Changing relations with animals
During the Jomon period, wild boar played an important role in both subsistence and ideology. A degree of animal husbandry is suggested by the presence of boar bones at Jomon sites in Hokkaido and on islands off the Pacific coast of Honshu, beyond their natural range.
Although deer bones are regularly found in Jomon shell middens, they are barely represented in Jomon material culture, while ceramic figurines of boar are relatively common.[784] Work by Koike Hiroko on faunal assemblages suggests that at certain times and places during the Jomon, there was considerable hunting pressure on larger wild animals, as well as on shellfish.[785] Populations may have become depleted, with the result that the relatively sedentary populations of larger Jomon settlements had to depend more on fish, small animals, and especially plants. These findings are backed up by more recent work at Sannai Maruyama, the largest Jomon settlement yet investigated, occupied at differing rates of intensity over nearly two millennia from 3900 to 2300 bce, where changes in lithic assemblages and low ratios of deer and wild boar in the faunal assemblages in the later stages of occupation indicate a shift to a largely plant diet, and potential over-hunting of larger animals around this long-lived settlement.[786]The significance of different animals changes during the Yayoi period, when deer start to feature in material culture depictions. For example, one survey of 364 pictorial representations on Yayoi period bronze bells found 129 pictures of deer and just 18 of wild boar. The first evidence for the domesticated pig also comes from the Yayoi period and it can be differentiated from wild boar at a number of sites in western Japan.[787] Recent work has focused on identifying the genetic forebears of Japanese pigs.[788] Perforated pig jawbones have been found at sites including Nabatake and Karako-Kagi, suggesting that they were mounted on poles, as is found in the Chinese Neolithic. At Karako-Kagi, wild boar continued to be raised in captivity.
Animal bones also featured in divinatory rituals during the Yayoi, in which hot sticks were pressed onto mainly scapula, in practices reminiscent of Chinese Shang dynasty oracle bones. Over 75 per cent of these bones were deer, followed by boar.[789]Pigs along with dogs, which were domesticated early in the Jomon, were the main domestic animals kept during the Yayoi. Although there are small numbers of horse and cattle bones from Yayoi sites in western Japan, they are not present in significant numbers until the later Kofun period.[790] Hoofprints in a Kofun period field at Kuroimine, Gunma prefecture, are evidence for the raising of horses by this time. Bones of domestic fowl are found on sites from the Yayoi period, and by the beginning of the Kofun period roosters appear in the repertoire of ceremonial material culture, including wooden examples thought to have played a role in funerary rituals, perhaps to reawaken the dead, and ceramic haniwa figures placed on burial mounds, though there is no evidence that chickens were being extensively consumed.[791] Fishing continued to be important, with evidence for specialized octopus-trapping using pots common at many Yayoi coastal sites, along with new types of net sinkers. The introduction of wet rice farming led to a restructuring of the way faunal food resources were exploited, but they continued to be an important part of the diet, helping support the increased population.