Mirrors of Music: Dōtaku Bronze Bells and the Late Middle Yayoi Ritual Reform (ca. 100 CE)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper re-evaluates the major size increase and shift from use of stone molds to clay molds in dōtaku (bronze bell) production in the Late Middle Yayoi. Over 500 dōtaku bronze bells traditionally dated to the middle through late Yayoi (ca. 200 BCE–250 CE) have been passed down or excavated, predominantly from the Kinki region of Honshu. They became increasingly large throughout the Yayoi period, ranging in size from about 20 centimeters to over a meter in height. Scholarly interpretations of this size increase and ornamentalization process have gone largely unchanged since 1970, when Tanaka Migaku argued that changes in Yayoi political institutions catalyzed the development of functional “bells to be heard” kiku dōtaku into large, symbolic “bells to be seen” miru dōtaku. However, Tanaka’s paradigm does not consider information archaeologists now have regarding both newly excavated bells and an explosion in dōtaku-related paraphernalia, including miniature examples (shō dōtaku) and pottery imitations also produced. When lines of evidence are considered in tandem, a vision of the Late Middle Yayoi as a period of major ritual reform emerges. What the author calls a “mimetic shift” was at the core of this moment in the formation of social complexity in Japan.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53986