Jomon Prehistoric Sites in Northern Japan

The Jomon managed something rare in prehistory: settled village life without agriculture. Across 17 sites in Hokkaido and northern Tohoku, this hunter-fisher-gatherer culture left more than ten millennia of testimony reaching back to roughly 13,000 BC — lacquered pottery, enigmatic goggle-eyed dogu figurines and ritual stone circles over 50 metres across. UNESCO inscribed the Jomon Prehistoric Sites in 2021 as World Heritage evidence of sedentary life flourishing millennia before farming reached the archipelago.