Japanese History: What was the style of houses and the layout of villages in the Jomon period?

During the Jomon period, people lived in self-built vertical cave-style houses, but there were also those who utilized natural caves and under rocks as dwellings.

Cave houses were dug about 50 centimeters below the ground, and the roof was supported by a few wooden pillars. The plan shape of the house is rounded square, square, trapezoidal, round, oval and so on. Later in the first period, a hearth was located in the center of the interior. A number of sites of vertical cave houses and villages consisting of vertical cave houses have been found in Japan. These sites reflect, to varying degrees, the social landscape of the clan communes of the time.

Hanawatai Beya in Ibaraki Prefecture is a site belonging to the Early Jomon period, where five vertical cave houses and pottery were found. There are overlapping house ruins and two types of pottery: jomon and unmarked. From this, it is assumed that the Hanawatai site is a settlement through two periods. In one period, there were only two or three houses with four or five people living in one house. The remains of two adult men, two women, and one child were found in a vertical cave house at the Bushanbe house in Ichikawa City, Kanaba Prefecture. The Bushanbe house is a site of the middle Jomon period. The number of people who lived in the cave house and the living conditions in the early period can be inferred from this cave. One house was occupied by four or five people, while two or three houses were occupied by only a dozen people. Most of the villages in the early Jomon period were located on the tops or slopes of hills and terraces, and were generally small in size and short in duration, which was due to the fact that people were constantly migrating in search of food at that time. Such small villages were clan settlements, and vertical cave houses were the dwellings of the members of the clan communes.

The former villages were larger and continued for a longer period of time. The Yokohama Minami-duguibaiya is a site of the pre-Jomon period. The site is located on the southern slope of the terrace and covers an area of about 5,000 square meters. The ruins of 50 vertical cave-type houses of roughly equal size were discovered from here. The houses have overlapping. Some of the houses were buried by shell layers. The pottery excavated was categorized into three forms. It is evident that the village lasted for quite a long time, about 300 years according to Japanese scholars.

In the center of the site, there is a square about 60 meters from north to south and about 35 meters from east to west. In the center of the square there is only a large stone disk. The houses are arranged in a horseshoe shape around the square. It can be seen that the square was a place for discussing the day's production, distributing the fruits of labor, as well as holding meetings and sacrifices. The large stone pan was a milling tool used by the same people. People in this village lived a primitive ****productivist life of ****together labor and distribution.