A Jomon City: Sannai-Maruyama, a Village of a Thousand Years

Hunter-gatherers were small bands forever on the move, chasing their prey — for a long time, that is what we believed. A life without fields does not suit a large village. What shook that preconception to its very roots was a single site that emerged from the forest on the outskirts of Aomori City. The Sannai-Maruyama site. It is one of the largest settlements of the Jomon period, where hundreds of people are thought to have gone on living on the same land for the dizzying span of more than a thousand years. Its form, even called a ‘Jomon city,’ quietly but decisively rewrote the textbook image of the Jomon.

A ‘Village’ That Emerged from the Forest

It was not so long ago that the Sannai-Maruyama site became widely known. In 1992, in the midst of an excavation survey accompanying the construction of a baseball stadium, the remains of large-scale pit buildings and giant pillar holes were found one after another. Realizing their importance, Aomori Prefecture cancelled the planned construction and chose the path of preserving the site itself. It was the moment when a site slated for a sports facility became, at a stroke, a historic site of the highest importance for telling Japan’s prehistory.

The further the investigation went, the more its scale astonished the researchers. The settlement is said to have been maintained from roughly 5,900 years ago to about 4,200 years ago, and a simple subtraction gives the staggering span of more than a thousand years. Far from moving from place to place, the people put down roots here and went on living, stacking up dozens of generations. The fact that a hunting-and-gathering society could settle on a single piece of land for so long was itself a great discovery.

What Were the Six Giant Pillars For

The symbol of Sannai-Maruyama is the remains of the large six-pillar structure. A giant structure made of chestnut trunks over a meter in diameter, set up in two neat rows of three. The holes that held the pillars reach about two meters in both diameter and depth, and analysis of the weight that bore down on the soil points to the possibility that a considerably tall building once stood there. The reconstructed, tower-like form has now become the symbol of the site.

Yet what this giant pillared structure was a building ‘for’ is not clearly known. Was it a watchtower, a place of festival and prayer, or a facility for observing the movements of the heavens like a calendar? Various theories have been put forward, but there is no decisive answer, and debate continues. What is certain is that to cut, carry, and raise such great trees — digging deep holes and joining forces to set them up — required many hands, careful planning, and a shared purpose. The riddle of the pillars is, in itself, a question about ‘the force that held the people together.’

Moreover, it must not be overlooked that the settlement itself did not spread haphazardly. The blocks where pit buildings stood in rows, the buildings said to be raised-floor structures, the rows of graves, and the paths — these are said to have been arranged with a certain order, suggesting that people ran the village while thinking about how to use the land. This is why the expression ‘planned settlement’ is used. The very idea of dividing in advance the places to live, to bury, and to discard is itself a sophisticated design for living. Without agreements handed down across generations, such order could not be kept. Through the village of Sannai-Maruyama there surely flowed unseen covenants, refined over a long time.

What Supported the Great Settlement, and the Riddles That Remain

How were so many people fed without relying on farming? The clue lies, again, in the bounty of forest and sea seen last time. Around Sannai-Maruyama spread chestnut groves that appear to have been tended, and the chestnut supported life both as food and as material for the building pillars. Add to this fish and shellfish, hunted game, and other nuts — the Jomon manner of binding several bounties together is thought to have fed the great settlement’s stomach. Only with the foundation of a rich natural world could people stay for so long.

Beneath a forest that was to have become a baseball stadium, a giant village that lasted more than a thousand years lay sleeping — the Sannai-Maruyama site greatly changed the feel of the words ‘Jomon period.’ It shows that a life of engaging with nature without taking too much did not merely persist small and faint, but could at times grow into a society gathering hundreds of people. Live this long, and gather this many people, and naturally what comes out of daily life becomes immense too. Nutshells, shells, bones, broken tools — how did the Jomon people handle them? Next time, around the ‘shell mounds’ said to have been more than mere refuse dumps, we trace another face of a society that cycled.