Popoulation dynamics and complexity of clay figurines in the Jomon period

The present study aims to examine the relationship between the population dynamics and the complexity of culture, specifically clay figurines (dogu in Japanese) in the Jomon period of the Japanese archipelago (16,000 BC – 800 BC). Many relevant studies of cultural evolution have argued that as populations and the social networks within them increase, so does the complexity of their cultures (e.g., Henrich 2017; Powell et al. 2009). We test the hypothesis by focusing on the clay figurines from the Jomon period. Clay figurines were produced mainly in the eastern part of the Japanese archipelago during the Jomon period, and it has been commonly claimed that they were used for some ritual purposes. The main purpose of the study is to analyze the fractal dimensions (i.e., the complexity of the data) of three-dimensional data from more than three hundred clay figurines and investigate the relationship between the complexity and the population dynamics in the period.