Shijūzaka 四十坂 sites in Saitama (Watanabe 1986, p. 116). They contrast with Suwada-style(eastern Kantō) or Nozawa I-style (northern Kantō) ceramics, which are variously thought torepresent the early to middle Middle Yayoi period in those regions (Watanabe 1986, p. 118).
The geographical difference is explained by Iwabitsuyama-style pottery being inﬂuenced byjōkonmon pottery from Nagano Prefecture (GARF n.d., p. 2); Ooki suggests that the routeof diffusion from Aichi to Nagano to Gunma was likely via the Tenryū River, a barrier toeastern diffusion noted by Fujio above.
Transitional Jōmon–Yayoi sites at the end of Early Yayoi in Gunma yield different
combinations of ceramic styles:• In the northern Kantō region, Ongagawa pottery occurs in extremely limited quantities:
only a few sherds are known from Gunma Prefecture, for example at Itoi Miyamae 糸井宮前, Shiroishi Ōmidō 白石大御堂, and Oshide 押手 sites (see Site Appendix and Appendix
Bibliography at the end). Many Gunma archaeologists consider that these are tradeceramics, and if rice was introduced in these containers, it did not lead directly to relianceon rice even if it was sown in that region during the Early Yayoi period.
• The Mt Iwabitsu 岩櫃山 site itself (see Photo in Site Appendix) yields three different styles(Watanabe 1986): one jar from Cave B is comparable to Maruko-style pottery from Tōkai(Watanabe 1986, p. 121); it exists together with a majority of local pottery decorated withlinked-triangle designs (三角連撃文 sankaku renkeimon) and jōkonmon-ﬁnish as well assome zoned cord-marked wares of Jōmon-lineage (Figure 6).
• At Kami(no)kubo were discovered triangular-design local (Jōmon-lineage) pots butwith a jar comparable to the Tōkai Suijinbira-style (Watanabe 1986, p. 117), which was
distributed from Aichi and Gifu to Shizuoka, Yamanashi, and Nagano Prefectures.
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Figure 6. Iwabitsuyama-style pottery from Gunma (photo by author, modiﬁed, at Gunma
Archaeological Research Foundation exhibit)• The Minami Ōtsuka 南大塚 site yielded Tōkai-style jōkonmon-ﬁnish pottery together
with a local [Final Jōmon-lineage] jar.
• At the Oki II site, the earliest Yayoi was a jar with locally adapted jōkonmon ﬁnish,occurring together with local raised-band (tottaimon) jars and cooking pots with local
linked-triangle designs. These latter Jōmon-lineage ceramics formed the majority at Oki
II, indicating the context of the beginning of the ceramic transition, which is marked byan increase in large jars (to 20% of the assemblage) (Shitara 2014, p. 455).
The Oki II and Iwabitsuyama styles were categorized as early Middle Yayoi by Watanabe(1986); Shitara (2006) places Oki together with Dōyama 堂山 site in Kanagawa in theterminal Early Yayoi (I-new), but Iwabitsuyama succeeding Oki in early Middle Yayoi (II).
Table 1 presents the chronological ordering in Shitara (2006); the Iwabitsu, Jinbo Fujitsuka,
and Tatsumichō styles for Gunma are pictured in Figures 5 and 6.
What these ceramic data suggest is that changes in the pottery repertoire were the ﬁrst stepof Yayoinization and that the Yayoi ‘package’ did not initially exceed the boundary of the
Waist of Honshu even though local peoples (of Jōmon lineage) in the Owari Plain invented
new styles (Kashiō, Suijinbira) in response to the Yayoi Ongagawa-style pottery in the west,
using jōkonmon surface ﬁnishing and modiﬁcation of shapes (jars made from cooking
pot shapes). These localized styles then were traded and/or inﬂuenced the development ofsimilar jōkonmon ceramics in regions further east-north-east (Kōri, Oki, Dōyama). In many
places, these new type vessels were used contemporaneously with local Jōmon-lineage
vessels bearing traditional decoration (linked triangles, zoned cord-marking). In the western
Kantō region, most of the transitional ceramics occur as secondary burial jars together withlocal Jōmon-lineage continuations.
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THE JŌMON–YAYOI TRANSITION IN EASTERN JAPAN

Table 1. Contemporaneous Early–Middle Yayoi ceramics in eastern Japan compared with thestandard Yayoi in Kinki (extracted from Shitara 2006, table 1; Shitara 2014, table 1 gives a slightly
different line-up of ceramic names). Bold=appear in Gunma
KINKI

CENTRALHIGHLANDSTŌKAINORTH KANTŌ

SOUTH-WEST KANTŌ

SOUTHERN TŌHOKU

Early Yayoi (EY)
I-old+Nagahara

MamizukaKōri I-old

Chiami

ChiamiŌbora A2

I-middle+Nagahara

Ongagawa+KashiōKōri I-mid-new

Chiami

ChiamiŌbora A’

I-new+Nagahara

Ongagawa+Suijinbira

Kōri II

Oki

DōyamaMiyotaAsahi +Yaname Shōnohata(Iwabitsuyama)DōyamaImaizumi

KaidachōTeradoko

Jinbo Fujitsuka

Hirazawa(Asobigasaki)

Ryūmonji

Kaidachō

Ajima

IkegamiNakazato*

Minami-miyama

Kitajima**

Miyanodai

Kawaharachō-guchi

Middle Yayoi (MY)II

III

Kuribayashi

IV
Takakura[Tatsumichō]**** Nakazato is placed in second half of Middle Yayoi III by Kanagawa Kyōi 2012.
** From Saitama, parallel to Tatsumichō-style pottery in Gunma*** The new view is that Tatsumichō-style is the same as Kuribayashi-style pottery (S. Ooki pers. comm. 16may’19).

2.2

The burial evidence

From late Early through mid-Middle Yayoi, the broad jōkonmon ceramic sphere wasconcomitant with the distribution of secondary burials, practiced from the Tōkai tosouthern Tōhoku regions. Shitara comments that this burial tradition conforms both to the
Final Jōmon distribution of grooved fusenmon-decorated pottery and to the Early Yayoi
distribution of jōkonmon-ﬁnished pottery (Shitara 2006, p. 110). Hudson (1992) gave an
overview of Yayoi secondary burials and described the process of cleaning the bones forredeposit (cf. also Shitara 1988, 1991, 2006, pp. 110–120).

2.2.1

Secondary burial locations in Gunma

The locations of Yayoi secondary burials in Gunma Prefecture are shown in Figure 7, with
their data presented in Table 2. Most of the secondary burials are interred in jars withinburial pits; however, at Yatsuhagi, no jars were used but the bones simply deposited in the
cave, while at Iwatsubo, primary (not secondary) burials of ﬂexed skeletons in the Jōmon
tradition were recovered as described above. These burials might be considered as a prelude
to exhuming the bones and reburying them in jars, but this is not attested at the site (Iijima
et al. 1994, p. 12).
© Japanese Archaeological Association

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Gina L. BARNES

Figure 7. Locations of Early~Middle Yayoi secondary burials in Gunma Prefecture (compiled byauthor, background courtesy of Google Earth)

Most secondary burials in Gunma are jar burials located at lower elevations, generally
less than 500 m msl. However, several are located at greater elevations than 500 m msl.
(Table 2). For comparative purposes, it is useful to know that the conﬂuence of the Toné andAgatsuma Rivers, near Oshide 押手 site in the far north-western corner the Kantō Plain, isabout 220 m msl, and the Toné when passing the Oki 沖 II site is at ca. 60 m msl (Figure 7).
Thus, the plain drops rapidly within 22 km from north-west to south-east. Terraces border
the river and footslopes rise up to Mt Haruna on the west and Mt Akagi on the east.

2.2.2

Landform classiﬁcation for secondary burials

Rather than mere altitude, a better classiﬁcation of sites can be developed based on landform
location:• MT (high mountain): the four sites in this category, Arigasayama 有笠山, Iwabitsuyama,
Yatsuhagi 八束脛, and Oga-Kanamaru 大胡金丸 are indeed high on the mountainsides
and consist of caves or rock shelters. The initial three listed were some of the ﬁrst
discovered—or long known in the region. Because their remains were so spectacular, they
conditioned the image of secondary burials being in isolated, inaccessible places. These
three sites date from Early Yayoi to early Middle Yayoi.
© Japanese Archaeological Association

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THE JŌMON–YAYOI TRANSITION IN EASTERN JAPAN

Table 2.

Yayoi-period Secondary Burials in Gunma
Site

Date ceramics

Alt.

Loc.

Osaka*

尾坂

tFJ, 1½MY

738

MV

Shimebiki-bara I

注連引原

EYI Ongagawa-old, -newfusenmon, Ōbora(A?)

238

TR

Kami(no)kubo

上(ノ)久保2½EY pre-Iwabitsuyama (Suijinbira)

590

MV

Shimebiki-bara II

注連引原

tEYI-old~MYII-new Kinai-kei

238

TR

Minami Ōtsuka

南大塚

tEYI

440

HS

Uwahitomi

上人見

tEYI Iwabitsuyama Suijinbira

751

TR

Iwabitsuyama(Takanosu)(Makuiwa)

岩櫃山
(鷹ノ巣)
(幕岩)

tEYI Iwabitsuyama (Maruko)

775

MT

Oshide

押手

tEY Ongagawa I-mid Suijinbira-old?

HS

Oki II

沖II

tEYI ~bMY Iwabitsuyama, Suijinbira, Maruko

69

AL

Uehara 1

上原

tEY

642

MV

Ōgo-Kanamaru

大胡金丸

Iwabitsuyama

420

MT

Maehata

前畑

Iwabitsuyama

428

MV

Nakazenji

中善地

Iwabitsuyama+(Suwada)

300

HS

Arigasayama #2

有笠山

1½MY

884

MT

Iwatsubo Cave

岩津保

1½MY (Nozawa I)

394

MV

Hirai

平井

MY (Nozawa I)

180

HS

Nakanoya-hara

中野谷原

MYII-old

265

TR

Shimebiki-hara II

注連引原

MYII-old

238

TR

Ōkami

大上

MYII

428

TR

Yatsuhagi Caves

八束脛

1½MY Kuribayashi 1∼2-old, Nozawa II, Suwada

650

MT

Tanakada

田中田

1½MY

164

HS

Myōjin

明神

1½MY

115

—

Jinbo Fujitsuka

神保富士塚

MYIII Jinbo Fujitsuka

170

TR

Tatsu-iwa

立岩

MY (Yamasōka)

542

HS

Minami Ōtsuka

南大塚

MY

440

HS

Kannon-mae

観音前

MY

173

TR

Shinmeisan

神明山

MY

143

HS

Notes: All sites had jōkonmon pottery; named styles appear below without parentheses; imported or copied ceramics inparentheses; 1½=ﬁrst half; 2½=second half; Sources are listed in Site Appendix bibliography* not the city of Ōsaka 大坂 which is often spelled without the macron© Japanese Archaeological Association

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Gina L. BARNES• MV (mountain valley): these sites are indeed in the deep mountains but tend to be locatedat lower elevations near the river terraces: Maehata 前畑, Kami(no)kubo, Iwatsubo 岩津
保 and Osaka 尾坂. The ﬁrst three sites are all terminal Early Yayoi or beginning Middle
Yayoi; Osaka has yielded both Final Jōmon and early Middle Yayoi ceramics.
• HS (hillside): these sites occur on hillslopes or volcano ﬂanks very close to basinbottomland. They span two time periods: from Minami Ōtsuka 南大塚, Nakazenji 中善
地, and Hirai 平井 in terminal Early Yayoi (tEY)~beginning Middle Yayoi (bMY); andMinami Ōtsuka continuing into Middle Yayoi along with Shinmeisan 神明山 and Oshide
押手 (EYI-mid).
• TR (terrace): sites on terraces begin with Shimebiki-hara 注連引原 in the earliest Early
Yayoi (I-old); this site is dated earlier than what is commonly thought to be Early Yayoi,
commencing with Oki and Iwabitsuyama-style pottery in EY(I-new). As such it needs
further research. But it is clear that the Shimebiki-hara site area became an important
Yayoi site in the basin, with Shimebiki-hara II adjoining it from EY(I-new), and Okami 大
上 nearby in MY(II). This site cluster on the upper terrace at the edge of the foothills of
the Usui River contrasts with another cluster of sites to the west and closer to the edge ofthe same terrace: Uwahitomi 上人見 (tEY) and Nakanoya-hara 中野谷原 (bMY).

2.2.3

Burial contents & sources

Early analyses of the jar burial contents were focussed on the human remains—not justbones but perforated teeth and ﬁngerbone pendants (e.g. Aramaki et al. 1988; Toyama et al.
1989). Such remains have been recovered from several sites throughout Japan from southern
Tōhoku to Okinawa at Jōmon and Early to Middle Yayoi sites (Toyama et al. 1989, p. 2–3).
Two of the secondary burial sites, Iwatsubo Cave (1½MY) and Yatsuhagi Cave (2½MY),
yielded cranial remains that had been subject to tooth extractions. This is recognized as aWestern Yayoi tradition and is taken by investigators to indicate either migrants or locals
who had adopted the practice. Nagai (2007, p. 27) assumed that the people making andusing jōkonmon-ﬁnished pottery were local natives who had contacts and relationships withothers throughout the ‘network’ deﬁned by the Final Jōmon grooved fusenmon-decorated
pottery (Nagai 2007, p. 27). However, analyses of crania and teeth from two individuals in
the Iwatsubo Cave burials revealed one female was local while one male was of admixed
type (Kaifu 1992; Matsumura 2001). This pattern was repeated several centuries later inthe Kofun Period at nearby Kanai Higashi-ura site, where skeletal morphology indicated amale of admixed descent and a female of native descent; strontium isotopic analysis further
revealed that both had migrated into the Gunma region from the west (Sugiyama 2019, p.
176). Thus, migration of peoples from west to east, in however small numbers, cannot bedenied for the Early Yayoi period; and according to Matsumura’s reckoning, by the Kofun
period 72% of his 83 samples were of admixed type.
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THE JŌMON–YAYOI TRANSITION IN EASTERN JAPAN

Other artifacts in Early Yayoi also give indications of distant communications. Even theassemblage from Arigasayama Cave #2 included a shell pendant alongside a local beadmade of pumice and ﬁngerbone pendants perhaps of a relative (Iijima et al. 1994). Gunma
being one of the few land-locked prefectures in Japan, any sea products that appear there
are automatically indicative of long-distance trade, whether direct or down-the-line. The
contemporaneous Iwatsubo Cave, in addition to Western Yayoi-style tooth extractions,also yielded shell bracelets, a southern product; deer antlers were placed upon one grave,
implying both hunting and ritual. An increase in the scale and sophistication of grave
deposits through time can be seen: the Yatsuhagi Caves, dating to the ﬁrst half of Middle
Yayoi, had not only ﬁngerbone but teeth pendants, both shell bracelets and shell beads, notonly animal products but a boar tusk ornament—and ﬁnally jasper tools and cylindricalbeads reﬂecting trade relations with the bead-making villages or beadstone source areasof the Japan Sea Coast to the northwest of Gunma. Multi-directional communications arerepeated in the types of ceramics found in the burial sites, either as burial jars themselves
or accompanying vessels.

2.2.4

Pottery communications

The types of artefacts found in and with these burials attest to communications with othergroups in the region. Here I use local routes through the mountains to postulate relations
between Gunma and other areas. Such routes are known to be very long-lived, since they
are proven passages through difﬁcult terrain; Ooki (2019) gives the names of the signiﬁcantmountain passes. The connections between Gunma and the west, for example, wereformalized in the Tōsandō administrative road in the Nara–Heian periods and incorporated
into the Nakasendō in the early Edo period. This focus on geography is necessary because
pots do not move magically across the landscape: prehistorically, they had to have been
carried by people, whether over very long distances or successive short ones. People travelon paths, or by boat on rivers and along coastlines; thus, it is necessary to anchor movementson the ground. This will be borne out by examining late Middle Yayoi developments as well,at the end of this article.
One of the earliest Yayoi sites in Gunma, Kamikubo, yielded a Tōkai variety of jōkonmon
pottery (Sujinbira); this conforms to the schema outlined above where jōkonmon pottery
from the Tōkai was imported or inﬂuenced pottery during the Early Yayoi period in the east.
The Kamikubo site is located deep in the mountains along the Karasu River. That river isfollowed today by Route 406 along an old road called Kusatsu Kaidō; thus at least in historicaltimes, it was a way to travel from the Takasaki City area to Kusatsu Onsen (hot springs), andperhaps in earlier times the road extended beyond into Nagano Basin in the Chikuma Rivervalley. It is exactly this area where jōkonmon pottery is thought to have been introduced into
northwest Kantō (see the quote from Kanaseki & Sahara above, in Akazawa 1981, p. 241).
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Gina L. BARNES

Iwabitsuyama is the type site for the beginning of Middle Yayoi in the north-western
Kantō. However, among the three caves/rock shelters on the mountain, Cave B contained
both Iwabitsuyama and Maruko-style pottery, the latter from Tōkai. Mt Iwabitsu is locatedinland on the Agatsuma River, which forms a passage north of Mt Haruna towards the west.
This was probably a major route to the Nagano Basin on the Chikuma River, passing by
Mt Kusatsu-Shirane. Today Route 145 runs along the river, meeting Route 406 coming infrom Kamikubo before splitting to go north on Route 292 towards the Japan Sea or south on
Route 144 towards the Saku Basin in the Chikuma River valley.
Nakazenji, also an early site, and Shinmeisan (MY) are on opposite sides of the Toné Riverbasin, but the presence of Suwada-style pottery, characteristic of East Kantō, suggests ties
down the Toné River towards Tokyo Bay, the river’s original outlet. In the early 17th century,
the Toné was diverted away from Tokyo to ﬂow directly east into the Paciﬁc Ocean, but prior
to that, it would have connected the north-western and south-eastern ends of Kantō. Suwada
pottery is the type pottery for the Early Yayoi in East Kantō, excavated and identiﬁed at the
Suwada site in Ichikawa City, Chiba, close to the mouth of the former Toné River at the headof Tokyo Bay. Jōkonmon-ﬁnish was ﬁrst identiﬁed on Suwada pottery, and Iwabitsuyama
ceramics came to be considered an early regional variation of Suwada (Watanabe 1986);
more recently the Suwada style is broken down into the later Hirazawa style, Jinbo Fujitsuka
style, and Ikegami style (Gunma Maibun 2019). Now, however, it is thought that theinﬂuences of jōkonmon-ﬁnish came into the Kantō from different directions (Nagai 2007),
but the existence of Suwada- and Iwabitsuyama-style ceramics together at the Nakazanji site
point to the Toné River valley as a route of communication from inland Kantō to Tokyo Bay.
The two sites of Hirai and Iwatsubo sit on opposite sides of the Gunma plains but bothhave pottery/inﬂuence from northern Kantō. The Nozawa 野沢 site, located today innorthwestern Utsunomiya City, Tochigi, was a Jōmon site where Middle Yayoi jar burials
were discovered in the late 19th century. Nozawa I (MY) pottery was imported into the Hirai
site, and the pottery of the Iwatsubo site shows inﬂuences from Nozawa I. Hirai is close to
the back route to Nozawa, from Kiryū around the mountains to the west of Utsunomiya,
while Iwatsubo is located in a deep mountain valley that leads into Yamanashi Prefecture.
Route 462 to the west today leads into a tunnel just after the Iwatsubo cave site; but theold road, Jukkoku-tōge Kaidō, follows the river on the opposite site, where the shrine thatnow sites in the mouth of the cave could be seen from across the river. This route leads into
the Saku Basin in the Chikuma River valley; it is said the road derives its name (“10-koku
Pass”) from the need to carry many koku 石 (bushels, 1 koku=190 litres) of rice across themountains from Nagano to supply the mountain villages of western Gunma.
The Yamasōka-style pottery that appears at the Tatsu-iwa site is distributed acrosssouthern Tōhoku to the Japan Sea Coast. The site’s location at the northwest end of the Kantō
Plains, near mountain passes that lead north into Aizu Basin in Fukushima or northwest to© Japanese Archaeological Association

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THE JŌMON–YAYOI TRANSITION IN EASTERN JAPANthe Niigata coast, was perfect for taking advantage of these routes of communication.
Finally, it is important to note that many of the burials incorporate both transitional
jōkonmon pottery and Final Jōmon-lineage ceramic types, such as the perfect Final Jōmon
pedestaled bowl included with the Minami Ōtsuka burial, possibly to hold food offerings forthe dead. The Kantō region was not uninhabited when Western Yayoi traits began tricklingin. People continuing the Final Jōmon lifestyle were the very ones to adopt these traits. In
this sense it is ultimately counter-productive to treat transitional evidence in isolation fromits Final Jōmon social context. This overlap is confusing but essential in recognizing thetime-transgressive nature of the spread of Yayoi culture. In Gunma, Yayoi culture does notstart until Jōmon-like pottery and pottery inﬂuenced by Yayoi styles begin to occur together
in sites. And this may vary site by site.
In summary, the pottery and artifacts yielded by different secondary burial sites aroundthe edge of the northwest Kantō Plains suggest that the various communities in the
Early~mid-Middle Yayoi periods had distinct ties to different lands within the interaction
network continuing from the Final Jōmon grooved fusenmon-decorated pottery sphere.
Yayoinization began ﬁrst by the local Jōmon-lineage residents in the area adopting the new
methods of manufacturing pottery with jōkonmon-ﬁnish as developed in the Owari Bay
region. Many jōkonmon-ﬁnish pot bases are fabric-impressed, suggesting that the continental
craft of weaving cloth was also inﬂuencing lifestyles during the Jōmon–Yayoi transition.

2.3

The settlement evidence

It has been lamented over many decades that settlement sites were unknown for the people
who practiced these secondary jar burials. However, surveys of the literature on the ﬁnds
locations of Early Yayoi pottery (both jōkonmon and Ongagawa) suggest that they areclosely related to Final Jōmon site locations (Noto & Kojima 1989, 2006). In their list of 21
Kantō ﬁnd spots yielding imported Early Yayoi pottery, only four do not have Final Jōmon
sites in the vicinity (Noto & Kojima 1989, table 1). The cave at Iwatsubo was discovered
to have 4m of occupational ﬁll from earlier Jōmon hunter-gatherers; it is notable that theburials in the uppermost layer, accompanied by early Middle Yayoi pottery, were notsecondary jar burials but ﬂexed primary burials in the Jōmon tradition, indicating culturalcontact between remaining Jōmon-lineage populations in the area and incomers bringing
new pottery styles (as documented at the Iwatsubo site discussed above).
Final Jōmon settlement patterns are very different from the large Middle Jōmon sites
common to Chūbu and Kantō regions. Due to what is believed to have been a deteriorationin climate, populations dispersed and settlement numbers decrease dramatically (e.g. Shitara
2006, p. 145). Habu notes that “most of these sites are not associated with any pit-dwellings
or any other residential features, making any kind of analysis on settlement systems
difﬁcult” (Habu 2004, p. 259). Her conclusions are echoed more recently by KOBAYASHI© Japanese Archaeological Association

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Gina L. BARNES

Seiji, who states that the clothing, food, and housing of the Early Yayoi presence in the
Kantō region are still unclear, making this a “puzzling period” (Sakura-shi 2016, unpg.). The
Kanagawa researchers say that nothing but bonﬁre/ﬁreplace remains and sherd scatters havebeen recovered for sites with ceramics from Early Yayoi (I) and Middle Yayoi (II) phases(Kanagawa Kyōi 2012, p. 02). All these indicate a very transitory presence in the landscape.

2.3.1

Annaka City area

Already in the 1980s, the Annaka City area in Gunma became known for its transitional
settlement evidence (evaluated by Shitara 2006). House remains have been discovered at
the Shimebiki-hara sites in the late 1980s and in the last couple of years (Daikuhara 1987,
1988; Shitara 2006; Ojisan 2017). One rectangular, shallow house pit, dating to Early Yayoi(I-old), measured 5–6×6–7 m in size and had a hearth outlined with rocks on the house ﬂoor
(Daikuhara 1987; Shitara 2006). Two other house pits measured 3.5 m square and 20 cm
deep, and 3.2 m square and 6 cm deep. These were dated slightly later, to Yayoi I-new. One
house had only a burned area for a hearth, interpreted as evidence for evanescent occupation(Shitara 2006 citing Kobayashi 2004). Then at Shimebiki-hara II, one shallow pit-building
3.5 m/side was dated to the ﬁrst half of Middle Yayoi (Maebashi/Takasaki Kyōi 2013).
Several structures with just postholes but not house pits were also present.
Interestingly, ﬁnds at the Shimebiki-hara I site were concentrated only in Yayoi I-old
but not after that; at the adjacent site of Shimebiki-hara II, settlement began in Yayoi I-new
but then tailed off in Yayoi II (Shitara 2006, table 3). The abandonment of house sites isreminiscent of the stop-start Yayoi presence in Kanagawa. It can be surmised that notmuch investment was made in house-building: populations were thought to be sparse andoccupation transient. Surrounding a house(s) at Shimebiki-hara were 30 pits, some at least
thought to be burials, arranged in an arc (Figure 8); three large oval pits had considerable
pottery and stone tools, while other irregularly shaped ones were less provisioned.
At the Ōkami 大上 site (Inoue et al. 2003; Shitara 2006), a kilometre or so from
Shimebiki-hara, three house pits and a surface structure were excavated two decades ago(Inoue et al. 2003; Shitara 2006). The house pits measured 3.2×5 m and (2.6)×3 m, and were
1–15 cm deep. All had hearths on the ﬂoor, one surrounded by rocks in one pit-house. These
dated to Middle Yayoi II, slightly later than Shimebiki-hara.
About 7 km west of the above sites but still in Annaka City are the Uwahitomi terminal
Early Yayoi (I) secondary burial site and the Nakanoya-hara settlement where 15 pit-houses
and 10 pits were excavated in the early 2000s (Figure 9). The house pits were ca. 10 cm deep
and mostly oval or circular in shape; hearths were either burned ﬂoor areas or had stone
surrounds. These dated to the beginning of Middle Yayoi (II-old).
South-east of Annaka in Takasaki City are the Jinbo 神保 sites, positioned in the terraced
rolling uplands south of the Kabura River. The Jinbo Uematsu 神保植松 site yielded three© Japanese Archaeological Association

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THE JŌMON–YAYOI TRANSITION IN EASTERN JAPAN

Figure 8. Pit-house at Shimebiki site surrounded by an arc of secondary jar burials (after Shitara
2006, ﬁg. 2, modiﬁed by author)

Figure 9.

Ephemeral pit-houses at Nakanoya-hara (after Shitara 2006, ﬁg. 1, modiﬁed by author)© Japanese Archaeological Association

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Gina L. BARNES

pit-buildings dating to Middle Yayoi (II~early III), of which two measured ca. 4.2 m squarewith house pits 4 and 30 cm deep. They were equipped with ﬂoor hearths. Jinbo Fujitsuka
神保富士塚 nearby consisted of 77 pits dating to mid-Middle Yayoi (III). At least pits #705
and #706 are thought to be secondary burials as they occurred in close proximity to house#67. Shitara (2006) assumes these features form a household unit.

2.3.2

Agatsuma River area

For the past 25 years, excavations for the Yanba Dam construction have been conductedalong the Agatsuma River, one of the main passages west from Gunma to Nagano on thenorthern side of Mt Haruna, as discussed above. In approximately a 14 km stretch of narrowvalley, 66 sites ranging in date between 14,000 years ago and the Tenmei 3 (1783) lahar
were discovered (GARF 2018; cf. Soda 2019). A public presentation of the results describes
details for 33 of those sites, among which 24 had remains from the Yayoi period (Table 3).
Signiﬁcantly, the major Jōmon occupation of the area dated from Early to Late Jōmon,with only two long-occupied settlements, Yokokabe Nakamura 横壁中村 and Ishikawa-hara
石川原. The former carried on into the Kofun period while the latter was abandoned after
early Middle Yayoi. Several other sites (10) began with terminal Final Jōmon ceramics(Chiami and Kōri styles) leading into the Yayoi period, suggesting new occupationof this area, perhaps radiating out from the two existing Final Jōmon settlements.
Naganohara-Ipponmatsu is the only site established in the Final Jōmon to persist through to
the Kofun period. Again, there is a pattern of stop-start settlement occupation in this area,
which is also characteristic of the greater Gunma area for Yayoi IV, V, and Early Kofun(GARF 2018: table, pp. 8–9).
The Yayoi sites in the Yanba Dam area date from Middle through Late Yayoi. Theirdating distributions are listed in Table 3. It is important to note that Early Yayoi (YI) ﬁnds
(signiﬁed by Oki II style ceramics) are not identiﬁed in this work. Oki II style of ceramics,
however, are often found in conjunction with Final Jōmon pottery as discussed above.
Thus, it is possible that the Chiami and Kōri styles of terminal Final Jōmon, common in
the Agatsuma River drainage, may have been contemporaneous with Oki II ceramics foundelsewhere (especially in secondary jar burials).
The patterns of Yayoi occupation of this region of the Agatsuma River drainage indicatedin Table 3 are illuminating. Of the 24 Yayoi sites identiﬁed, 13 had prior Jōmon ceramics
but only three carried on into the Kofun Period. A full 14 Yayoi sites were abandoned at the
beginning of late Middle Yayoi, when irrigated rice agriculture was established in the region
as we shall see below. Ten of the sites were occupied during the whole of Middle Yayoi, but ofthese, six were abandoned thereafter. The remaining four Middle Yayoi sites continued into
Late Yayoi—while another site was reoccupied in Late Yayoi after a hiatus during the lateMY, and two new Late Yayoi sites were established at locales without previous occupation.
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THE JŌMON–YAYOI TRANSITION IN EASTERN JAPAN

Table 3. Dates of Final Jōmon to Kofun-period sites discovered in the Yanba Dam excavations
along the Agatsuma River (extracted from GARF 2018, pp. 8–9)
M-L-F Jōmon

terminal FJ

1½MY

2½MY

LY

Kofun

Yokokabe-Nakamura+

Angyō Chiami Kōri

+

+

+

+

Ishikawa-hara

+

ACK

+

Naganohara-Ipponmatsu

長野原一本松

CK

+

+

+

+

Datsume I

立馬

CK

+

+

+

Uehara IV

上原

CK

+

Kawarayu Katsunuma

川原湯川沼

CK

+

Shimohara

下原

K

+

Sai-no-kami

幸神

K

+

Ue-no-daira I

上ノ平

K

+

Yokokabe-Katsunuma

横壁勝沼

K

+

Sanpei I, II

三平

K

+

+

Nishikubo I

西久保

K

+

+

Osaka

尾坂

K

+

Kugudo久々戸

K+Yamane III

山根+

Uehara I

上原+

Niregi II

楡木

+

+

Niregi III

楡木

+

+

Hayashi Nakahara II

林中原

*

+

Datsume II

立馬

+

+

Datsume III

立馬

+

+

Shimoda下田+

Hayashi Nakahara I

林中原+Ishihata I Iwakage

石畑岩陰

+

+

+
+

+=Yayoi remains; *=pit-building; shading=unoccupied© Japanese Archaeological Association

55

Gina L. BARNES

Thus, the steep valley ﬂanks were heavily utilized in the terminal Final Jōmon and early
Middle Yayoi, but despite the arrival of irrigated rice agriculture in late Middle Yayoi, sites
were mainly abandoned thereafter. The few Late Yayoi settlements consisted of very longoccupied sites (since terminal Final Jōmon) and newly founded or reoccupied sites.
Only two Yayoi pit-buildings were discovered among the 24 Yayoi sites identiﬁed. One at
Hayashi Nakahara II site, on a river terrace, was built without prior occupation of the spot, andthe site lasted through Middle Yayoi. The second was at Datsume I site, on a hill promontory,
about .75 km distant from Hayashi Nakahara. This hilltop had been occupied from terminal
Final Jōmon, and there was an additional pit-building that was dated to the Chiami ceramicphase. Datsume I was occupied longer, from terminal Jōmon through Late Yayoi. Four othersites dating to early Middle Yayoi had unnamed features, but most of the ﬁnds at the Yayoi
sites were varying quantities of pottery. With this intensive excavation throughout the damsite area, the temporal spans and the natures of the sites are seemingly fairly representative.
We can conclude that the valley was heavily used during the Jōmon–Yayoi transition but
occupation was light thereafter, probably due to the lack of good land for paddy ﬁelds.

2.3.3

Comparatives

In 2005, Noto and Kojima published their survey of Ongagawa pottery ﬁnds (Early Yayoi) in
the Tōhoku region, including in their sample copies of Ongagawa vessels. They concluded
that such sites are located at spots close to small streams in hilly regions in the vicinity of
Final Jōmon sites—paralleling the data for Kantō. Although all sites were positioned where
rice could be grown, only six were positioned where rice agriculture could be expanded. The
authors conclude that the Ongagawa pottery ﬁnd spots were not indicative of site selection
based on agricultural potential but that they represented Final Jōmon communities which
received actual imported pottery or copies thereof. Most of such sites did not continue
beyond that stage: later sites where rice agriculture was thought to have been undertaken
are in different locations. Noto assumes that it was Jōmon-lineage people who graduallydeveloped rice agriculture in the Kantō and Tōhoku regions without migration, re-locating
their villages to take advantage of better agricultural potential. This view harks back to theoriginal hypothesis (in Akazawa 1981, 1982) that migration of Yayoi admixed people out of
Kyushu stopped at the Waist of Honshū.
Shitara (2006) reviews the evidence of Early Yayoi and early Middle Yayoi sites in bothGunma and Nagano Prefectures within the context of the wider ﬁnds of more than 100 Yayoi
secondary jar burial sites in the Kantō but few settlement remains. He concludes that thesesites support the hypothesis of ISHIKAWA Hideshi, who postulated that concentrated jar burialsites served a wider community of small hamlets whose residents congregated to deposit
their dead. That the house remains were shallow pits or surface structures, poorly equippedand insubstantial, stimulated him to consider not only a dispersed settlement pattern of a few© Japanese Archaeological Association

56

THE JŌMON–YAYOI TRANSITION IN EASTERN JAPANhouses each but their transience. This brought Ishikawa to propose a mobile subsistence system
incorporating swidden agriculture, a hypothesis which Shitara then tested, reviewed below.

2.4

The subsistence evidence

The Ongagawa style, which was initially utilized as documenting the spread of rice
agriculture, is now more accurately referred to as Itazuke-style pottery. Ongagawa-old
pottery (=Itazuke IIa) of the Early Yayoi (I) period has been discovered in Kanagawa
Prefecture separately from the Yayoi ‘package’ of material culture at the Hirasawa-Dōmei
平沢同明, Yagashira 矢頭, and Naka-yashiki 中屋敷 sites. Local ceramics belonged to the
Jōmon-lineage grooved fusenmon-decorated pottery. Naka-yashiki has yielded rice and bothmillets, while pottery from the Uemura site has rice-husk impressions (Kanagawa Kyōi
2012). These reﬂect the cropping of grains by people who were still following a Jōmon-style
broad-spectrum subsistence base (anra-teki seigyō ruikei 網羅的生業類型). The telltale
signs of the beginnings of Yayoinization—increase of jar numbers and enlargement ofstone hoes (Shitara 2014)—were not to be seen. These material items appear, along with theuse of ﬁgurine-pots, in the Kōri II ceramic phase under the inﬂuence of jōkonmon-ﬁnish
Suijinbira-style pottery from the Tōkai region in Itazuke II-c times (Shitara 2014, table
1; and Table 1 above). Thus, these sites clearly suggest Jōmon communities were starting
to adopt agricultural lifeways, as well as ceramic technology, incrementally within theformal Yayoi period. Table 4 lays out the current evidence for transitional crops in Gunma,
Kanagawa, Saitama, Yamanashi and Nagano Prefectures.
In Kanagawa, residential remains are not found for transitional sites, which are usually
located at the edge of uplands or in the deep mountains as at Uemura (cf. map I-1 in
Kanagawa Kyōi 2012), as attested above for both the Kantō in general and Tōhoku regions.
For both coastal Kanagawa and land-locked Gunma, traditional Jōmon subsistence practices
continued alongside casual cropping: deep-sea ﬁshing is seen to have continued into
Middle-Yayoi Kanagawa sites (Shitara 2006, p. 142), while Gunma has evidence of continued
hunting. Beads made of boar tusk were recovered from the Yahatsugi cave burials, dating tothe ﬁrst half of Middle Yayoi; and deer antlers, boar tusks, and burned animal bones wererecovered from three different burned-earth hearth areas in Cave #1 at Arigasayama. These
occupational areas within the cave mouth may have functioned as temporary hunting camps
during the second half of Middle Yayoi, after the introduction of irrigated rice.
Shitara and Takashe [sic] (2014) undertook an examination of grain impressions on thesurfaces and interior voids of Final Jomon to Early and Middle Yayoi ceramic bodies from
Gunma, Saitama, and Kanagawa Prefectures. For comparative purposes in Gunma, theychose Late–Final Jōmon sherds from the Nishi-arai 西新井 site in Maebashi City and sherds
from the Nakanoya-hara site in Annaka City, discussed above, dating to early Middle
Yayoi (1½MY). Whereas none of the Jōmon sherds had grain impressions or voids (unlike© Japanese Archaeological Association

57

Gina L. BARNES

Table 4. Finds of grain from Jōmon–Yayoi transition in Chūbu–Kantō prefectures (collated from
Shitara 2006; Shitara 2014; Shitara & Takashe 2014; Kanagawa Kyōi 2012; Odawara-shi Kyōi
2017; Fujio 2017; Shindō 2011; Ooki pers. comm. 16may’19)
Site (pref)

Site characters

Nishi-arai (G)西新井

Shimoppara (K)

下原

rice

awa Setaria

kibi Panicum

L-FJ

−

−

−

FJ

+

Period (Shitara&others)

FJ

+

+

Shimo-ōtsukimine (K)

下大槻峯

tFJ

+

+

Nakazato (K)

中里

tFJ

+

+

FJ/EY

1

+

+

FJ/EY

1

+

+

+

+

(Nagano)(Saitama)(Kanagawa)
Jōshikimen (S)

上敷免

FJ/EY

Oshide

押出EYmid-I**

Kōri (N)氷

EYI-new

Nakayashiki (K) #9 pit

中屋敷[4c BC]{tYI}

393

Uemura (K)

上村

{tYI}

+

Minami Ōtsuka (G)南大塚[[YI Ongagawa]]+

Kami-nakamaru (Y)

上中丸

tEY

+

Takizawa (Y)

滝沢

2½EY

+

Oki II (G)*沖2½EY–bMY

1

8

Iida B (Y)

飯田

bMY

+

+

Nakanoya-hara (G)*

中野谷原

1½MY

3
3

17
4

25
9

+
+

+

ca. 2000

26+
13

Nakazato-hara (G)

中里原

mMY

+

+

Kannon-mae (G)*

観音前

mMY

+

+

Shagūji-hara (G)

社宮寺原

mMY

Iida B (Y)

飯田

mMY

+

+

Sakaikubo (N)

境窪

mMY

+

+

+

Gotanda (N)

五反田

mMY

+

+

+

Ōtsuka (N)

大塚

mMY~

+

+

Agata-machi (N)

県町‘2½MY’

Takasaki Keibajō (G)

高崎競馬場[[2½MY]]+++

Kurokawa Kozuka (G)黒川小塚“2½MY”+++++

G=Gunma (shaded), K=Kanagawa, N=Nagano, S=Saitama, Y=Yamanashi; period abbreviations as above; dates from
Shitara publications, and Kanagawa Kȳoi 2012 and others; absolute grain numbers=impression/void counts* sites listed in Table 2 as having secondary jar burials{ } dates from Kanagawa Kyōi 2012** data on Oshide from Noto & Kojima 1989, p. 19[ ] date by Ishikawa via Fujio 2017; [[ ]] date by Ooki pers. comm.
‘ ’ date from Nagano-shi Kyōi; “ ” date by Hirosaki University (Tomioka City 2018)© Japanese Archaeological Association

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THE JŌMON–YAYOI TRANSITION IN EASTERN JAPAN

sherds from the Uemura site in Kanagawa), the Nakanoya-hara sherds had an abundance ofawa 粟 (foxtail millet, Setaria Italica) impressions/voids (17), and kibi 黍 (common millet,
Panicum miliaceum) impressions/voids (25) as opposed to rice (Oryza sativa) (3); also inevidence were Perilla (1) and beans (1). Sites in Kanagawa and Saitama that straddled the
Final Jōmon/Early Yayoi divide had far fewer ﬁnds as might be expected from their earlier
dating, but they still produced either kibi or awa, and only one rice husk impression. The
analysts report both millet types occurring on Kōri I-new sherds (Final Jōmon) in thecentral highlands, equivalent to Early Yayoi I-middle (cf. Table 1 above); and they postulate
their spread thereafter.
Baba and Endo (2017) have investigated this problem further, testing grain/seed
impressions/voids in different types of ceramics and collating data from central Japan.
As of their publication, there were no rice impressions/voids in the Final Jōmon grooved
fusenmon-decorated pottery in the central highlands (Chūbu), but both rice and millet
occurred together at most sites from the mid-Middle to late-Middle Yayoi (Kuribayashistyle) and Late Yayoi (Hakoshimizu-style) of the Chikuma River valley in Nagano
Prefecture. Baba (2018) dates Kuribayashi-style pottery to 225 BC–AD 0.
Obviously, there are problems with sampling sizes and site preservation biases, but it
is fairly clear from even these meagre but very welcome data that grains arrived in Kantō
at the same time as jōkonmon pottery inﬂuence from the central highlands—except for in
Kanagawa where the crops seem even to precede jōkonmon. Iwabitsuyama-style pottery
has not yet been found in conjunction with rice (S. Ooki, pers. comm. 16may’19), but at theOshide site in Gunma, dating one stage earlier than Iwabitsuyama, one of the rare Ongagawa
pots had an impression of rice still in its husk. Sparse early evidence gives way to ﬁnds ofmodicums of rice in early Middle Yayoi (1½MY). This is the phase of Jinbo Fujitsuka-stylepottery in Gunma, provisionally dated to 2–1c BC (S. Ooki, pers. comm. 16may’19); theseceramics are still decorated with Jōmon motifs and jōkonmon ﬁnish.
By mid-Middle Yayoi (mMY), at least two of the three grains (rice, awa, kibi) wererecovered from sites in Gunma, Yamanashi, and Nagano. The millets, beans, and soybeans
are all dry-ﬁeld crops, so they could be grown without irrigation. But very few dry-ﬁelds
are known archaeologically. Ridged garden features are known from Early Yayoi sites inFukuoka Prefecture (Kyushu) and Mie Prefecture (just west of the Waist of Honshu) (Shitara
2014, p. 462). In Gunma, with its multiple layers of tephra cover, ridge-and-furrow occur at
the Arima site under Asama-C tephra, thus earlier than the late 3rd century AD (Sakaguchi2010). Two different forms of ridged ﬁelds are known from the Kofun Period onwards inGunma, and evidence of dry-ﬁelds is known throughout western Japan for the early historicand medieval periods (e.g. Kuwahata 2019; Noto & Barnes 2019). It is a matter of time formore information to be forthcoming on non-rice agriculture.
Though it appears from Table 4 that dry-ﬁeld farming was initially more easily adopted© Japanese Archaeological Association

59Gina L. BARNES

than rice agriculture during the Jōmon-Yayoi transition in the Kantō, the question whether
swidden techniques were used must be delayed yet again for solving later. The case studyof the Kumakura 熊倉 site is a good example of the types of problems encountered indetermining swidden agriculture (see Noto & Barnes 2019). Shitara (2014, p. 462) suggeststhat the concentration on rice and Setaria millet (awa) rather than Panicum millet (kibi)
at the coastal Nakayashiki site in Kanagawa was determined by problems in uplandfertility—as both rice and Setaria are moist-area crops while Panicum is suited to more arid
regimes. His evaluation may well be appropriate for the Kantō region where uplands arehost to tephrogenic andosols that pose great problems for farming (see Barnes 2019; Noto
& Barnes 2019). If skeletal material was tested for carbon isotope distribution, we might see
a differential in individual eating habits such as at the Early Neolithic site of Jiahu on the
China Mainland where one individual was found to be a C4 millet eater among a communityof C3 rice eaters (Hu et al. 2006).
From excavations in Kanagawa and Gunma Prefectures, we now know that irrigatedpaddy-ﬁeld agriculture was instigated in mid-Middle Yayoi in north-western and southwestern Kantō. Kanagawa is an interesting case study in this regard: multiple cases of
migrants establishing rice agriculture through the Middle and Late Yayoi period are known,
but the sites established did not necessarily continue. The Nakazato 中里 site, establishedby migrants from the west in the second half of Yayoi III (ca. 250 cal. BC), survived only
about a century (Kanagawa Kyōi 2012; Odawara-shi Kyōi 2017). Agricultural villages again
ﬂourished in the latter half of Middle Yayoi (IV) but then again disappeared. Finally in
Late Yayoi (V), Yayoi culture was reintroduced into Kanagawa, but even then, some sites
like Kanzaki were occupied only temporarily, and many sites established thereafter did
not survive into the Kofun Period (Kanagawa 2012, table V-10). Having the technology
did not necessarily ensure survival of the village; other factors may have been at work,as Kanagawa researchers wonder if there was a natural disaster which would account forthese disappearances. Research on climate variations, assessed via δ18O in tree rings, may
answer that question: “in the Late Yayoi…the magnitude of variation in precipitation was
enlarged in the period of multi-decades, with the resulting prolonged ﬂooding or drought
accompanied by severe societal reactions” (Nakatsuka 2015, p. 30).

3.

Late Middle Yayoi (2½III–IV) in north-west Kantō

The introduction of full irrigated rice agriculture into Gunma occurred in the second halfof Middle Yayoi (mIII–IV). At least two sites (Kurokawa Kozuka 黒川小塚 and Takatsuki
Keibajō 高崎競馬場, Table 4) have yielded substantial carbonized rice remains. According
to a fairly recent assessment (Maebashi/Takasaki Kyōi 2013, unpg., my translation), thedirection of introduction was from Nagano Prefecture:© Japanese Archaeological Association

60THE JŌMON–YAYOI TRANSITION IN EASTERN JAPANGroups using Kuribayashi-style pottery—with a new combed design
characteristic of northern Nagano Prefecture—arrived into Gunma in the
mid-Yayoi period. These groups were unrelated to the local Jōmon-lineage
cultures. Instead, they came from mature societies where new elements
such as wood cofﬁn burials and the production and distribution of Yayoitype polished stone tools were apparent. Bronze ritual usage as in Western
Yayoi is also noted. These migrants into Gunma possessed an advanced
agricultural technology, and they established wet-rice ﬁelds in the heretofore
unused terraces and stream valleys.
Recent excavations in Nagano at the Agata-machi 県町 site, however, have produced a
Kurobayashi jar of awa (Setaria) that date to 46 BC–AD 59 (95.4%, 2σ) (Nagano-shi Kyōi
2018, p. 32). This suggests rice had not completely supplanted the traditional dry-farming of
millets by this date.
Ceramics in the style of the Kuribayashi 栗林 site in Nagano were ﬁrst discovered at the
Tatsumichō 竜見町 site in Gunma and named Tatsumichō-style pottery. This style was dated
from the late 3rd century to 0 AD (Nagano-shi Kyōi 2018). These Nagano-derived ceramics
are distinctive in having combed designs applied clockwise without using a turntable; thesetechniques differ from Tōkai and Kinai combed pottery even though the designs are thesame (Ooki 2001). Sites yielding such comb-pattern ceramics are focussed around the footof Mt Haruna; sites across the Toné River to the east at the foot of Mt Akagi yield a very
different ceramic set inﬂuenced not by pottery from Nagano but from South Kantō, East
Kantō and Southern Tōhoku (Ooki 2001). The Toné River that runs through the centre ofGunma Prefecture thus seems to form a cultural boundary within Gunma from this timeup until the beginning of the Kofun period, as proposed by Fujio (2017). In Late Yayoi (V),comb-pattern pottery spreads south to Yamanashi and Kanagawa Prefectures (Ooki 2001).
Tatsumichō-style ceramics were thought to have developed under the inﬂuence ofKuribayashi-style pottery from the Chikuma River region in Nagano Prefecture (Baba2008), parallel to Kitajima-style ceramics in Saitama Prefecture (see Table 1 above).
However, some researchers now consider Tatsumichō-style ceramics as an outdated name,preferring to consider them as a regional variety of Kuribayashi-style itself (Ooki 2001, p.
8). Baba has tracked the routes of inﬂuence of successive stages of Kuribayashi-style pottery
into Gunma: the earlier Kuribayashi (1+2-old) transmitted around Mt Kusatsu Shirane in
Yayoi III and coming into the Gunma basin via the Agatsuma River north of Mt Haruna(Figure 10). Then at the beginning of Yayoi IV, Kuribayashi 2-new pottery inﬂuence travels
farther upstream to the Saku Basin on the Chikuma River before entering Gunma, coming
in south of Mt Haruna (Figure 11).
It is notable that the Kuribayashi styles developed in northern Nagano near the Japan Sea© Japanese Archaeological Association

61

Gina L. BARNES

Figure 10. The route of introduction of older Kuribayashi-style pottery from Nagano into Gunma
in Middle Yayoi (III) (after Baba 2008, ﬁg. 22, modiﬁed by author)

coast and thereafter moved south upstream along the Chikuma River to the Saku basin. Thisis opposite the movement proposed by Ooki for the transmission of jōkonmon techniquesfrom the Paciﬁc seaboard up the Tenryū River into Nagano. The path of the Yayoi ‘package’transmission to northern Nagano is not yet known, but a coastal dispersal seems likely fromthe geographical evidence.
As indicated above, it was not only the ceramics that changed, from jōkonmon to
Kuribayashi-style; other elements of material culture were also new. A comparison withthe earlier transitional cultural elements associated with Iwabitsuyama and Jinbo Fujitsukastyle ceramics (Table 5) suggests rapid and thorough cultural transformation accompanying
Kuribayashi-style ceramics—to the extent that this must have been the introduction of
the Yayoi package by migrants from Nagano. Not all Gunma archaeologists agree withthis assessment, but it is difﬁcult to imagine that the local post-Jōmon populace, even if
sprinkled with a few migrants from Tōkai, were able to single-handedly adopt the western
Yayoi lifestyle wholesale in such a short period with no outside help. I refer to this in
Table 5 as a cultural replacement. However, it is notable that the initial stages of irrigatedrice agriculture might have been paralleled for a short while by continuation of mountainhunting. At Arigasayama Cave #1, three occupational areas marked by burned earth and© Japanese Archaeological Association

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THE JŌMON–YAYOI TRANSITION IN EASTERN JAPAN

Figure 11. The route of introduction of newer Kuribayashi-style pottery from Nagano into Gunma
at the beginning of late Middle Yayoi (IV) (after Baba 2008, ﬁg. 23, modiﬁed by author)

Table 5. Comparison of jōkonmon-phase pottery (transitional phases) with Kuribayashi phase in
Gunma (Gunma Maibun 2019); c=century
Pottery/
Attributes

Iwabitsuyama

Jinbo Fujitsuka

Kuribayashi (Tatsumichō)

end Early–1½ Middle
Yayoi (II) ca. 5–3c BC

1½ Middle Yayoi (III)ca. 3–1c BC

2½ Middle Yayoi (IV)ca. 1c BC–AD 1c

pott surface

jōkonmonjōkonmonsmoothpott shapes

jars, pots, cylindricalbottles, bowls+lids

pott dec

zoned cord-marking,linked triangles

deep incised patterns
zoned cord-marking

cultural
replacement+pedestals, perforated
vessels=steamers?
red slip; incised wave, zig-zag,parallel lines

stone tools

large ﬂaked hoes

settlement

ephemeraltransitory

moatedpolished axes

burialsecondarysecondarymoated precincts*; cobbleﬂoored, board-walled graves* small moated and mounded family(?) burial grounds widely used in the Kinai area of western Japan; ﬁrst discovered in the
Kantō region in 1984, but many identiﬁed thereafter have been reassessed as moats around building structures (Hosono 2019).
© Japanese Archaeological Association

63

Gina L. BARNES

hearth(s) accompanied by Tatsumichō- (late Kurabayashi-) style pottery yielded burned
deer and boar bones along with a polished stone axe—part of the Yayoi package tool kit.
The full explication of Tatsumichō-phase Yayoi occupation in Gunma has not yet beensynthesized, but most elements of the Yayoi package are known piecemeal from different
sites. Direct evidence of paddy ﬁelds dating to late Middle Yayoi in Gunma is rare. Paddies
were excavated at the Middle Yayoi Ide 井出 site cluster in 2018 (not yet published), andfootprints in mud next to a river at Nakagawa 中川 site are interpreted as made in riceplanting preparations (Takasaki/Maebashi Kyōi 2013). More recent excavations (not yet
published) at the Takasaki Keibajō site yielded irrigation canals but not yet paddy ﬁelds.
However, many sites yielding Tatsumichō-style pottery have produced other elements ofwestern Yayoi culture: polished stone axes (superseding the large ﬂaked hoes of the Jinbo
Fujitsuka ceramic phase), a village moat at Takasaki Keibajō site, and a new type of burial
known from Nagano consisting of a board-walled bottomless structure placed on a cobble
bed (礫床墓 rekijōbo). With the importation of this new burial style and moated precinct
burials, secondary jar burials ceased in late Middle Yayoi (Hosoda 2019).

4. Discussion
When Yayoi farmers were colonizing lowlands in western Japan to practice wet-rice
farming, peoples in the eastern and north-eastern regions of Japan still followed Jōmon
lifestyles. There is a divergence of opinion in the research literature as to how to deal withthese differences, and the dates offered by different authors are often in conﬂict:• FUJIO Shin’ichiro maintains a Yayoi period beginning from the late 10th century BC that
contains several different cultures, including phases of continuing Jōmon cultures—shorter in the west and longer in the east—until irrigated-rice agriculture is adopted. The
irrigated-rice cultures are designated as continental-style Yayoi A in the west and Yayoi
B in the east, with northern Tōhoku and Hokkaidō partitioned into Zoku/Epi-Jōmon.
However, most important for us here is that he designates a special phase of Jōmonlineage Yayoi culture ( jōmon-kei yayoi bunka 縄文系弥生文化) for the Chūbu and Kantō
regions between 600 and 300 BC, the time period examined in detail above.
• MIYAMOTO Kazuo deﬁnes the Yayoi period by the development of Itazuke-style pottery
and consolidation of the Yayoi package. This concurs with the original deﬁnition of Yayoi
by ceramic style, though the timing has been pushed back from 300 BC to 600–500 BC.
• SHITARA Hiromi, on the other hand, has deﬁned the period by the type of subsistence.
He distinguishes grain-growing farmers (in Fujio’s ‘Jōmon-lineage Yayoi culture’)
from Jōmon horticulturalists preceding them on the one hand, and from irrigated-rice
agriculturists who succeed them (Fujio’s ‘Yayoi B culture’) on the other hand. Shitaraemphasizes the multiplicity of cultures, and particularly, different kinds of agriculture© Japanese Archaeological Association

64

THE JŌMON–YAYOI TRANSITION IN EASTERN JAPAN(Shitara 2019).
Despite my previous attempts at proposing an overlap such as Shitara’s between the Jōmon
and Yayoi periods, it seems more appropriate to treat the Yayoi period like Fujio does: as atemporal container in which all kinds of cultures were co-existing in different areas. The
challenge of this perspective is to divorce ourselves from the idea that Yayoi=irrigated rice
agriculture. It is important to note here the shift in terminology from ‘wet-rice’ to ‘irrigatedrice’ agriculture. Because rice can be grown in marshlands without irrigation, the formal
construction of paddy-ﬁelds and irrigation canals becomes an important aspect of deﬁning
Fujio’s Yayoi A & B cultures as opposed to growing rice in marshes or even on dry land.
We also now have several terms for describing the movements of people, but these are
difﬁcult to translate into English. It has long been accepted that prehistoric peoples coming
into Japan from the continent are known as toraijin 渡来人; once they intermarried withthe resident Jōmon people in Kyushu, they are known as Yayoi people (yayoijin 弥生人).
However, the continental genetic component decreased with distance from Kyushu, as
more Jōmon residents (zairaijin 在来人) were converted to the Yayoi lifestyle and became
therefore, by deﬁnition, Yayoi people by their cultural afﬁliation. And it was possible forzairaijin (Jōmon-lineage people) to become farmers without immigrant input. The problem
comes when such converted farmers migrate beyond their local areas (zaichi 在地), as did
the jōkonmon pottery users migrating eastwards from the Tōkai region. These new farmers
may have been Jōmon-lineage people but were farmers belonging to Fujio’s Jōmon-lineage
Yayoi culture; when they moved into areas of continuing Jōmon lifestyles, the genetic
compositions of these migrant groups (gairai-kei shūdan 外来系集団) would have been
similar. Thus, we must be careful to distinguish between immigrants from the continent,
and Yayoi migrants whatever their genetic make-up (admixed or Jōmon-lineage).
Fujio’s category of “Jōmon-lineage Yayoi Culture” describes perfectly the situation in
the central mountains and Kantō Plains regions, where cultivation of a variety of crops,
including rice, preceded the instituting of irrigated-rice agriculture in Late Yayoi. This
culture, however, was short-lived, lasting from Yayoi I to mid-Yayoi III (600–300 BC).
It began with the intrusion of Tōkai pottery (Suijinbira-style) and the adoption of the
jōkonmon scraped ﬁnish to form the local Iwabitsuyama-style pottery. It is assumed that thegrains—rice and millets (Table 4)—found associated with pottery in this culture ﬁltered inwith the jōkonmon manufacturing technique. The pottery mainly occurs in secondary jar
burials, which are not just conﬁned to high altitude sites but occur at all altitudes on several
different landform types throughout the period (Table 2). Habitation sites of the transitional
period are beginning to be discovered, but they prove to be both spatially and temporally
ephemeral, suggesting a settlement pattern that may be more mobile than the large villages
characteristic of continental-style Yayoi A culture. It is not yet known where and how thefarming of the grains took place, or whether swidden techniques were used to clear uplands© Japanese Archaeological Association

65Gina L. BARNES

for cultivation.
Because of the ephemeral nature of terminal Final Jōmon occupation in the Kantō, it is
not possible to respond to Mizoguchi’s (2019) hypothesis that cropping was adopted there by
Jōmon-lineage peoples because of previous horticultural experience. However, the growingof millet was a spring to autumn activity, and the labour demands would not have interferredwith winter hunting, as Mizoguchi surmises.

5.

Summary

Research has revealed that the transition from Jōmon to Yayoi subsistence patterns
was a relatively slow and incremental process that did not progress in waves across thelandscape but made inroads here and there following previous cultural connections. The
ﬁrst manifestations of the transition in the Tōkai region was a change in ceramic styles,
with new shapes being adopted from western Yayoi and a localized surface-ﬁnishingtechnology ( jōkonmon) developed among surviving Jōmon communities in eastern Japan.
The ceramic assemblages of the transitional sites consist of local Final Jōmon-type pottery
occurring together with some Ongagawa vessels from Kyushu (or their copies), imported
vessels from the Tōkai region, and the new localized jōkonmon-ﬁnshed products. It is
assumed that there was a little migration in this phase, but broad networking within thecontinuing Final Jōmon social structure brought in new ideas and technologies. Resultsof seed-impression identiﬁcations (both on ceramic surfaces and in voids in the ceramicbody) indicate that farming accompanied the diffusion of the new formation technology
and shape-types; dry-ﬁeld millets are prominent in this phase, but the presence of some ricesuggests it was grown in either dry-ﬁelds or natural wetlands. The transitional phases are
known archaeologically in the Kantō region by ceramics occurring in secondary jar burials,
but short-term occupational remains excavated since the turn of the millennium suggest atransitory settlement system accompanying these jar burials.
This transitional period came to an end with the introduction of full-ﬂedged irrigated-rice
technology in late Middle Yayoi (mid-YIII to YIV). Many (but not all) Gunma archaeologists
conceive of this introduction in the form of migration of peoples from the west, speciﬁcallyfrom Nagano Prefecture, bringing in a speciﬁc style of pottery (Kuribayashi-style) which
is localized in Gunma as the Tatsumichō-style. This eventually replaces the transitional
ceramics (at that point, Jinbo Fujitsuka-style), but some jōkonmon-ﬁnished pieces andeven Late Final Jōmon-lineage pots are found with Tatsumichō-style ceramics; thesecircumstances suggest a period of co-existence and acculturation. Paddy ﬁelds from thistime are beginning to be excavated in Gunma, and many sites with Tatsumichō-stylepottery are known. However, the pattern of occupation is not regular, with many sites
abandoned early and others instituted quite late, as particularly evident from the Yanba Dam© Japanese Archaeological Association

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excavations (Table 3).
The routing of the diffusion of irrigated-rice agriculture shown in Figure 2 is also inneed of revision. Wet-rice technology was introduced into Gunma from the west via the
Chikuma River valley in Nagano Prefecture; in its earliest guise, it did not enter along thehistoric Tōsandō route from Aichi Prefecture to Mt Asama, nor did it diffuse northwards
from the Tokyo Bay region. Kuribayashi-style pottery itself, centred in the Chikuma Rivervalley, is thought to have developed under the inﬂuence of Komatsu-style pottery along the
Hokuriku coast, which had previously partaken of decorative patterns in Tango (northern
Kyoto Prefecture) (Baba 2008). These connections strongly suggest a coastal diffusion ofrice agriculture along the Japan Sea coast, with its inﬂuences eventually carried into Gunma
from the northwest via the Chikuma River.
In Late Yayoi (V), moated villages on the western Yayoi-A pattern became standard,
and the area can be considered to belong to Fujio’s Yayoi-B cultural sphere. This entailed
instigation of the Yayoi-A ‘package’ but without ritual bronze use. It is assumed, but not
yet proven through the study of plant remains or dietary isotopes, that rice was the basic
carbohydrate staple, unlike the millet-based subsistence pattern pictured in Figure 1.
Thus, however much millet formed an important part of the diet further north in Honshū,
the Gunma region is now acknowledged to have participated in the “rice orientation”
subsistence pattern of Western Yayoi from the late Middle Yayoi period onwards.
It is unfortunate that so few AMS dates are available for the sequences above, many ofwhich might seem to have contradictory dates based on pottery types at this point. Moreover,the pottery chronologies are still in ﬂux, so that the outline provided here is a work inprogress, and some details have been omitted (e.g. discussion of the four Kuribayashi phases
and their relationships to the Gunma ﬁnds). We look forward to learning of reﬁnements andelaborations of these data in future.

Acknowledgements
Many thanks are due to the organizers of the Japanese Archaeological Association (JAA)
and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) for inviting me to present in the
Plenary Session at the Shizuoka JAA meetings on October 20, 2018. Most of the data werecollected speciﬁcally for that presentation during a two-month stay in Maebashi, and I am
deeply grateful to my Gunma colleagues, especially NOTO Takeshi whose own research on
the secondary jar burial cave sites incited my interest. FUJIO Shin’ichirō at Rekihaku was kindenough to vet the manuscript, and many points were further clariﬁed through conversations
with OOKI Shinichirou at Gunma Maibun and SHITARA Hiromi at Tokyo University. I am deeply
grateful to them all, but any remaining misunderstandings and mistakes are, alas, my own.

© Japanese Archaeological Association

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THE JŌMON–YAYOI TRANSITION IN EASTERN JAPANSite Appendix: Yayoi sites from terminal Early Yayoi (I) to
mid-Middle Yayoi (mid-III) in Gunma
Those sites appearing on the Yayoi Secondary Burial signboard in the Gunma Prefectural
Museum (Gunma-ken n.d.) are keyed by number (#) to the signboard (text not included
here). Details are incomplete. 1½=ﬁrst half of…, 2½=second half of…; tEY=terminal
Early Yayoi, bMY=beginning Middle Yayoi; EY(I), MY(II, III, IV); ABS=artefact-bearing
stratum (包含層 hōgansō)=cultural layer.
• ARIGASAYAMA CAVE 有笠山洞窟 (#2); 吾妻郡中之条町上沢渡字牧場 Agatsuma-gun,Nakanojō, Kamisawatari, Makiba, 884 m msl (GARF 2009a; Agatsuma-cho 2004: 11;
GARF 1999: 15)
The whole of Mt Arigasa is known as a Yayoi burial ground mostly for Middle Yayoi
remains. Two caves at Arigasayama yielded Yayoi pottery, successively from the ﬁrst halfof Middle Yayoi (Cave 2, discovered in 1953) then second half of Middle Yayoi (Cave1, excavated in 1996). The remains from Cave 1 are preserved at Gunma University,
while those from Cave 2 are split between Nakanojō Township Kyōdō Shiryōkan and thePrefectural Museum.
Cave 2 mouth was 1.0 m high, .8m wide, and the cave was 1.8 m deep and 1.5 m high.
The remains, dating to the 1½ of Yayoi, comprised a burial with two personal ornaments;
the shell arc-pendant suggests long-distance trade, but the pumice bead was probably
local. The contents strongly resemble Yatsuhagi. In 1990, further ﬁnds were made in
Cave 2: pot sherds, and pendants made of perforated human ﬁngerbones.
The mouth of Cave 1, a rock shelter, was 20 m across, the interior measured 12 m deep
and 15 m high; it was large enough to have three areas with occupation remains including
burned earth, stone tools (polished axe), a hearth, and burned deer and boar bones. Theselater ﬁnds, dating to the 2½ of Middle Yayoi (Tatsumichō) attest to the continuationof hunting practices from the Early Yayoi, and we may presume this cave may havefunctioned as a temporary hunting campsite.
• ATSUBO 安坪遺跡;高崎市吉井町長根 Takasaki-shi, Yoshii-chō, Nagane, 127 m msl(Maebashi/Takasaki Kyōi 2013)
Cluster of pits dating to mid-MY.
• HIRAI 平井遺跡; 桐生市平井 Kiryū-shi, Hirai, 180 m msl (GARF 1989: 324; GARF n.d.)
Two Middle Yayoi pots said to have been washed out of a burial pit 65×40×45 cm deepat the foot of a hill range during heavy rain. One was a cylindrical vessel with terminal
Jomon decoration, the other a pot of Middle Yayoi Nozawa I-style, proving that there was© Japanese Archaeological Association73Gina L. BARNES

overlap between continuing Jomon and Yayoi.
• ITOI MIYAMAE 糸井宮前; 利根郡昭和村糸井大貫原 Toné-gun, Shōwa-mura, Itoi,Ōnuki-hara (Noto & Kojima 1989)
Final Jōmon site Miya-no-mae; ABS with Ongagawa I-new sherds.
• IWABITSUYAMA 岩櫃山遺跡群 (#1); 吾妻郡東吾妻町原町 Agatsuma-gun, Higashi
Agatsuma-cho, Haramachi, 775 m msl (Sugihara 1967; Watanabe 1986; Iijima et al. 1986:
55; Agatsuma-cho 2004: 2; Anon. 2005: 4; GARF n.d.)
Designated a Township Important Cultural Property in 2004, Iwabitsuyama site isa rugged collection of andesite outcrops. One rock shelter within, called Takanosu 鷹ノ巣 (Eagles’ nest), was excavated by SUGIHARA Sōsuke in 1939. The shelter ﬂoor was
triangular in shape, covering ca. 100 m2, and sloped 20° back to front. It yielded 21 pots,
19 of which were clustered into three groupings (A, B, C) toward the front of the shelter;

Mt Iwabitsu in Gunma Prefecture (courtesy of Soda Tsutomu)© Japanese Archaeological Association

74THE JŌMON–YAYOI TRANSITION IN EASTERN JAPANthe pots contained human bones. All these materials are preserved at the Meiji University
Museum These remains are dated over the terminal Early—beginning Middle Yayoi
divide, and the style of pottery from Takanosu (Iwabitsuyama-style) is representative of
the beginning of Middle Yayoi in the north Kantō region (GARF n.d.: 2).
Watanabe notes that one jar from Group B is comparable to Maruko-style pottery fromTōkai (1986: 121); while Shitara (2006: table 1) aligns the materials with Suijinbira-stylepottery from Tōkai and puts it later than Dōyama in Kanagawa. In the Mt Iwabitsu sites,
the pottery consists of a majority of local pottery (Iwabitsuyama-style) decorated withlinked-triangle (sankaku renkeimon) design and jōkonmon ﬁnish as well as some zoned
cord-marked wares of Final Jōmon style.
A second rock shelter on Iwabitsuyama called Makuiwa 幕岩, situated just below
Takanosu, yielded the same types of materials: bone fragments and Iwabitsuyama-stylepottery, in addition to Final Jōmon Chiami-type and Early Jōmon Moroiso-type pottery.
• IWATSUBO CAVE 岩津保洞窟 aka 岩津保観音堂 Iwatsubo Kan’ondō; 多野郡神流町青梨
Tano-gun, Kanna, Aonashi, 394 m msl [located at beginning of bridge just before tunnel
on Rt 426 (Jukkoku-tōge Kaido)] (Iijima et al. 1986: 55; Kaifu 1992; Matsumura 2001;
GARF 1989: 39; 2009b)
Iwatsubo Cave, eroded into a quartzite cliff, measures 8m wide, 16 m deep, and 7m
high; it was investigated between 1980 and 1982. The cave stratigraphy built up from
Initial through Final Jōmon and Middle Yayoi. The uppermost layer, dating to the ﬁrst
half of Middle Yayoi, contained four pits yielding six ﬂexed burials in the Jōmon style,ranging from infants to adults. Three individuals (2 females, 1 infant) were buried
together in one pit; these had 20 shell bracelets and 3 large stones placed on them, withantlers and fabric-impressed-base pottery set on top of the stones and then all burned.
The excavators note that inﬂuences were apparent from the north (Nozawa I-stylepottery), from the west (tooth extraction in the Tōkai region), and the south (shellbracelets)—indicating widespread contacts and interaction.
Two of the adults were females whose bone morphology indicates they are of Jōmon
lineage though the individuals were slightly taller and more robust long bones than the
Jōmon sample (Kaifu 1992). This determination was conﬁrmed by dental morphology(Matsumura 2001).
• JINBO UEMATSU 神保植松遺跡 (#6) aka Inariyama site 稲荷山遺跡; 高崎市吉井町神保 Takasaki-shi, Yoshii, 170 m msl (GARF 1989: 193, 1997; Shitara 2006; Iseki Walker
2007-18a; Maebashi/Takasaki Kyōi 2013)
Located on a riverine terrace and excavated during expressway construction between
1987 and 1989, this site has yielded remains from the Jōmon through medieval periods.
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Gina L. BARNES

Yayoi remains included 3 pit-buildings, 2 at ca. 4.2 m square, ranging from 4 to 30 cm
deep. They were equipped with ﬂoor hearths. The remains dated to Middle Yayoi II~earlyIII. [Jinbo Fujitsuka site reported under Jinbo Uematsu entry in GARF 1989]• JINBO FUJITSUKA 神保富士塚遺跡; 高崎市吉井町神保字富士塚 577 Takasaki-shi,
Yoshii, Jinbo, Fujizuka 577, 170 m msl (Ono 1993; Ishikawa 2003; Shitara 2006; Maebashi/
Takasaki Kyōi 2013)
Adjoining Jinbo Uematsu site, 77 pits were found dating to mid-Middle Yayoi (phaseIII); the pits seemed to be arranged in a ring. Some of them contained bowls, cooking
pots, and jars together with many other sherds and stone tools; these are not thought to beburials. At least pits #705 and 706 are thought to be secondary burials.
• KAMIGO 上郷遺跡; 藤岡市緑埜郡上郷 Fujioka-shi, Midono-gun, Kamigo (Shitara 2006:
ﬁg. 9#1)
MYII-old (early Oki-type) sherds from tip of hill overlooking upland stream.
• KAMI-NO-KUBO/KAMIKUBO 上(ノ)久保 (#5) (Yamazaki 1959; Watanabe 1986;
GARF 1989: 91; Iseki Walker 2007-18b; Maebashi/Takasaki Kyōi 2013). 高崎市倉渕町権田 Takasaki-shi, Kurabuchi-chō, Gonda, 590 m msl
Situated on a tongue of riverine terrace, this site was excavated in 1954. 3 jars and 3
cooking pots were found standing upright, dating to 2½ Early Yayoi. Two of the jars borejōkonmon patterns and are considered to be Sujinbiru-style jars from the Tōkai region.
The third jar was Ongagawa-style. The cooking pots also bore either/or/or both jōkonmon
with local linked-triangle-designs. These are one phase earlier than Iwabitsuyama andrepresent the earliest phase of inﬂuence from the west. Also present was a ﬂaked hoe anda ﬂat stone serving as a jar lid, while another vessel was covered with a large ceramic
sherd; these are considered secondary burials.

KANAMARU site: see Ōgo-Kanamaru• KANNON-MAE 観音前遺跡 (#11); 富岡市七日市 Tomioka-shi, Nanoka’ichi, 173 m msl(GARF n.d.)A pit 3.2×3.4 m containing Middle Yayoi zoned cord-marked pottery was discovered
on a riverine terrace. There was no evidence of a hearth or any other features indicating it
was a pit-house, so it is interpreted as a secondary burial or a ritual site.
• KITSUNEZAKI 狐崎遺跡; 甘楽郡甘楽町大字天引字狐崎 Kanra-gun, Kanra-machi,
Amabiki Kitsunezaki (Shitara & Takashe 2014; Iseki Walker 2007-18d; GARF 1989 : 10)© Japanese Archaeological Association

76THE JŌMON–YAYOI TRANSITION IN EASTERN JAPAN

Earliest Yayoi ceramics in Gunma, equivalent to Suijinbira-style (Shitara & Takashe
2014: 516). Also, Yayoi period: 34 pit-houses, 13 pits, 1 secondary jar burial, 2 roundmoated precincts, and a weir; Early Yayoi pottery from North Kyushu, Late Yayoi 1
bronze bracelet, 5 iron arrowpoints, lidded pot, a wooden ﬁsh-spear, and much driftwood.
• KIYOMIZU 清水遺跡; 吾妻郡中之条町山田 Agatsuma-gun, Nakanojō-chō, Yamada(Noto & Kojima 1989)
Final Jōmon site ABS with Ongagawa sherds.
• KUROKAWA KOZUKA 黒川小塚; 富岡市立黒岩小学校 Tomioka City Kuroiwa
Elementary School (Tomioka City 2018)
A moated settlement dating from late Middle Yayoi through Early Kofun. Carbonizedrice husks were dated by Hirosaki University to 175±20 BC.
• MAEHATA 前畑遺跡; 吾妻郡東吾妻町岩下 Agatsuma-gun, Agatsuma, Iwashita, 428 m
msl (Agatsuma-chō 2004: 8; GARF 1989: 351)
Pre-construction excavations, for a community center in 1988 on a ﬂat riverine terrace
in the deep mountains, uncovered Middle Yayoi to Heian period remains. The Yayoi
ﬁnds consisted of 9 pits containing Takanosu-type (Iwabitsuyama-style) pots; these areinterpreted as secondary burials.

MAKUIWA rock shelter: see Iwabitsuyama• MINAMI ŌTSUKA 南大塚遺跡 (#8); 渋川市 Shibukawa-shi, ca. 440 m msl (Noto &Kojima 1989; Shitara & Takashe 2014; Watanabe 1986; GARF n.d., 1989: 365)
Jōmon and Yayoi pottery occur together at this site. Discovered during road-widening
in 1979 along the Agatsuma River, a cluster of 3 rectangular burial pits. #1 pit contained
4 jars; #2 pit contained 2 jars and 2 cooking pots, a pedestaled bowl and a large stone; #3
pit was destroyed by the construction but yielded one jar. Included among the jōkonmon
pottery were some sherds of Ongagawa pottery. The pits contained bones and areconsidered secondary burials employing reused utilitarian vessels; interment of several
jars interpreted as kinship groupings. They date from terminal Early Yayoi throughMiddle Yayoi. Shitara and Takashe (2014: 516) say earliest Yayoi pottery in Gunma isequivalent to Suijinbira. A perfect Final Jōmon-style pedestaled bowl was used in aterminal Early Yayoi secondary burial, possibly to hold food for the dead. Other burial
jars date to Middle Yayoi.
• MIYAGAITO 宮谷戸遺蹟; 高崎市下室田 Takasaki-shi, Shimo-murata (Maebashi/© Japanese Archaeological Association

77Gina L. BARNES

Takasaki Kyōi 2013)
Jar and cooking pot dating to 2½ Middle Yayoi.
• MIZUNUMA NAKAGŌ 水沼中郷; 群馬郡倉淵村 (Noto & Kojima 1989)
ABS containing Suijinbira pottery.
• MYŌJIN 明神遺蹟; 前橋市元総社 Maebashi-shi, Moto-Sōja, 115 m msl (Maebashi/
Takasaki Kyōi 2013)
1½ Middle Yayoi pottery from ABS at base of river channel.
• NAKAGAWA 中川遺跡; 高崎市中里見町 Takasaki-shi, Nakasatomi-chō, ca. 154 m msl(Maebashi/Takasaki Kyōi 2013)
Walking footprints indicating paddy ﬁeld in lowlands next to Karasu River, EY–1½
MY. Much pottery inﬂuenced by Kōri and Chiami styles.
• NAKANOYA-HARA 中野谷原遺跡; 安中市中野谷原 Annaka-shi, Nakanoyahara,
265-6m msl (Inoue et al. 2004; Shitara 2006; Shitara & Takashe 2014)
Remains from the ﬁrst half of Middle Yayoi (II old∼1½ III) consisted of 15 pit-houses,
10 pits, and stone tools that are reported to have Poaceae (Graminae) gloss (Shitara &Takashe 2014: 515). Most of the pit houses were round or oval in shape, ranging from 4
to 7m across. They were all very shallow, mostly 10 cm deep. Most hearths were on theﬂoor, some with stone surrounds. There were also Mid-Middle Yayoi secondary burials.
• NAKAZENJI 中善地遺跡; 高崎市箕郷町善地 Takasaki City, Misato, Zenji, 300 m msl(GARF n.d., 1989: 268)
On the south-eastern ﬂank of Mt Haruna, ceramics were accidentally found that arethought to have been burial jars. Some of the pots were similar to Takanosu (Iwabitsuyamastyle), but others belonged to the Suwada-style distributed in eastern Kantō, attesting torelations between these areas.
• ŌGO-KANAMARU 大胡金丸遺跡 (#13); 前橋市大胡町 Maebashi-shi, Ōgo, 420 m msl(Maebashi/Takasaki Kyōi 2013; GARF n.d.)At the Kanamaru site, 1½ Middle Yayoi burial pots similar in style to those at Takanosu
were discovered during agricultural activities on the southern ﬂank of Mt Akagi. Thought
to be secondary jar burials; the site yielded 4 jars, 3 cooking pots, 1 shallow bowl, and 1
pedestaled vessel.
• ŌKAMI 大上遺跡; 安中市上間仁田Annaka-shi, Kamimanita, 248 m msl (Inoue et al.
© Japanese Archaeological Association

78

THE JŌMON–YAYOI TRANSITION IN EASTERN JAPAN

2003; Shitara 2006)
Four buildings dating to Middle Yayoi, three speciﬁcally to phase II. Three pit-house
shapes are rounded-corner rectangular or square, with house-pits between 1 and 15 cm
deep; two could be measured at 3.2×5m and (2.6)×3 m. A fourth surface building size
was unclear. All had hearths on the ﬂoor, in one pit-building with a rock surround.
• OKI II 沖II遺跡 (#12); 藤岡市立石沖 Fujioka-shi, Tatsuishi, Aza-Oki, 69 m msl (Shitara
1985; Aramaki et al. 1988; Watanabe 1986; Noto & Kojima 1989; GARF n.d., 1989: 59)
This is an unusual site as it is located on a natural levee of the Karasu River at relatively
low altitude near the Final Jōmon site of Yachi. Excavated in 1983, Oki II site yielded an
ABS with Suijinbira pottery, and tEY~bMY pottery in 27 pits, mostly with one vessel perpit. One pit had not pot but human and animal bones on a stone ﬂoor. The pottery borejōkonmon; some pots and jars had I-shaped decoration, some with sankaku renkeimon.
Bones from these have burials have been extensively studied by Aramaki and colleagues.
Lithics included ﬂaked hoes, arrowheads, querns, and much ﬂaking debris. 50% ofpottery in pits were jars, 20% in ABS; also in ABS cooking pots 50%, bowls 25%. Largejars with jōkonmon made locally in imitation of Tōkai, but sherds of imported Maruko
and Suijinbira. Watanabe reports pottery of Uwabitsuyama-style of the terminal Early
Yayoi. Shitara aligns Oki with Suijinbira-style Tōkai pottery (Yayoi I new).
• OSAKA 尾坂 (#4); 長野原町大字長野原字尾坂 Gunma-ken, Naganohara, 738 m msl(GARF 2015, 2018)
Yayoi secondary burial(s) discovered in construction for the Yatsuba Dam. Pottery
dating the terminal Final Jōmon (Kōri-style) and 1½MY periods was recovered.
• OSHIDE 押手遺跡 (#7); 渋川市中郷 Shibukawa-shi, Nakagō [旧: 北群馬郡子持村北牧](Noto & Kojima 1989; GARF 1989: 61; Ooki 2001)
Yayoi secondary burial discovered on the southern ﬂank of Mt Komochi dug into
the middle of a Final Jōmon site; the site has been termed a ‘banked cemetery,’ but this
attribution is unclear. Other Yayoi pits were ﬁlled with fragments of burned bone. Pottery
included jōkonmon, Suijinbira-old, and Ongagawa (photos in Ooki 2001). One Ongagawa(EYmid-I) pot has a rice husk impression.
• SHIMEBIKI-HARA I 注連引原遺跡; 安中市鷺宮大林西 Annaka-shi, Saginomiya,Ōbayashi-nishi 238 m msl (Daikuhara et al. 1987; Shitara 2006; Maebashi/Takasaki Kyōi
2013)
A Final Jōmon site that has tEY~bMY pottery, excavated in 1985–6. A rectangular,
shallow house-pit, 5∼6×6∼7 m; it had a hearth outlined with rocks on the house ﬂoor.
© Japanese Archaeological Association

79Gina L. BARNES

Assigned to Early Yayoi (I old). Most artefacts in ABS. Another house (?) was 3.5 m/sidewith similar features.
• SHIMEBIKI-HARA II 注連引原II遺跡 (#10); 安中市鷺宮Annaka-shi, Saginomiya, ca.
238 m msl (Daikuhara et al. 1987, 1988; GARF 1989: 159-60; Inoue et al. 2003; Shitara
2006; Ojisan 2017)
Three building traces were recovered here at Loc. 1: one surface and two squarish
house pits, one 3.5 m sq. and 20 cm deep, the other 6 cm deep measuring 3.2 m sq. all
dating to Yayoi I (new). Some remains dated to Yayoi II (old). Of two houses at Loc. 2,
one had only burned earth attesting a hearth.
Behind the pit-buildings positioned in an arc were found 30 pits. Three were fairly
large ovals with relatively more pottery and stone tools, while the others were irregularin shape with few artefacts.
Excavations later recovered 10 pillared buildings without hearths, all dating to thesecond half of Middle Yayoi, as documented in the Annaka City Furusato Gakushūkan
exhibit in 2017.
• SHINMEISAN 神明山遺跡; 桐生市広沢町三丁目 Kiryū-shi, Hirosawa-chō 3, 143 m msl(GARF n.d.; Kiryū-shi n.d.)This site was occupied in the Jōmon–Heian periods. A small zoned cord-marked pot
dating to Middle Yayoi was excavated here. It echoes inﬂuences from Suwada-stylepottery in eastern Kantō.
• SHIROISHI ŌMIDŌ 白石大御堂遺跡; 藤岡市白石 Fujioka-shi, Shiroishi (Shitara 2006:
ﬁg. 9)
Site is located on alluvial high ground (levee?); yielded Ongagawa sherd(s) dating to the
Oki pottery phase of tEY (YI-old) and Final Jōmon pottery.

TAKANOSU rock shelter: see Iwabitsuyama• TANAKADA 田中田遺跡; 前橋市富士見町横室 Maebashi-shi, Fujimi-chō,Yokomuro,
164 m msl (GARF 1989: 228; Maebashi/Takasaki Kyōi 2013)
1½ Middle Yayoi secondary burial site
• TATSU-IWA 立岩遺跡; 利根郡川場村 Toné-gun, Kawaba-mura, 542 m msl (GARF n.d.:3; Ooki 2019)
At the northwest end of Kantō Plain, the site has Middle Yayoi Yamasōka-type 山草荷pottery distributed from Hokuriku across southern Tōhoku; brought into Gunma from© Japanese Archaeological Association

80THE JŌMON–YAYOI TRANSITION IN EASTERN JAPANthe north. Aizu Basin to the north can be reached via mountain passes, and Ooki (2019)suggests a passage westwards from the Tatsu-iwa site directly to the Agatsuma River via
the Nakuta River.
• TATSUMI-CHŌ 竜見町遺跡; 高崎市 竜見町, 92 m msl (Baba 2008)
The type site for Tatsumi-chō style pottery of Yayoi IV, divided into 4 stages—the ﬁrst
being the pre-Tatsumi phase from Yatsuhagi Cave site.
• TERASAWA寺沢遺跡; 高崎市倉渕町水沼 Takasaki-shi, Kurabuchi-chō, Mizunuma(Takasaki/Maebashi Kyōi 2013)
A large jar thought to be an infant burial dating to tEY~bMY.
• UEHARA 上原 1, 3; 吾妻郡長野原町大字林 Agatsuma-gun, Naganohara-machi 642 m
msl (Naganohara-chō 2013-14)
Three pits with Yayoi pottery, one dating to tEY; secondary jar burials (?) discovered
in construction.
• UWAHITOMI 上人見遺跡 (#9); 安中市松井田町人見向原 Annaka-shi, Matsuida, Hitomi
Mukuihara, 715 m msl (Noto & Kojima 1989; GARF 1989: 47; Iseki Walker 2007-2018c;
Ojisan 2017)
Two Yayoi secondary burials; 3jars, 2 pots. No bones but reaper and chipped sone tool.
All Iwabitsuyama type bearing jōkonmon but Noto & Kojima also specify Suijinbira;plus local Jōmon pots dating to the end of Early Yayoi. Located near the Final Jōmon
Tenbikihara site.
• YATSUHAGI 八束脛洞窟 (#3); 水上町後閑字穴切, 石尊山 Minakami, Gokan, Anagiri,
650 m msl (GARF 1989: 389; Tsukiyono-chō Kyōi n.d.; Agatsuma-chō 2004: 10; Miyazaki
et al. 1985; Iijima et al. 1986, 1987, 1994; Toyama et al. 1986; Gunma-ken Kyōi 1994).
This site was investigated archaeologically in 1993. In addition to the presence of
Early Jōmon pottery, pottery from the ﬁrst half of Middle Yayoi was recovered: Suwada,
Kuribayashi I, and Nozawa II. The site consists of four caves (A,B,C,D from bottom totop) carved into welded tuff, yielding the remains of at least 34 people. Cave A is smallest(2 m wide×1.5 m high, 2.5 m deep); it contained no artefacts. Cave B (15 m wide×3.5 mhigh, 6.2 m deep) had many human bones and one polished axe. Cave C (9.3 m wide×3.3 mhigh, 5.5 m deep) had few artefacts (ﬂaked arrowhead) but human bones were found ina pit plastered over. Cave D (12.6 m wide×3.7 m high, 5.2 m deep; this was the mostproductive, containing burned bones from infants to elders. Some adults had teeth ritually
removed (a western Japan practice). Iijima et al. (1986: 48) note that burned bones are a© Japanese Archaeological Association

81Gina L. BARNES

regional feature (known in Nagano, Niigata, Fukushima, Gunma, and Saitama at thattime) that might indicate a separate practice of cremation in addition to or in place of
secondary jar burial.
The associated ornaments were of greater variety and manufacture than those of
Arigasayama. Perforated human ﬁngerbones (10) and teeth (8) were among 8 jasper ﬂakes(that had been heated), 19 shell bracelets, 9 shell beads, 3 jasper cylindrical beads, 2 boar
tusk beads, and ﬂaked arrowhead(s); the jasper and shells in particular suggest longdistance exchange, as the sources of various ornamental stones are mostly found on along
the Japan Sea coast and the shell types are found south of the Izu Peninsula.
Many of the human bones from Cave B were preserved in a shrine built by the local
ruler of Numata Castle but were later lost in a ﬁre.

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