Edward Sylvester Morse

At the invitation of Edward Sylvester Morse, an American zoologist and Orientalist then teaching at Tokyo Imperial University, Fenollosa in 1878 joined the university to lecture (in English) on political science, philosophy, and economics. At this early stage in the Meiji Restoration, traditional art—and many of Japan’s ancient temples…

…to 1879 the American zoologist Edward Sylvester Morse undertook research in Japan. His discovery of pottery in a shell mound, really a prehistoric refuse heap, on the coast at Ōmori in southwestern Tokyo, served as an important catalyst in directing the attention of young Japanese scholars to the methodical investigation…

…for “cord marks,” the term Morse used in his book Shell Mounds of Omori (1879) to describe the distinctive decoration on the prehistoric pottery shards he found. Other names, such as “Ainu school pottery” and “shell mound pottery,” were also applied to pottery from this period, but after some decades—although…

Morse, called the pottery jōmon (“cord marks”) to describe the patterns pressed into the clay. A convincing theory dates the period during which Jōmon pottery was used from about 10,500 until about the 3rd century bce. Of the features common to Neolithic cultures throughout the…