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Iwajuku Site
The an archaeological site located in what is now the Kasuke neighborhood of the city of Midori, Gunma Prefecture in the northern Kantō region of Japan with finds from the Japanese Paleolithic period. It received protection as a National Historic Site in 1979. Overview The site is located about 4.4 km west-southwest of JR East Kiryū Station at an elevation of 196.2 meters above sea level, and is a cutting through the central saddle of two hills extending from northeast to southwest. The site was discovered in 1947 by a seller of ''nattō'' and amateur archaeologist Aizawa Tadahiro, who passed through this cutting every day on his way to work. One day, Aizawa found a small flake of obsidian which resembled a microlith in a layer of red soil much lower than the black topsoil layer. He continued to look in the area, but could find no evidence of Jōmon pottery, but in subsequent months found numerous other stone tools, including a stone arrowhead in 1949. Puzzled by these d ...
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Midori, Gunma
is a city located in Gunma Prefecture, Japan. , the city had an estimated population of 50,266 in 21,028 households, and a population density of 240 persons per km². The total area of the city is . Geography Midori is located in eastern Gunma Prefecture in the northern Kantō Plains. The city is shaped like an inverse triangle, bordered by Tochigi Prefecture to the north, and by the city of Kiryū to the east and west. The Watarase River runs through parts of Midori City. Surrounding municipalities Gunma Prefecture * Kiryū * Isesaki * Ōta * Numata Tochigi Prefecture * Sano * Kanuma * Nikkō Climate Midori has a Humid continental climate (Köppen ''Cfa'') characterized by warm summers and cold winters with heavy snowfall. The average annual temperature in Midori is 14.0 °C. The average annual rainfall is 1296 mm with September as the wettest month. The temperatures are highest on average in August, at around 26.3 °C, and lowest in January, at around 2 ...
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Jōmon Period
The is the time in Japanese history, traditionally dated between   6,000–300 BCE, during which Japan was inhabited by a diverse hunter-gatherer and early agriculturalist population united through a common Jōmon culture, which reached a considerable degree of sedentism and cultural complexity. The name "cord-marked" was first applied by the American zoologist and orientalist Edward S. Morse, who discovered sherds of pottery in 1877 and subsequently translated it into Japanese as ''Jōmon''.Mason, 14 The pottery style characteristic of the first phases of Jōmon culture was decorated by impressing cords into the surface of wet clay and is generally accepted to be among the oldest in the world. The Jōmon period was rich in tools and jewelry made from bone, stone, shell and antler; pottery figurines and vessels; and lacquerware.Imamura, K. (1996) ''Prehistoric Japan: New Perspectives on Insular East Asia''. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press It is often compared to pre-C ...
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Lithic Flake
In archaeology, a lithic flake is a "portion of rock removed from an objective piece by percussion or pressure,"Andrefsky, W. (2005) ''Lithics: Macroscopic Approaches to Analysis''. 2d Ed. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press and may also be referred to as simply a ''flake'', or collectively as debitage. The objective piece, or the rock being reduced by the removal of flakes, is known as a core.Andrefsky, W. (2005) ''Lithics: Macroscopic Approaches to Analysis''. 2d Ed. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press Once the proper tool stone has been selected, a percussor or pressure flaker (e.g., an antler tine) is used to direct a sharp blow, or apply sufficient force, respectively, to the surface of the stone, often on the edge of the piece. The energy of this blow propagates through the material, often ( but not always) producing a Hertzian cone of force which causes the rock to fracture in a controllable fashion. Since cores are often struck on an edge with a suitable angle (<90°) ...
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Scraper (archaeology)
In prehistoric archaeology, scrapers are unifacial tools thought to have been used for hideworking and woodworking. Many lithic analysts maintain that the only true scrapers are defined on the base of use-wear, and usually are those that were worked on the distal ends of blades—i.e., "end scrapers" (french: grattoir, link=no). Other scrapers include the so-called "side scrapers" or racloirs, which are made on the longest side of a flake, and notched scrapers, which have a cleft on either side that may have been used to attach them to something else. Scrapers are typically formed by chipping the end of a flake of stone in order to create one sharp side and to keep the rest of the sides dull to facilitate grasping it. Most scrapers are either circle or blade-like in shape. The working edges of scrapers tend to be convex, and many have trimmed and dulled lateral edges to facilitate hafting. One important variety of scraper is the thumbnail scraper, a scraper shaped much like ...
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Stone Axe
A hand axe (or handaxe or Acheulean hand axe) is a prehistoric stone tool with two faces that is the longest-used tool in human history, yet there is no academic consensus on what they were used for. It is made from stone, usually flint or chert that has been "reduced" and shaped from a larger piece by knapping, or hitting against another stone. They are characteristic of the lower Acheulean and middle Palaeolithic (Mousterian) periods, roughly 1.6 million years ago to about 100,000 years ago, and used by ''Homo erectus'' and other early humans, but rarely by ''Homo sapiens''. Their technical name (biface) comes from the fact that the archetypical model is a generally bifacial (with two wide sides or faces) and almond-shaped (amygdaloidal) lithic flake. Hand axes tend to be symmetrical along their longitudinal axis and formed by pressure or percussion. The most common hand axes have a pointed end and rounded base, which gives them their characteristic almond shape, and both ...
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Shale
Shale is a fine-grained, clastic sedimentary rock formed from mud that is a mix of flakes of clay minerals (hydrous aluminium phyllosilicates, e.g. kaolin, Al2 Si2 O5( OH)4) and tiny fragments (silt-sized particles) of other minerals, especially quartz and calcite.Blatt, Harvey and Robert J. Tracy (1996) ''Petrology: Igneous, Sedimentary and Metamorphic'', 2nd ed., Freeman, pp. 281–292 Shale is characterized by its tendency to split into thin layers ( laminae) less than one centimeter in thickness. This property is called '' fissility''. Shale is the most common sedimentary rock. The term ''shale'' is sometimes applied more broadly, as essentially a synonym for mudrock, rather than in the more narrow sense of clay-rich fissile mudrock. Texture Shale typically exhibits varying degrees of fissility. Because of the parallel orientation of clay mineral flakes in shale, it breaks into thin layers, often splintery and usually parallel to the otherwise indistinguishable beddin ...
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Chert
Chert () is a hard, fine-grained sedimentary rock composed of microcrystalline or cryptocrystalline quartz, the mineral form of silicon dioxide (SiO2). Chert is characteristically of biological origin, but may also occur inorganically as a precipitation (chemistry), chemical precipitate or a diagenesis, diagenetic replacement, as in petrified wood. Chert is typically composed of the petrified remains of siliceous ooze, the biogenic sediment that covers large areas of the deep ocean floor, and which contains the silicon skeletal remains of diatoms, Dictyochales, silicoflagellates, and radiolarians. Precambrian cherts are notable for the presence of fossil cyanobacteria. In addition to Micropaleontology, microfossils, chert occasionally contains macrofossils. However, some chert is devoid of any fossils. Chert varies greatly in color (from white to black), but most often manifests as gray, brown, grayish brown and light green to rusty redW.L. Roberts, T.J. Campbell, G.R. Rapp Jr. ...
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Hunter-gatherer
A traditional hunter-gatherer or forager is a human living an ancestrally derived lifestyle in which most or all food is obtained by foraging, that is, by gathering food from local sources, especially edible wild plants but also insects, fungi, honey, or anything safe to eat, and/or by hunting game (pursuing and/or trapping and killing wild animals, including catching fish), roughly as most animal omnivores do. Hunter-gatherer societies stand in contrast to the more sedentary agricultural societies, which rely mainly on cultivating crops and raising domesticated animals for food production, although the boundaries between the two ways of living are not completely distinct. Hunting and gathering was humanity's original and most enduring successful competitive adaptation in the natural world, occupying at least 90 percent of human history. Following the invention of agriculture, hunter-gatherers who did not change were displaced or conquered by farming or pastoralist groups in ...
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Brown Bear
The brown bear (''Ursus arctos'') is a large bear species found across Eurasia and North America. In North America, the populations of brown bears are called grizzly bears, while the subspecies that inhabits the Kodiak Islands of Alaska is known as the Kodiak bear. It is one of the largest living terrestrial members of the Order (biology), order Carnivora, rivaled in size only by its closest relative, the polar bear (''Ursus maritimus''), which is much less variable in size and slightly bigger on average. The brown bear's range includes parts of Russia, Central Asia, the Himalayas, China, Canada, the United States, Hokkaido, Scandinavia, Finland, the Balkans, the Picos de Europa and the Carpathian region (especially Romania), Iran, Anatolia, and the Caucasus. The brown bear is recognized as a national and state animal in several European countries. While the brown bear's range has shrunk, and it has faced local extinctions across its wide range, it remains listed as a least con ...
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Palaeoloxodon Naumanni
''Palaeoloxodon naumanni'', occasionally called Naumann's elephant, is an extinct species belonging to the genus ''Palaeoloxodon'' found in the Japanese archipelago during the Middle to Late Pleistocene around 430,000 to 24,000 years ago. It is named after Heinrich Edmund Naumann who discovered the first fossils at Yokosuka, Kanagawa, Japan. Fossils attributed to ''P. naumanni'' are also known from China and Korea, though the status of these specimens are unresolved, with some authors regarding these as belonging to separate species. Description ''Palaeoloxodon naumanni,'' like other members of the genus ''Palaeoloxodon'' had a pair of long straight tusks and a parietal-occipital crest on the top of the head. These tusks grew more than 2.4 m in length, 20 cm in diameter. It was a little smaller than Asian elephants averaging to . It lived in forest which mixed subarctic conifers and cool-temperate deciduous trees. The ancestor of ''Palaeoloxodon naumanni'' moved from the ...
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Hokkaido
is Japan's second largest island and comprises the largest and northernmost prefecture, making up its own region. The Tsugaru Strait separates Hokkaidō from Honshu; the two islands are connected by the undersea railway Seikan Tunnel. The largest city on Hokkaidō is its capital, Sapporo, which is also its only ordinance-designated city. Sakhalin lies about 43 kilometers (26 mi) to the north of Hokkaidō, and to the east and northeast are the Kuril Islands, which are administered by Russia, though the four most southerly are claimed by Japan. Hokkaidō was formerly known as ''Ezo'', ''Yezo'', ''Yeso'', or ''Yesso''. Nussbaum, Louis-Frédéric. (2005). "Hokkaidō" in Although there were Japanese settlers who ruled the southern tip of the island since the 16th century, Hokkaido was considered foreign territory that was inhabited by the indigenous people of the island, known as the Ainu people. While geographers such as Mogami Tokunai and Mamiya Rinzō explored the isla ...
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Kyushu
is the third-largest island of Japan's five main islands and the most southerly of the four largest islands ( i.e. excluding Okinawa). In the past, it has been known as , and . The historical regional name referred to Kyushu and its surrounding islands. Kyushu has a land area of and a population of 14,311,224 in 2018. In the 8th-century Taihō Code reforms, Dazaifu was established as a special administrative term for the region. Geography The island is mountainous, and Japan's most active volcano, Mount Aso at , is on Kyushu. There are many other signs of tectonic activity, including numerous areas of hot springs. The most famous of these are in Beppu, on the east shore, and around Mt. Aso in central Kyushu. The island is separated from Honshu by the Kanmon Straits. Being the nearest island to the Asian continent, historically it is the gateway to Japan. The total area is which makes it the 37th largest island in the world. It's slightly larger than Taiwan island . ...
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