Feasts and Ritual Structures: Ethnoarchaelogical and Archaeological Perspectives

DOCUMENT Citation Only Masaru Kobayashi.

As in the Northwest Coast of North America, salmon may have played a critical role for the development of subsistence and political economies as well as ritual systems during prehistoric and historic northern Japan. This paper explores the Jomon salmon ceremony in the Japan Sea coastal regions based on the analyses of the (1) ecology of salmon, (2) rock arts (petroglyphs), (3) salmon remains and their archaeological contexts, (4) zoomorphic stone figurines (clubs), and (5) ethnohistory...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryuzaburo Takahashi.

Recent advance in anthropology have resurrected the term totemism from earlier the theories developed by such scholars as Robertson Smith and E, Durkheim at the beginning of 20th century. The crucial features of totemism are: 1) it represents total emblems of the descent groups; 2) it functions to support solidarity of the group; 3) it has as exogamic function; 4) it invokes taboos against killing certain animals and eating them; 5) it constitutes intimate relationships between human being and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Takashi Sakaguchi.

Cross-culturally, wooden items such as bowls, ladles and spoons play an important role as ritual offerings to deities and ancestors. Thus, they are keys to understanding feasting and ritual activities, and can provide archaeological signatures of these activities. This paper explores evolution of feasting among Jomon societies focused on the analysis of wooden artifacts. The analysis is based on three sources of information: 1) temporal and spatial distribution; 2) stylistic analysis; and 3)...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leo Aoi Hosoya.

Since the role of feast as a calendar marker for farming communities was proposed by Bender in 1970s, ‘practical’ roles of feasts in production systems have been debated. In this paper, I argue that feasts can also considered as a farming 'technique' because they can substantially enable regular and continuous farming production by motivating and obliging people for the production, particularly in settings unfavorable for cultivation. In Japan, the southern Amami and Yaeyama Islands were...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nobutaka Hirahara.

East Cape, the southeastern tip of Papua New Guinea mainland, is one of the pottery production areas in southern Massim. Domestic pottery production has continued to the present day, mainly made by female potters to supply their own needs. However, more extensive pottery production beyond the household level occasionally occurs, especially when funerals (toleha) are held. Toleha are organized by the matrilineal descent group (guguni) of a dead person; the potters who belong the descent group get...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yuka Sasaki.

Seed impressions of cultigens have been recovered from pottery of the early to middle Jomon periods in the central highland of Honshu and the western Kanto district of Japan. These include such cultigens as Perilla fructescens introduced from China and Azuki bean (Vigna angularis) and Soy bean (Glycine max) domesticated in Japan. They often occur in large numbers and are also found even in clay figurines (Dogu). I found that the seeds exist not only on pottery surfaces, but also within pottery...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Oki Nakamura.

Previous studies have discussed burial customs and society of the Kamegaoka culture in the final Jomon period (around 3200 to 2500 cal BP) as a single unit of similar local societies in the northern Tohoku district, extending around 220 km from north to south and around 180 km from east to west. In contrast, geographical clustering with delaunay triangulation, my new spatial analysis using GIS, reveals local scale differences in burial customs in terms of shapes of burial pits, grave goods and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yo Negishi.

It has long been claimed that the Jomon-era cultural and ritual system was probably replaced by a new early farming cultural system (Yayoi Culture) brought by immigrants from the Korean peninsula. Recently, however, Japanese archaeologists have been working to determine the variability of ritual practices in each region of the Japanese archipelago. This paper analyzes the transformational process of ritual items (e.g., clay figurines and stone implements) of the Tohoku (northeastern part of main...