 So I was born in Japan and I lived there until I was about 11 and so I've always had this fascination with Japan and then in 2001 my family and I moved to Australia and I became really interested in archaeology and this was mainly because I started watching the British TV show Time Team which is presented by Tony Robinson and so I kind of became hooked on archaeology. In my first year of undergraduate at the Australian National University I had an archaeology course where one of the assessment pieces you had to create an artifact from a culture the way that those people would have made it back then. So I decided to make a Jomon figurine because I thought that would be cool and yeah so I picked this one here the Holomastogu from the Nakapara site in Nagano prefecture. Jomon clay figurines start appearing in the archaeological record around about 10,000 BC and they cease to be made when immigrants from the Korean Peninsula arrived in Japan about 300 or 400 BC. This figurine is called Palms Fest together. It was found at the Kazahari One site in Aomori prefecture. It dates from the late Jomon period so about 1,000 BC and this one is particularly special it's a national treasure of Japan. So in 2009 a lot of the figurines were put in an exhibition at the British Museum and this is the kettle or the book that was created from that exhibition. This is a very important figurine to me because it's the heart-shaped logu and my boyfriend actually made a necklace of this figurine for me. So approximately 15,000 clay, the Jomon clay figurines have been found so far but archaeologists believe that over 200,000 were made so we still have quite a few more to find. I would like to one day do my PhD on these Jomon clay figurines. I'm actually going back to Japan at the end of the year so that I can do a bit of research for my masters next year but I'm also hoping to do a bit more research and see a few more figurines while I'm there as well. So my dream is actually to one day unearth a real Jomon figurine while I'm excavating in Japan. That would be amazing.