TRENDS IN ARCHAEOLOGY IN JAPANKofun Period
NAKAKUBO Tatsuo1
Japanese archaeology deﬁnes the period of about 350 years from the middle thirdcentury A.D. to the seventh century A.D. as the Kofun period. During this period about
160,000 mounded tombs (kofun) were constructed in an extensive area of the Japanesearchipelago from southern Tohoku to southern Kyushu. Fiscal 2014 continued to see
accumulation of massive studies mainly based on mounded graves called kofun, after
which this historical period was named. Topics of the studies were varied: reexaminationof dating and relative chronology, construction processes of grave mounds and burial
facilities, examination of the location and scenery of mounded tombs, identiﬁcation of
those buried in the tombs such as female chiefs and primordial government ofﬁcials,
typology of burial equipment and clay ﬁgurines (haniwa) aligned on mounds, external
negotiation with eastern Asia, settlement dynamics, handcrafting and subsistence,reconstruction of rituals, and so on.
One of the characteristics of Kofun study this ﬁscal year was the completion of apublication of all ten volumes of the series Kofun Jidai no Kokogaku (Kofun PeriodArchaeology) (Doseisha), edited by ICHINOSE Kazuo, FUKUNAGA Shinya, and HOJO
Yoshitaka. Coming twenty years after the publication of Kofun Jidai no Kenkyu (Kofun
Period Study) (Yuzankaku) in the 1990s, this series enabled us to grasp the researchsituation of Kofun period study in the early 21st century. If overseas readers are interested
to learn about the Kofun period in Japanese, this book is highly recommended alongwith Koza Nihon no Kokogaku: Kofun Jidai Jo/Ge (a two volume set of Lectures on
Japanese Archaeology, Kofun Period) (HIROSE Kazuo and WADA Seigo, Aoki Shoten),
and Kofun Jidai Kenkyu no Genjo to Kadai Jo/Ge (a two volume set on States and Issuesof Kofun Period Study) (HABUTA Yoshiyuki and KAMEDA Shuichi ed., Doseisha).
During the past twenty years, Kofun period study showed further segmentation anddetails are becoming clearer, but each of the books above has a generalized view of theKofun period in the beginning. One path Kofun period study should take in the next 10to 20 years is the process of integrating individual studies on features and artifacts thatare minutely segmented.
1 c/o

The Ofﬁce of Archaeological Heritage Management, Osaka University, 1–5 Machikaneyama,Toyonaka City, Osaka 560–8532, Japan(nakaku68@let.osaka-u.ac.jp)
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Furthermore, the importance of international transmission and international comparison
is becoming more evident in Kofun period study in recent years. Of course profoundachievements at various attempts have been already made, mostly in eastern Asia.
However, new developments are being made towards the West, such as a publication
by MIZOGUCHI Koji, The Archaeology of Japan: From the Earliest Rice Farming
Villages to the Rise of the State in 2013, and symposiums and sessions that were heldby Japanese Kofun period scholars at the 76th annual meeting of Society for American
Archaeology held in the U.S. in the spring of 2014, as well as The 6th Worldwide SEAA(Society for East Asian Archaeology) Conference in Mongolia in the summer of 2014. Areport on Grant-in-Aid for Scientiﬁc Research (Kakenhi), Kofun Period in the Early 21stCentury: Toward a Comprehensive Overview and Its Internationalization (representativeFUKUNAGA Shinya, Graduate School of Letters, Osaka University) contains anoverview of the comprehensive historic view of the Kofun period and various theses forinternational audiences. Also, Volume 9 of Kofun Jidai no Kokogaku (Archaeology of theKofun Period) (Doseisha) contains an evaluation of the Kofun Period from the viewpoints
of international scholars who studied each region of the world in which mounded graves
and monuments were constructed, such as South Korea (Park Chong-su), China (HuangXiaofen), Egypt (TAKAMIYA Izumi), western Europe (Laurent Nespoulous), North
America (SASAKI Kenichi), and the Andes (SEKI Yuji). This volume also contains aninternational comparative study.
Thus, 2014 saw generalization of the Kofun period study and new departures.

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