About 10,000 years ago, in the earliest stages of the Jomon period, people in the Japanese archipelago began to build pit dwellings. These early houses were simple, circular structures with conical roofs. Builders dug shallow pits into the ground, set up wooden pillars for support, and covered the roof with thatch, bark, or mud. A main pillar, dug deepest and widest, formed the central support. The dwellings often had indoor fireplaces, storage pits, and occasionally a smoking ditch near the entrance to help ventilate smoke. By the Middle Jomon period, around 5,000 years ago, pit dwellings became more diverse. Archaeologists have uncovered nearly 700 such houses, revealing changes in floor shape, pillar placement, and furnace design over time. Some floors were tamped hard or covered with flagstones, sunk as deep as half a meter below ground. Roofs were supported by five or six posts around a central pillar, thatched with kaya grass to shed rain into ditches encircling the homes. As settlements grew larger, house shapes evolved from round to square or rectangular forms with rounded corners, reflecting a shift toward more planned communities. At major sites like Sannai Maruyama in Aomori, the Jomon built not only pit dwellings but also raised-floor warehouses, likely used for storing food and tools. Over 800 pit houses and hundreds of raised buildings have been unearthed there, including a large structure supported by massive columns—an impressive example of communal architecture. In other regions, such as Aizu-Wakamatsu in Fukushima, longhouses appeared. These large buildings, sometimes with three fireplaces inside, stood within ring-shaped settlements surrounded by drainage ditches, showing the complexity of Jomon village planning. The Jomon people were skilled woodworkers. Excavations at the Sakuramachi site in Toyama have revealed over a hundred wooden beams, crosspieces, and posts from the Middle Jomon period. Even earlier evidence of woodworking comes from the Yokoo site in Oita, where a 3.8-meter wooden beam dated to 10,000 years ago is believed to have been part of a stilted building. By around 4,500 years ago, at the Oyabe site in Toyama, builders were already using mortise-and-tenon joinery—a sophisticated technique later seen in Japan’s oldest surviving wooden temple, Horyuji. The Jomon’s ability to work with wood shaped nearly every aspect of their life. They carved dugout canoes, built wooden vessels, reinforced storage pits, and raised sturdy dwellings from a variety of trees—chestnut, cedar, mukunoki, nutmeg, camphor, and others. These skills reveal a deep understanding of materials and the environment, marking the Jomon people as some of the earliest and most accomplished woodworkers in prehistoric Japan.

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Jomon Period Pit House