Jomon-period communities in the Japanese archipelago obtained obsidian from a limited number of volcanic sources, including Mount Wada and the island of Kozushima, and distributed it across distances of more than a hundred kilometers. Trace-element sourcing studies on recovered tools show overlapping supply zones, suggesting that multiple communities accessed the same quarries through travel, exchange, or both. This pattern persisted for several thousand years across the Jomon period, alongside the production of other crafted goods such as lacquerware.
Relevance to Trade History
Demonstrates that complex, long-distance material exchange developed independently among East Asian hunter-gatherer societies, without agriculture or centralized authority.
Read the full story in our article Obsidian and the World's Oldest Known Trade Networks.
Source: Tokyo National Museum. See our Sources & Methodology page for how we select and verify references.