The site of Sannai Maruyama in Aomori City continued to be the main focus of Jomon studies in 1996. Sannai Maruyama symbolizes all that is good - as well as all that is not so good but extremely interesting - in Japanese archaeology. Sannai Maruyama is a huge excavation in terms of both money spent and area dug; it has produced remains which are unquestionably of global significance; it has attracted massive media and public interest within Japan; and yet it continues to be discussed in the narrowest terms possible, almost nothing having been published in English except for very short notes by Tom Keally (EAANnouncements 15) and myself (The Asia-Pacific Magazine, No.2, 1996). To some extent one can excuse the site being used to promote local tourism (the reconstructed Sannai Maruyama tower is several meters higher than the Yoshinogari watch-towers!), but more problematic is the way the site has tended to be hijacked for more nationalistic ends. A new book entitled Jomon Teidan: Sannai Maruyama no Sekai [Three-way Discussions on the Jomon: the World of Sannai Maruyama], for example, contains a chapter by UMESAO Tadao entitled 'Nihon bunmei wa Sannai Maruyama kara hajimaru' [Japanese civilization begins with Sannai Maruyama]. In the same volume, HABU Junko expresses the hope that Sannai Maruyama will provide an opportunity for Japanese archaeology to become more international but I suspect she is being rather optimistic. As so often in Japanese archaeology, it is the lack of comparative and of ecological perspectives that is so striking. To take one example, many newspaper reports continue to paint a rosy picture of subsistence at Sannai Maruyama, interpreting the wide variety of food remains found at the site as evidence for 'prehistoric gourmets.' It is my impression, however, that a diet breadth model might lead to a quite different conclusion in which the preponderance of r-selected species points to considerable subsistence stress.
Another important excavation was the Nakazato shell midden in Kita-ku, Tokyo. This site had been known from the Edo period but never excavated since it contains very little pottery. Excavations from July 1996 were conducted in association with consolidation work for a local park. Nakazato has the deepest accumulation of shells from any prehistoric midden in Japan - 4.5 m. The thickest midden elsewhere is a mere 2.5 m. Although the precise surface area is unknown, it is almost certainly larger than Kasori in Chiba which, at 4.4 hectares, was previously thought to be the biggest Jomon shell mound. Nakazato contains huge quantities of shells, mainly oysters and Meretrix lusoria (hamaguri), but hardly any pottery or other artifacts. The little pottery that does exist has been used to date the midden to the early Middle to the beginning of the Late Jomon (about 4800 to 4000 years ago). What were the Jomon people doing with all these shells? The excavators have argued that Nakazato was a type of production site where the shells were being processed for trade.
On the biological anthropology side, DODO Yukio, DOI Naomi and KONDO Osamu reported non-metric and metric studies of Okinawan skulls in which they found a greater similarity to the mainland Japanese than the Ainu (papers presented at the Anthropological Society of Nippon general meeting in October). At a conference at Nichibunken in September and in his book Bunshi Jinruigaku to Nihonjin no Kigen (Molecular Anthropology and the Origin of the Japanese) (Tokyo: Shokabo 1996), geneticist OMOTO Keiichi reported that in his recent analyses the Ainu cluster with Northeast Asians, throwing some doubt on HANIHARA Kazuro's theory of a Southeast Asian origin for the Jomon people.