The present study discusses the management and use of forest resources at settlement sites that produced wooden artifacts for a long time during the Yayoi to Kofun periods. In some cases, small settlement sites were scattered in the hilly terrain not to affect the surrounding environment. In others, settlement sites that deforested the surrounding environment were forced to move to densely wooded terrains at higher altitudes, or were relocating settlements along densely wooded plateaus, returning to the original place after 10 to 30 years. The last example parallels the moving pattern of Kiji-shi, bowl wood craftsman with lathe, in the early modern period. Since the late phase of the Yayoi period, an increase in population and cultivation caused exhaustion of the forest resources, especially in the Kinki region, and people had to move to remote mountains to produce wooded artifacts. Possibly, settlements on high grounds derived from these settlements and turned into Soma, forests of the state and powerful lords, in later periods. Large settlements formed in the alluvial lowland of the Kinki and Tokai regions probably maintained their life for a long time by obtaining wooden materials from surrounding secondary forests artificially made at an early stage.

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Although exclusively used for hoes and spades since the Yayoi period, Quercus gilva is known only as fruits in storage pits before that, and it was unknown in what kind of forest or since when this species grew in western Japan. At the Tarumi-hyuga site on the northern shore of the Osaka bay, fossil woods and plant macrofossils of the initial and middle–final Jomon periods were obtained. These fossils showed that a deciduous forest of Aphananthe aspera, Zelkova serrata, and Carpinus tschonoskii existed before the fall of Kikai-Akahoya tephra (K-Ah) and that a lucidophyll forest of Quercus subgen. Cyclobalanopsis including Q. gilva and Cinnamomum camphora existed after the fall, agreeing with the pollen analyses carried out around the Osaka bay. From an extant lucidophyll forest in Miyazaki, the lucidophyll forest established after the fall of K-Ah differed in the dominance of canopy trees, but had a similar species composition, added with species growing in open disturbed areas, probably reflecting an unstable habitat at the foot of Mt. Rokko. Considering other records of plant macrofossils, lucidophyll forests with Q. gilva spread around the Seto sea around the early Jomon period after the fall of K-Ah.

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