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Bengala

The only appreciable story prehistoric people have left is in their litter. “ベンガラ” is the Japanese term, derived from the Dutch “bengala,” for red iron oxide, which was used to color some Jomon pottery around 3000 years ago. The Jomon culture, a people who like Native Americans had genetic roots in the Altai Mountains, was first brought to light by American biologist Edward S. Morse, not a professional archeologist, who noticed one of their midden piles near Tokyo. I discovered fragments of Jomon pottery washing down a river and took them to local archeologists in 2011. I recently made an effort to revisit the site, since archeologists said they could not find anything. I found more pieces of stone flaking and the pottery below, as well as the rusted remains of a Heian knife, and again delivered them to archeologists. For tens of thousands of years, the Jomon were among other things whale hunters whose culture extended from Ryukyu to Kamchatka.





Location: Iwate, Japan

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