Sapporo Satoland
Farm park built over an ancient dig where hearths, grain, and traded pottery surfaced from beneath the fields.
Location
About this audio guide
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.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Sapporo City Buried Cultural Property Center
Excavated clay figurine buried with shark teeth and red ochre, later reborn as a Sapporo Snow Festival sculpture.
Takino Suzuran Hillside Park
Sprawling hillside park of flower fields, waterfalls and forest trails on former pioneer farmland.
Nopporo Forest Park
Mixed forest of oak and linden hiding meadows that were once farmland cleared by hand after wartime famine.
Sapporo Ainu Culture Promotion Center
Reconstructed Ainu village with hand-touch artifacts, a carved canoe, and traditional cise dwellings by a forested river.
Botanic Garden, Hokkaidō University
Historic wooded botanical garden with a wooden museum of Ainu artifacts and taxidermied specimens.
Historical Village of Hokkaido
Open-air museum of over fifty relocated pioneer-era buildings from Hokkaido's frontier settlement.