Material selection and weaving techniques for the oldest basketry in Japan found at the Higashimyou site, Saga Prefecture

Abstract Compared with North America or northern Africa, prehistoric basketry has rarely been studied in East Asia. Even in Japan where plant remains excavated from lowland sites have been studied extensively in the past thirty years, the study of basketry lagged behind that of other wooden artifacts, and materials of less than 1000 baskets of the Jomon period have been identified versus more than 21,300 wooden artifacts and 32,500 natural woods of the same period so far identified. The Higashimyou site in Saga prefecture of western Japan yielded over 700 baskets including basket fragments of the initial Jomon period from 8000 to 7300 cal BP and provided a good material to examine the material selection and basketry technique of the incipient basketry manufacture in Japan. The identification of basket materials revealed that large baskets were made mostly with splints of two arboreal species, Sapindus mukorossi and Ficus erecta , and that small ones were made mostly with stems of two vine species, Sinomenium acutum and Trachelospermum . The basketry techniques used at this site showed that the bodies of the baskets were made by various types of twill, weave, and twining, and that the bodies of large ones were usually made of two kinds of technique across belts in the middle of the bodies. The employment of various basketry techniques at this site showed that most of the basketry techniques used in later Jomon and following periods were already established in the initial Jomon period. Occurrences of remains of the material plants around the site, the archaeological record of these plants in Japan, and floristic studies of present Japan indicated that appropriate materials used for the baskets were not easily available around the site and that some kind of resources management for basketry materials must have existed around the settlement.