Archaeological and anthropological views of Jomon society: methods and practices

Archaeological study of the social structure of the Jomon period has advanced through discoveries about the relative positions of graves, the presence or absence therein of accessories and grave goods, head orientations of corpses, types of tooth extraction, and so on. In recent years, research using anthropological information—both physical and biological—obtained from excavated human bones has begun to elucidate the social structures of that time. This approach is called bioarchaeology. In the analysis of the social structure of the Jomon period, bioarchaeology has three principal uses: to reconstruct burial subgroups by 14C dating of human bones; to estimate genetic relationships between adjacent human bones; and to estimate the proportion of migrants in the overall population. Here, I review the analysis of the cemetery of the Odake shell-mound as an example of bioarchaeological research while touching on the history of archaeological research of Jomon social structure.