Sapporo City Buried Cultural Property Center

This guide to the Sapporo City Buried Cultural Property Center starts in 1995, when bulldozers clearing ground for an ordinary job-training center in the Nijuyonken neighborhood hit a burial ground thousands of years old, along with traces of pit houses and cooking fires from a vanished village. You'll hear how archaeologists opened sixteen graves from the late Jomon period, and how the largest held something unexpected from a hunter-gatherer culture: a small clay human figure, laid to rest with shark teeth and red ochre. The guide follows what that discovery meant once the city recognized it as an official cultural property in 2004. The figurine itself sits in the case just past the doors, the first thing you meet inside.