Odai Yamamoto Site and Goshono Site

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. Odai Yamamoto Site

   Some of the oldest pottery in the world was found on a hillside near the northern end of Honshu, and nobody was looking for it. At Odai Yamamoto I, on the Tsugaru Peninsula in Aomori prefecture, archaeologists dug up fragments of fired clay that date back more than sixteen thousand years, among the earliest known ceramics in Japan, made by hunter-gatherers at the end of the last Ice Age. The site is part of the Jomon prehistoric sites of northern Japan, a World Heritage listing from 2021 that celebrates a long era of settled life without agriculture, with Sannai Maruyama as its best-known example.

   Read the complete Odai Yamamoto Site write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Odai Yamamoto Site is where the day begins. Next is Futatsumori Site.

2. 2. Futatsumori Site

   Futatsumori is a gentle hilltop near the town of Shichinohe in Aomori prefecture, overlooking Lake Ogawara, and to an untrained eye it is simply a grassy field among woods and farmland. But this is one of the largest shell mounds in the Tōhoku region, piled up by Jōmon people over thousands of years as they gathered shellfish from the lake and the sea, and it belongs to the same World Heritage group of Jōmon sites as the better-known Sannai-Maruyama. The shell heaps, rich in calcium, neutralised the acid soil and preserved bones, tools and ornaments that would otherwise have dissolved.

   Read the complete Futatsumori Site write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Futatsumori Site comes up about 102 km into the recorded legs. Next is Goshono Site.

3. 3. Goshono Site

   In the hills of northern Iwate, a short ride from the town of Ichinohe, a group of round houses with grass-covered roofs sits in a quiet clearing among cedar and broadleaf woods. They look like something out of a fairy tale, low mounds with doorways and smoke holes, and they are reconstructions of pit dwellings from the Jomon period, the long prehistoric era of hunter-gatherers who lived in Japan from around fifteen thousand years ago until the arrival of rice farming. The Goshono site was a large settlement in the middle Jomon period, and excavations found that some houses here were roofed with earth rather than thatch, which is why the reconstructions look the way they do. Since 2021 it has been one of the components of the World Heritage site of the Jomon Prehistoric Sites in Northern Japan.

   Read the complete Goshono Site write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   about 190 km into the recorded legs you reach Goshono Site. Next is back through Futatsumori Site.

4. 4. back through Futatsumori Site

   Return visit. Read the place description above.

   Read the complete Futatsumori Site write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   back through Futatsumori Site, late in the day. Next is Odai Yamamoto Site.

5. 5. Odai Yamamoto Site

   Return visit. Read the place description above.

   Read the complete Odai Yamamoto Site write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Back at Odai Yamamoto Site. That is the ride.