Jomon pottery is built up from the bottom, using coils upon coils of clay made from soil gathered from the volcanic ash layer, which is mixed with water and sand and then left sitting for six months to a year before being handled.

The main tools used to model the vessels are bamboo spatulas and ramie cords. Hundreds of patterns can be created by impressing the cord onto the clay in different ways, such as winding them around thin bamboo, Murakami says. Shells and stones are then used to polish the interior and surface. Finally, the pots are fired by an outdoor bonfire, a process that typically lasts from dawn to dusk.

Jomon pottery is thought to have served multiple functions, including storing food and cooking. Murakami says he believes the elaborate ornamentation featured in the earthenware reflected their ceremonial nature.

“These were made to celebrate life and rebirth, and may have been an embodiment of the prayers people offered to the animals and plants they killed and consumed,” he says.

Numerous interpretations have been made regarding the motifs used in Jomon artifacts. Naoyuki Oshima, a visiting professor at the Sapporo Medical University and former chairman of the Hokkaido Archaeological Association, has proposed that all Jomon relics featured designs symbolizing regeneration and rebirth, including the moon, water, the womb and snakes.

Moreover, Oshima argues that methods used in traditional archaeology are inadequate in grasping the mind of the Jomon people and, to do so, one had to branch out to other fields such as cultural anthropology, religion, folklore and even brain science.

“Archaeologists, for example, say pit houses were real homes inhabited by families, which is based on the presumption that the concept of marriage existed back then,” Oshima says. “But I began to question these premises. Archaeologists base their thinking on the law of contradiction that encompasses ideas such as rationality, economic efficiency, dichotomy, hierarchy, ancestor worship and animism. But would a civilization based on values like manners and morale survive 13,000 years? I believe the people of Jomon had a fundamentally different way of thinking and understanding the world around them.”

Oshima focused on an idea posited by French scholar Lucien Levy-Bruhl called the concept of participation. The “primitive” mind, Levy-Bruhl argued, was not an inferior version of our “civilized” mind but operated in a distinct mode of thought that didn’t address contradictions and didn’t differentiate the supernatural from reality.

Based on that concept, Oshima argues that Jomon pit houses, shell mounds and stone circles were all designed from the image of the womb and functioned as symbols of regeneration. These places could be characterized by the word “topophilia,” he says, a term that refers to the love or emotional connections to certain physical locations. The people of Jomon would visit these sites to pray and celebrate life and rebirth, he says, akin to modern-day institutions such as the Grand Shrines of Ise in Mie Prefecture.

“There were only an estimated 260,000 people at the peak of the population,” Oshima says. “We should assume that in such a sparsely populated hunter-gatherer society, people interacted and communicated in a very different manner from what we are accustomed to.”

Oshima, 69, admits that his theories may be radically different from those adopted by mainstream academia. But the difficulty in penetrating the Jomon mind may be what attracts so many to the mystery-laden era.