Okinoshima site (Chiba)
More actions
| Okinoshima site | |
|---|---|
| 沖ノ島遺跡 | |
| Location | |
| Country | Japan |
| Province/State | Chiba Prefecture |
| City | Tateyama |
| Coordinates | 34.99, 139.83 |
| Site | |
| Type | Settlement |
| Culture | Jōmon |
| Period | Initial Jōmon |
| In use | Incipient to Initial Jōmon on the shore; Kofun-period sherds inland[1] |
| Excavated | 2003–2005, three seasons[1] |
| Excavated by | Archaeology laboratory of Chiba University; Chiba Prefectural Awa Museum |
| Cannabis finds | |
| Found | Seeds |
| Four hemp fruits, three whole and one broken, from layer 9a of grid B-5 | |
| Dated | c. 8280–7660 BCE |
| Dating | Radiocarbon |
| Identified by | Morphology |
The Okinoshima site (沖ノ島遺跡) is a Jōmon site on the east shore of Okinoshima, a small island in Tateyama, Chiba Prefecture, Japan. Four hemp fruits came from a layer of the Initial Jōmon period excavated there in 2005.[1] The fruits were dated directly by radiocarbon to about 10,000 calibrated years before present. The team that dated them called them "the oldest record of the fruits of Cannabis sativa in the world at this moment".[2]
Site and excavation
Okinoshima lies on the south side of Tateyama Bay. It is about 1 kilometre round and about 13 metres high, and a sandbar joins it to the Bōsō Peninsula. The archaeology laboratory of Chiba University and the Chiba Prefectural Awa Museum excavated the site in three seasons between 2003 and 2005. A test pit inland, about 7 metres above sea level, gave sherds of Haji ware of the Kofun period. A trench on the shore, at about sea level, reached deposits of the Incipient to Initial Jōmon.[1]
The shore deposits held cord-marked, plain and impressed pottery, stone tools of obsidian, bone and antler tools, many animal bones, among them those of dolphins and fish, and plant remains. The excavators take the large number of dolphin bones and the site's place on the shore as signs of a seasonal fishing ground or camp, used for dolphin hunting among other things.[1][2]
The trench cut three units of sediment. The lowest, Unit I, is a silt with almost no finds. Unit II, the layer with the artefacts, is an organic muddy sand thought to have built up quickly as a mud flow, and is divided into layers 9a and 9b. Unit III is a cross-bedded sand laid down by waves or currents, with a bed of leaves at its base. Above it lies the modern beach sand, with no deposit of any other period.[1]
Cannabis finds
In 2004 and 2005 sixteen grids of 2 by 2 metres were dug on the shore. In the third season finds clustered in grid B-5, which was divided into four strips 50 centimetres wide to examine them more closely. The sediment of layer 9a from each strip was washed through a 3-millimetre sieve at Chiba University. The hemp came from the lower part of layer 9a in the southernmost strip, the B-5 belt: four fruits, three of them whole and one broken. The same strip gave five seeds each of Fagara ailanthoides and Mallotus japonicus and two stones of elder.[1]
Identification
Because the fruits of hemp resemble those of the hop genus, Humulus, Makiko Kobayashi and colleagues described the fruits of hemp, of the common hop (H. lupulus) and of the Japanese hop (H. scandens), which grows wild in Japan, and set out their grounds for the identification. For comparison they used hemp fruits sold in Japan as food, imported from India, and hop fruits collected in Saitama and Gunma prefectures. Ten fruits of each were measured.[1]
The fruits from Okinoshima had lost their outer skin but kept part of the middle layer and the whole of the hard inner wall. They are ovoid in side view, 3.5 to 3.8 millimetres long (3.6 on average), 3.0 to 3.5 wide (3.2) and 2.6 to 2.9 thick (2.7). Each has a round knob 0.5 to 1 millimetre across at the top and a shallow rounded hollow at the base. The modern hemp fruits have the same shape, knob and hollow and measure 3.7 to 5.2 millimetres long and 3.1 to 4.1 wide. The stones of the common hop are round in side view, smaller in every dimension, and thickened at the top in a heart-shaped or round pad, with no hollow at the base. Those of the Japanese hop are round and lens-shaped, wider than the Okinoshima fruits, with the same heart-shaped pad and a smooth base. On these features the fruits were identified as hemp.[1]
Dating
Before the fruits were dated, two samples from the layers above and below layer 9a had been dated by accelerator mass spectrometry. Wood, probably root wood, from the base of layer 9b gave 8735 ± 45 radiocarbon years before present (PLD-3967), calibrated at one sigma to 7830–7640 BCE. A leaf of Machilus thunbergii from the leaf bed at the base of Unit III gave 8705 ± 45 years (PLD-3966), calibrated to 7750–7600 BCE. Kobayashi and colleagues placed the hemp-bearing layer between 7830 and 7600 BCE, which agrees with the date of its pottery.[1]
The fruits are so small that a later fruit falling into the older layer could not be ruled out. Yuichiro Kudo and colleagues therefore dated the fruits themselves at the Center for Chronological Research of Nagoya University. Three fruits went into one sample, since together they weighed only 11.8 milligrams dry: one that had been cut in two for study and kept in alcohol, one that had been dried for the scanning electron microscope, and the broken one. After acid–alkali–acid cleaning 4.5 milligrams were left, and these were turned into graphite and measured. The result was 8955 ± 45 radiocarbon years before present (NUTA2-12809), about 10,000 calibrated years before present, at the start of the Holocene.[2]
The date is about 200 radiocarbon years older than those of the leaf and the wood. Kudo and colleagues calculated that if even one of the three fruits had come from the Early Jōmon, about 6000 radiocarbon years before present, and made up about 30 per cent of the sample's weight, the result would have been about 1000 years younger. They concluded that the fruits belong with the pottery of their layer. On their reading, layer 9a and the leaf bed above it were laid down some time apart, and the dated wood came from the root of a later tree that had grown down to the base of layer 9b. Layer 9a holds pottery of the Ōurayama and Hirasaka types, the last stage of the cord-marked Yoriitomon pottery, which they place at the start of the Initial Jōmon. The Chiba University report on the excavation places layers 9a and 9b in the late Incipient to early Initial Jōmon.[2]
Rita Dal Martello and colleagues give the calibrated date of the same measurement as 8280–7660 BCE in their text and as 8260–7990 BCE in their table of measured archaeological cannabis seeds.[3]
Interpretations
In the review of Japanese finds by Kobayashi and colleagues, the oldest hemp remains from Japan before Okinoshima were the cord from the Incipient Jōmon layers of the Torihama shell mound in Fukui Prefecture. The oldest fruits were a charred mass stuck to the inside of a pot of the Initial Jōmon at the Shōbuzaki shell mound in Akita Prefecture, dated to 6745 ± 50 radiocarbon years before present. Cord, they argued, might have been brought into Japan as a finished product; fruits show that the plant itself grew there. They noted that hemp is not recorded as native to Japan and has left no fossil from the Pleistocene. They called the Okinoshima fruits "the oldest record of its fruits in the world" and suggested that hemp was already in use across East Asia before it reached Europe.[1]
They also argued that hemp was probably grown at the site. Evergreen broadleaf forest, with Machilus thunbergii and holly, is thought to have covered the island at the time, while the plants found with the hemp, Mallotus, Zanthoxylum, elder and the Japanese hop, are plants of open, sunny ground. Hemp therefore grew within the area people used, near the site. The sea then stood about 2 metres lower, so that the shore lay some tens of metres further out. Diatoms and the remains of pondweed and Euryale ferox point to a small marsh or pond near the site, which would have given water for retting the fibre. Since the site was probably a seasonal fishing ground, they thought it likely that hemp was grown for making fishing gear. As hemp seed is nourishing and was eaten in ancient China, they allowed that it may also have been grown for food.[1]
Kudo and colleagues wrote that the find was the oldest from the Japanese archipelago and probably the oldest directly dated hemp fruit in the world, and that it showed hemp to have been present by about 10,000 calibrated years before present. How it was used at Okinoshima they left open. Taken with the finds from Torihama and Shōbuzaki, they thought it possible that hemp was grown in Japan from a very early stage of the Jōmon for its fibre and fruit. Other plants that may have been cultivated or brought in, the bottle gourd, Vigna beans, perilla and burdock, are known from a deposit of the beginning of the Initial Jōmon at the Awazu lake-bed site in Shiga Prefecture. They took hemp to have been one element of such a set of plants by the start of the Holocene.[2]
Dal Martello and colleagues list the Okinoshima fruits among measured archaeological cannabis seeds from East and South Asia. They find their width outside the range of wild cannabis and note that they lack the caruncle, the protruding base of the fruit in wild forms. They infer that the fruits are "likely already a domesticated form". Finding no evidence of contact between Japan and China at that time, they suggest that cultivation of cannabis began independently in at least China and Japan.[3]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 Kobayashi, Makiko; Momohara, Arata; Okitsu, Susumu; Yanagisawa, Seiichi; Okamoto, Tozo (2008). 千葉県沖ノ島遺跡から出土した縄文時代早期のアサ果実 [Fossil hemp fruits in the earliest Jomon period from the Okinoshima site, Chiba Prefecture, Japan]. Japanese Journal of Historical Botany (in 日本語). 16 (1): 11–18. doi:10.34596/hisbot.16.1_11.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 Kudo, Yuichiro; Kobayashi, Makiko; Momohara, Arata; Noshiro, Shuichi; Nakamura, Toshio; Okitsu, Susumu; Yanagisawa, Seiichi; Okamoto, Tozo (2009). 千葉県沖ノ島遺跡から出土した縄文時代早期のアサ果実の14C年代 [Radiocarbon dating of fossil hemp fruits in the earliest Jomon period excavated from the Okinoshima site, Chiba, Japan]. Japanese Journal of Historical Botany (in 日本語). 17 (1): 27–31. doi:10.34596/hisbot.17.1_27.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Dal Martello, Rita; Min, Rui; Stevens, Chris J.; Qin, Ling; Fuller, Dorian Q. (2024). "Morphometric approaches to Cannabis evolution and differentiation from archaeological sites: interpreting the archaeobotanical evidence from bronze age Haimenkou, Yunnan". Vegetation History and Archaeobotany. 33 (4): 503–518. doi:10.1007/s00334-023-00966-6.