--- title: "A 2,900-Year-Old Clay Earring From Saitama Comes With Very Good Comparables" description: "The Jomon ornament, parts of it a millimetre thick, looks like earrings in Gunma and Tokyo that are already Important Cultural Properties" author: "Nate Ledger" published: 2026-10-25T16:18:37Z modified: 2026-10-26T00:09:05Z url: https://rews.cc/a/a-2-900-year-old-clay-earring-from-saitama-comes-with-very-g-bda401 language: en tags: ["archaeology", "jomon", "japan", "history", "art", "culture"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # A 2,900-Year-Old Clay Earring From Saitama Comes With Very Good Comparables *The Jomon ornament, parts of it a millimetre thick, looks like earrings in Gunma and Tokyo that are already Important Cultural Properties* By Nate Ledger · October 25, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/a-2-900-year-old-clay-earring-from-saitama-comes-with-very-g-bda401 ## In brief - A clay earring about 2,900 years old was excavated on July 23 at the Shinpukuji Shell Mound in Saitama, Japan - It is about 8 cm across, with openwork spirals, sections about 1 mm thick and traces of red pigment - The city board of education says it closely resembles earrings from sites in Gunma and Tokyo that are Important Cultural Properties - The find spot may have been a burial, but who wore the earring and where it was made are unknown - It goes on public display on November 14, 2026, at a symposium marking 100 years of excavation at the site On July 23, archaeologists digging at the Shinpukuji Shell Mound in Saitama, north of Tokyo, pulled a clay earring out of the ground. It is about 2,900 years old, from the Final Jomon period. It measures roughly eight centimetres across at its widest point. It is decorated with spirals and rings and, mostly, with holes: the design is openwork, clay arranged around empty space, and the thinnest pieces of clay are about one millimetre thick. There are traces of red pigment on it, so it was presumably a good deal brighter when someone made it than it is now. [Arkeonews reported the find](https://arkeonews.net/2900-year-old-clay-earring-with-1-millimeter-thick-details-found-in-japan/) this weekend, and [Kyodo News carried it](https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/d3b5446bd0c7ad352cbf54d46a1b5891c624c0c5) on October 22. Do the arithmetic for a second. The widest dimension is 80 millimetres and the thinnest bits are 1 millimetre, so you have an object 80 times wider than its most delicate parts, made of clay, that then sat in the ground for something like 29 centuries and came out with its lace intact. Clay is not a forgiving material. Most clay objects of that age come out of the ground as fragments, and archaeologists spend a lot of their time gluing those fragments back together. This one apparently didn’t need it. The part of the earring that was actually worn is about four centimetres in diameter; the rest is ornament radiating out from it. The Sankei Shimbun, which [reported the discovery earlier in October](https://jp.headtopics.com/news/1230029305245001104422-88428389), described the decoration as looking like the cross-section of a sliced walnut, with the three-pronged motif characteristic of the Final Jomon. Clay earrings were common enough in Jomon society. Plenty were small and plain. This one was not plain. ## The comps Here is the part I find most fun. If you want to know what something is worth, in finance or in anything else, you look for comparable things and see how they were valued. The Saitama City Board of Education did the archaeological version of that. It says the new earring closely resembles earrings excavated at the Sennami-Yato site in Kiryu, in Gunma Prefecture, and at the Shimofuda site in Chofu, in Tokyo. The resemblance goes beyond the round shape; the decorative arrangements themselves are closely related. In the board’s words, as [reported by Kyodo](https://www.chunichi.co.jp/article/1328452), “the decoration is strikingly similar, which suggests there was exchange with distant regions.” Those two comparables have both been designated Important Cultural Properties of Japan. So the new earring arrives with a valuation already implied. The Sankei reported that it might follow the site’s most famous object into that category: the owl-faced clay figurine known as the “Mimizuku Dogu,” which was designated in 1957 and [now belongs to the Tokyo National Museum](https://colbase.nich.go.jp/collection_items/tnm/J-39223?locale=en). That is a possibility in a newspaper report, not a decision. Designation is a national process, and the city does not get to award it to itself just because the comps look good. The resemblance also raises a harder question than valuation. The three earrings come from separate settlements, not one workshop. So how did the style travel? People moving, objects being traded, or ideas being copied are all possible, and researchers have not yet worked out which it was. “Exchange with distant regions” is a careful phrase. It tells you something moved without saying what. ## Jewellery as disclosure Archaeologists think the spot where the earring turned up may have been a grave, which would raise the possibility that it belonged to the person buried there. That matters because of what researchers think these ornaments were for. Some have proposed that elaborate Jomon earrings signalled things about the wearer: where they came from, where they stood in the community. Other interpretations, Kyodo noted, tie them to marital status or to whether a woman had given birth. On that reading an earring like this is less an accessory than a public filing, a standing statement of facts about the person who wears it, readable by anyone close enough to look. That is an attractive theory, and it has to stay a theory for now. Such links are hard to pin down for any single object, and in this case the evidence does not yet show who wore the earring, whether it was made locally, or how it ended up where it was found. A burial would suggest the earring meant something beyond decoration. It wouldn’t tell you what. ## Good timing The Shinpukuji Shell Mound sits in Saitama’s Iwatsuki district. It is a shell midden plus the remains of a settlement occupied in the Late and Final Jomon periods, and it has been a [national historic site since 1975](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinpukuji_shell_mound). Earlier digs produced pottery, clay figurines and a lot of personal ornaments, according to [Japan Heritage’s description of the site](https://japanheritage.jp/saitama/heritage/shinpukuji-shell-mound). The owl figurine is relevant here too: clay discs attached to its ears appear to represent large earrings worn through the earlobes, so the site’s best-known object is, among other things, a picture of people wearing objects like the one just found. Further up the Kanto plain, another dig recently produced [a fifth-century clay woman by the Tone River](https://rews.cc/a/in-a-ditch-by-the-tone-river-a-fifth-century-clay-woman-stil-d9457a), so it has been a good autumn for old clay in the region. Excavation at Shinpukuji began in 1926, which makes 2026 the site’s centenary. The Sankei reported that the earring came from a 43-square-metre area called “Point N,” opened in April as the last dig in a site-improvement programme that has been running since 2016. So: ten years of work, the final trench, the hundredth anniversary, and that is where the best object turns up. The earring will be shown to the public for the first time at a symposium marking the centenary on November 14, 2026. Plenty of institutions would happily pay for an anniversary that came with its own centrepiece. Saitama got one dug out of a burial in a shell midden in July, with four months to spare.