---
node: jomon
type: period
slug: jomon_period
title: "Jomon period"
lead: "The Jomon period (c. 14,000–c. 300 BC) was a hunter-gatherer-fisher culture named for its cord-marked pottery — among the oldest pottery traditions in the world."
published: 2026-07-09
updated: 2026-07-09
image_file: jomon_period.jpg
image_source: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jomon_Vessel_with_Flame-like_Ornamentation,_attributed_provenance_Umataka,_Nagaoka-shi,_Niigata,_Jomon_period,_3000-2000_BC_-_Tokyo_National_Museum_-_DSC05620.JPG"
image_author: "Daderot"
image_license: "CC0"
---

## Overview

The Jomon people lived by hunting, fishing and gathering nuts, yet were sedentary or semi-sedentary, settling in villages of pit dwellings and leaving shell mounds. The period takes its name from cord-marked pottery, one of the world's oldest pottery traditions.

## Key developments

Communities produced clay dogu figurines. The large Sannai-Maruyama settlement site in Aomori, occupied c. 3900–2200 BC, shows long-lived, organized communities.

## End and transition

Wet-rice agriculture and metal tools arriving from the continent opened the Yayoi period. The conventional boundary is c. 300 BC, though some scholarship dates the transition several centuries earlier.