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Accepted Paper:

Tumuli construction as social process: the creation of monumental landscape in proto-historic Japan  
Jun'ichiro Tsujita (Kyushu University)

Paper short abstract:

In considering state formation process archaeologically, it is useful to consider how the tumuli of ‘chiefly’ person(s) were constructed in the landscape. I will consider these issues from the viewpoints of the ‘alternation of generations’ of local chiefs, and the symbolic meanings of the landscape formed through building monumental tumuli.

Paper long abstract:

In considering state formation process archaeologically, it is useful to consider how the tumuli of 'chiefly' person(s) were constructed and how these tumuli, settlement area and fields formed the landscape for the living people. In this paper, I will consider these issues from the viewpoints of the 'alternation of generations' of local chiefs, and the symbolic meanings of the landscape formed through building monumental tumuli.

This paper examines the Kofun (mounded tomb) period of proto-historic Japan which is dated from middle 3rd to late 6th centuries. In this period, more than 5,200 keyhole-shaped tumuli were built across a wide area of the Japanese archipelago. These tumuli varied in size from 20m to more than 400m, and each tumulus was for one or several persons. The characteristics of these tumuli are summarized as below: 1) in many cases, a new tumulus was built when the chiefly person(s) died or once the person in question had achieved chiefly status, after which point the tumuli of previous generations were abandoned; 2) because of 1), this lead to the continuous practice of tumulus construction especially in the western and central part of the archipelago, resulting in a remarkable density of mounded tombs. I will discuss how the social power of local chiefs was maintained, legitimized and renewed through this process of continuous landscape formation. In this way we can understand how the building of new tumuli was embedded in the process of social reproduction over a period of three hundred years.

Panel S29
Landscape and symbolic power
  Session 1