Akira Matsui, who passed too early from cancer a few years back, had a column in the Yomiuri Shimbun Newspaper, the most popular one in Japan with an estimated circulation of over 10 million (called the biggest newspaper in the world). He wrote his column about our collaboration in excavating the National Historic Landmark Sunken Village wet site in Portland Oregon in 2007--he sponsored the project. My son Jaered Croes, who runs
www.textfugu.com, a Japanese language teaching site, help us translate the article. (see publications on the Sunken Village wet site under Book section too):
Last September 2007, five fellow researchers and I went to Oregon in the United States of America to participate in an excavation. It all started when my old friend Professor Dale Croes from the South Puget Sound Community College emailed me saying: “I found some pits packed with acorns in an ancient Columbia River intertidal beach site called Sunken Village. Would you like to do a collaborative project there?”
We knew that in the fall, the ancient Japanese Jomon people would store large amounts of acorns in storage pits so that during the passing winter they would have food. However, there is a difference between how Eastern and Western Japan went about this. Eastern Japan Jomon put their storage pits on top of a hill, and the West puts it at the bottom of a hill in a muddy, wet place. We didn't know the reason for this. When I asked Dale about the acorn pits, we hoped that we could get some ideas through this Oregon work.
I've been part of the Higashimyo wet site research advisory board, Saga City Board of Education, coordinating the excavations and research since 2004. On the Ariake Sea, with the Kose River running along it, the early Jomon people lived there 7000 years ago. We found six shell middens, and around their bases we found 200 acorn storage pits. What surprised me was how many of the baskets were still preserved. By the time the excavation was over, the total number had risen to 730 basketry examples.
The Sunken Village wet site is approximately one hour North of Portland in the silty intertidal banks of the Columbia and Willamette River slough, located on the west side of Sauvie Island. The Columbia River empties into the Pacific Ocean about 70 km west of the site location, but even so, during high tide the site is submerged. When the water is pumped through garden hoses and fine adjust nozzles, you spray water to clean off the surface, and you can see the outline of frequent and overlapping acorn pits, so I'm sure you can imagine how long it would take to excavate this site where we located 114 acorn pits in a week of work. Through the center of the site runs an underground aquifer that comes from fresh, spring water. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why they are so concentrated in only this one area. We realized that the construction of the storage pits was adjacent to the water. First, they were 0.5 – 1 meter from the river bank. Lining the acorn pits were hemlock boughs, then they were concealed by woven basketry. The acorns here are in the white oak family so they are deciduous and have tannic acids in them. Before you eat them you have to crack and soak them in moving ground waters. Dale is doing an experiment where he made a model acorn pit in an aquarium and runs water through it, experimenting with methods to make the acorns edible. Last year, the storage pits we mapped had radio-carbon dates from 130 to 700 years old (as best as we can tell). I am sure if we dug deeper, we'd find even older materials, since our coring at the site revealed cultural layers to 3.5 meters deep!
To me, being able to directly compare the separated American Northwest Coast and ancient Japanese cultures has been a dream of mine since my student days, and I look forward to continuing this collaborative effort into the future.
