Sapporo Satoland
Farm park built over an ancient dig where hearths, grain, and traded pottery surfaced from beneath the fields.
This guide to Sapporo Satoland traces a 2013 dig at Okadama, where archaeologists and volunteers opening a trench under the farm park's corn rows expected ordinary reclaimed swampland and found something else. More than twenty ash-stained hearths turned up first, spanning many generations but with no houses to match them. Then came charred grain and millet, pointing to people farming this ground far earlier, and far further north, than anyone had believed. Listen for how a single small clay ornament, found in this Hokkaido peat, still has researchers puzzling over who these people were trading with.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.