You can tell a lot about a society by how they treat the dead.
Found a body buried with valuable items?
Probably an important person.
Found a mass grave?
There may have been a war.
The Jomon had some burial practices that the Yayoi later adopted, indicating significant
interaction between the two cultures.
The Jomon Period lasted a longggg time and people were not united, so they didn’t have
all the same burial practices.
But they did have some common themes.
Cremation was rare, most Jomon did burials.
Early on, they buried people in shell mounds, which were basically large garbage heaps from
the Stone Age.
We call them shell mounds because societies that eat seafood have a lot of shells to throw
away, so they would throw them into these huge garbage droppings.
These mounds had all kinds of things, of course, not just shells.
Archaeologists love shell mounds because garbage is life.
You can figure out all kinds of things from someone’s garbage.
I’m glad Facebook only has my private information and hasn’t gone through my trash.
What the…?
Oh god!
Eventually, most Jomon did away with shell mound burials and settled on pit burials or
jar burials.
Pit burials were the most common.
Just dig a hole in the ground, put the body in there, and cover it with some dirt or shells.
Easy.
In many places, we found that abandoned pit houses often had a single body inside, either
covered with shells or buried.
Researchers believe that the family would bury the dead person in the house, then abandon
it.
The house would’ve been unlucky after a burial.
Some places buried the dead, then dug them up to re-bury them in a large collective pit.
This mass pit cemetery from hell stayed open and accumulated bodies over time.
When full, the Jomon sealed it up and covered it.
They also did jar burials where they placed the dead body inside a ceramic jar before
burying.
The Yayoi copied this type of burial, as we’ll see later.
Children had a special place in their hearts.
The vast majority of the jar burials were for children or unborn fetuses, and children’s
graves were separate from adults’.
Early on, people buried the dead with common everyday items like pottery and stone tools.
In the Middle Jomon, they started adding jewelry like necklaces and bracelets made of all kinds
of things, jade, shark teeth, stones, shells.
In the later years of the Jomon Period, they added more ritual objects like clay figurines
and stone rods.
After the Yayoi arrived, we started seeing large grave sites, more evidence that the
Yayoi population boomed.
Like the Jomon, the Yayoi had differing burial practices depending on region.
There was an early burial custom where they would put a dead body in a pit, with or without
coffin, and balance a large stone slab over it.
This practice probably came with Korean migrants, but was quickly abandoned.
Some Yayoi practiced secondary burials, which worked like this.
First, bury a person in a pit, usually enclosed in a building.
After the body has decomposed, dig it up and put the bones in a jar.
Finally, bury the jar in a separate cemetery, far from the village.
Archaeologists found that the teeth in these jars had holes in them.
This is because after digging up the body, the Yayoi removed the teeth and bored holes
through them so they could string them together as jewelry.
Then the relatives of the deceased wore them around, probably because they wanted terrible,
crippling nightmares.
After a short time, the teeth went back into the jar for the secondary burial.
We’ve also found bones with knife marks on them.
Researchers used to think, "Oh my god, they’re cannibals."
But no, it was because they had to scrape the remaining flesh off the bones before putting
it in the burial jar, which MAY be the second worse job in the world.
The worse job in the world is being the guy who edits Japanese adult videos.
Bodies were usually buried straight in a pit, or in a wooden coffin, but the most distinctive
type of coffin that everyone associates with the Yayoi is the jar.
They adopted this jar burial method from the Jomon, and it was actually only popular in
northern Kyushu, it wasn’t used often outside of this area.
They put bodies in these, um, uncircumcised ceramic jars.
They were basically two pots with their openings put together, then sealed.
Sometimes, they had one pot, with a flat lid covering the opening.
Now, so far we’ve talked about HOW they buried the bodies, but what about WHERE they
buried them?
When they needed burial places, they made a moat around a piece of land, a moated cemetery.
The area had sides ranging from a few meters to 30 meters.
I couldn’t find out whether the moats were wet, dry, or both... so I’m going to say
wet, because it’s cooler, plus the later Kofun Period did have wet moats.
People were buried in small mounds.
These were precursors to the large mound tombs of the later Kofun Period.
They had separate cemeteries for commoners and elites, more evidence of a social hierarchy.
Over time, the mounds for the elites kept getting bigger.
We found one mound that was 80 meters long!
As the mounds grew, researchers saw a society become more complex and hierarchical.
Things like the type of coffin, the quality of buried goods, and the size of the mound
determined the status of the people buried beneath.
Were you a chief?
Congrats, you get a huge mound.
Were you a poor farmer?
Sorry, you go under this speedbump.
So...I think we’re done with the Jomon and Yayoi, and we’ll move on to the Kofun Period
next time, where Japan’s Imperial House began.
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