The Study of Excavated Documents in Japan

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Current Issues in Japanese Archaeology (2019 Archaeological Research in Asia Symposium)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Traditional understandings of the history of writing in Japan have been both greatly enriched and substantially challenged by materials recovered from archaeological excavations. In particular, the continued recovery from archaeological contexts of the inscribed wooden documents known as mokkan has ensured that the history of Japanese writing will continue to be rewritten to accommodate new insights provided by this growing archive. As a full-fledged sub-discipline within Japanese historical document studies (J. shiryōgaku), the study of mokkan incorporates an understanding of archaeological methods and an awareness of the nature of historical written cultures in East Asia. This paper will examine the importance of archaeological data and approaches in this particular sub-field, and how the progress made in Japanese mokkan studies has contributed not only to the re-interpretation of the history of writing in Japan but to the study of early writing through excavated documents in the larger East Asian context. In addition, this paper argues that the manner in which mokkan studies has utilized archaeological data to answer particular historical questions can be a model for future interdisciplinary research which draws upon the vast body of data generated by decades of Japanese archaeology.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Current Issues in Japanese Archaeology (2019 Archaeological Research in Asia Symposium)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25352