The Sannai-Maruyama Site (Japanese: 三内丸山遺跡, Hepburn: Sannai-Maruyama iseki) is an archaeological site and museum located in the Maruyama and Yasuda neighborhoods to the southwest of central Aomori City in Aomori Prefecture in northern Japan, containing the ruins of a very large Jōmon period settlement. The ruins of a 40-hectare (400,000 m; 99-acre) settlement were discovered in 1992, when Aomori Prefecture started surveying the area for a planned baseball stadium. Archaeologists have used this site to further their understanding of the transition to sedentism and the life of the Jōmon people. Excavation has led to the discovery of storage pits, above ground storage, and long houses. These findings demonstrate a change in the structure of the community, architecture, and organizational behaviors of these people. Because of the extensive information and importance, this site was designated as a Special National Historical Site of Japan in 2000, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site as part of the Jōmon Prehistoric Sites in Northern Japan collection in 2021. Today the public can visit the site, its various reconstructions of Jōmon structures, and a museum that displays and houses artifacts collected on the site, which have collectively been designated an Important Cultural Property of Japan.
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Sannai-Maruyama Site in the context of Jōmon people
The Jōmon (縄文) were a prehistoric hunter-gatherer culture that inhabited the Japanese archipelago between approximately 14,000 BC and 300 BC, following which they were largely assimilated by migrants from mainland East Asia of the following Yayoi culture. The Jōmon people lived as sedentary hunter-gatherers, practicing plant foraging, fishing and hunting and possibly limited farming, manufacturing stone tools and pottery, the distinctive markings on the latter giving the culture their name. Jōmon ancestry forms a significant minority of the ancestry of modern Japanese people, and a majority of the ancestry of the indigenous Ainu people of Hokkaido.
View the full Wikipedia page for Jōmon people