David Dawson, our Director, talking about Japanese stone circles, the prehistoric Jomon culture and amazing museums he saw when he was fortunate to be invited to join a UK team visiting Japan to build on our existing links and partnerships.

The visit was supported by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation and was helping Wiltshire Museum and English Heritage develop plans for exhibitions to be held during the 2020 Tokyo Olympiad. The exhibition was to look at different aspects of the links between Japanese prehistory, contemporary art and stone circles. The partnerships that lie behind these exhibitions were developed by Professor Simon Kaner of the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Culture (SISJAC). Unfortunately, due to COVID, we had to cancel our exhibition, but the one planned by English Heritage should go ahead in 2022.

We were working with the Umataka Jomon Museum and the Niigata Prefectural Museum with an exchange loan programme. We were planning to borrow a prehistoric Jomon ‘flame’ pot and in return would lend a Beaker, Collared Urn and a Food Vessel to be the centrepiece of an exhibition at the Umtaka Jomon Museum in Nagaoka. We hope that it may be possible for our loans to take place in the future.

The English Heritage exhibition at the Stonehenge Visitor Centre will focus on the similarities and differences between stone circles in the UK and Japan and trace the link made by the work of William Gowland. He developed his interest in archaeology in Japan while he was working as a mining engineer between 1872 and 1888 and is called the father of Japanese archaeology. He returned to England and was invited to re-erect a fallen sarsen stone and to undertake archaeological excavation and recording of the work.  The exhibition was planned to help build links with the nomination of 17 Jomon archaeological sites as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which should take place this month (July 2021).