          There are two interpretations of this drawing.  One is that the woman has just borne a baby  But an archaeologist Makoto Watanabe thinks differently, and Professor Atsuhiko Yoshida agrees with him.  They think that in this picture a baby is going up into the body of the woman.
          One reason is that her breast is not big enough. like that of a woman who has just become a mother and is going to feed a baby.  As it is the case in other cultures too, woman's breast is usually exaggerated when it is a symbol of motherhood. So the woman here is not a mother yet, or has not been pregnant for months getting prepared to become a mother.
         The other reason is based on Jomon people's way of burying their infants. Jomon people put an infant's dead body into a pot and buried it at the entrance of their house. Pots with an infant's bones have been excavated there. Those pots were sometimes found buried upside down, but in that case the bottom of pots was broken, or there was a hole in the bottom. Archaeologists and anthropologists in Japan have reached a conclusion that Jomon people wished their dead child would get out of the pot and come back into its mother's womb and be reborn, so they buried the pot coffin at the entrance of their house where the mother walked in and out every day. By burying their child there, they probably thought they could make it easy for the child to enter its mother again. For these reasons, the two scholars think that though the basic idea about pottery and childbirth is the same on these two pots, the latter one is not a Shussan-doki.

The left pot was excavated at Toudonomiya Site in Nagano Prefecture. It is 64 centimeters high, and though it cannot be seen clearly in the picture here, the right-hand drawing is on the lower part of its body. The figure is considered to be a woman.
When it was found, there were two small pots beside it, one on its right-hand side and the other on its left-hand side. As there are some burns on its outside, it probably was used as a cooking pot first, and then it was used as a coffin.