Atlantis Online
March 29, 2024, 12:50:21 am
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
News: Comet theory collides with Clovis research, may explain disappearance of ancient people
http://uscnews.sc.edu/ARCH190.html
 
  Home Help Arcade Gallery Links Staff List Calendar Login Register  

Mystery shrouds the ancient Oshoro circle

Pages: [1]   Go Down
  Print  
Author Topic: Mystery shrouds the ancient Oshoro circle  (Read 204 times)
0 Members and 5 Guests are viewing this topic.
Starla St. Germaine
Hero Member
*****
Posts: 147



« on: December 15, 2008, 01:35:57 am »



Rocks of Ages: A composite photo of the Oshoro Stone Circle in Otaru, Hokkaido ANDREW KERSHAW


Mystery shrouds the ancient Oshoro circle


By MICHAEL HOFFMAN
Special to The Japan Times
In 1861 at Oshoro, southwestern Hokkaido, a party of herring fishermen, migrants from Honshu, were laying the foundation for a fishing port when they saw taking shape beneath their shovels a mysterious spectacle — a broad circular arrangement of large rocks, strikingly symmetrical, evidently man-made. What could it be? An Ainu fortress?

They would have been astonished to learn, as in fact they never did, that the Oshoro Stone Circle is a relic from a time before even war — let alone fortresses — likely existed in Japan.

Oshoro today is part of the city of Otaru, on its western fringe, 20 km from the city center and 60 km west of Sapporo.

The Late Jomon period (circa 2400-1000 B.C.) was an age of northward migration. The north was warming, and severe rainfall was ravaging the established Jomon sites, primarily in the vicinity of today's Tokyo and Nagoya.

Perhaps resettlement stimulated thought, for it coincided with a novel Jomon institution — the cemetery.

"By devoting a special area to burials," writes J. Edward Kidder in "The Cambridge History of Japan," "Late Jomon people were isolating the dead, allowing the gap to be bridged by mediums who eventually drew the rational world of the living further away from the spirit world of the dead."

The Oshoro Stone Circle was probably a cemetery.

It was other things as well, but primarily that, says Naoaki Ishikawa, chief curator of the Otaru Museum, where many of the finds from around this stone circle can be viewed.

Report Spam   Logged

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter

Starla St. Germaine
Hero Member
*****
Posts: 147



« Reply #1 on: December 15, 2008, 01:36:30 am »

It is one of about 30 Late Jomon stone circles scattered through northern Japan. In terms of size it ranks about midway between the smallest enclosures and the largest one at Oyu, Akita Prefecture, bounded by thousands of stones.

No bones have been found to make an airtight case of the cemetery theory, but relatively few Jomon bones have been found anywhere, the acid in the soil claiming them long before the archaeologist's trowel can.

The first archaeologists at work in Japan were American and European. Their heyday was the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when Japanese curiosity regarding the remote past was satisfied by nationalistic myths accepted — on pain of harsh punishment as the Japanese government in the 1930s and '40s claimed control over thought — as fact.

World War II ended, and, as though to make up for lost time, Japan plunged into archaeology. It became a passion, and remains one to this day. Historian William Wayne Farris, in "Sacred Texts and Buried Treasure," counts (as of 1998) some 4,000 archaeologists active in Japan — 20 times the number in Great Britain.

A prewar pioneer in Japan was the Scottish archaeologist Neil Munro, whose "Prehistoric Japan" was published in 1908. He thought at first the stone circles might be astronomical observatories akin to Stonehenge in southwest England.

Not so, asserts Otaru Museum's Ishikawa.

The question remains open, but calendrical significance has yet to be established. "In my opinion," says Ishikawa, "the only thing Stonehenge and the Oshoro Stone Circle have in common is that they're both made of stone."

Report Spam   Logged
Starla St. Germaine
Hero Member
*****
Posts: 147



« Reply #2 on: December 15, 2008, 01:37:21 am »



What you see at Oshoro today — it's a wilder-looking spot than its physical proximity to the city would suggest, set among farmers' fields and hills overlooking the sea — is an oval rather than a circular expanse, 33 meters north to south, 22 meters east to west, bordered by granite rocks, the tallest of which are about hip-high.

Some are rectangular, others rounded so smoothly you might think they had been sculpted, but no: "The rounded ones are called columnar joint stones," explains Ishikawa — "very common in the area, though some geologists say many of the stones were quarried at Cape Shiripa, 8 km away."

The site is a shadow of what it was at its height circa 1500 B.C. — a victim, first of 19th-century Japanese pioneers reclaiming Hokkaido from the wilderness and eager to appropriate handy rocks as construction material; second, of well-intentioned but misguided "cleanup campaigns," the first in 1908 preparatory to a royal visit by the Crown Prince, the future Emperor Taisho.

« Last Edit: December 15, 2008, 01:40:41 am by Starla St. Germaine » Report Spam   Logged
Starla St. Germaine
Hero Member
*****
Posts: 147



« Reply #3 on: December 15, 2008, 01:38:53 am »







Show pieces: Exhibits at Otaru Museum in Hokkaido (above) include a wealth of Jomon pottery, hunting weapons, digging and tree-felling tools and clear examples of the era's signature "rope-pattern" decoration. ANDREW KERSHAW
Report Spam   Logged
Starla St. Germaine
Hero Member
*****
Posts: 147



« Reply #4 on: December 15, 2008, 01:41:22 am »

Why regard it as a cemetery? Partly, says Ishikawa, because of the large number of unidentifiable, and probably ritual, objects unearthed in the vicinity; partly because of the many tools found unbroken, suggesting grave goods; partly also because "graves are among the few things that would have justified the degree of effort involved. Constructing a stone circle is a major undertaking. You have to flatten the land, quarry the stones, transport them, lay them out. . . . Only something of the highest importance could have taken people away from their daily hunting and gathering."

Very likely also, he says, it was a market, a trading center for the exchange of tools, local foods, regional products, lacquer — and information, gossip. What would people have said to each other? In what language? Not Japanese, writes archaeologist Richard Pearson in the International Jomon Culture Conference Newsletter. Proto-Japanese, he says, only begins with the succeeding Yayoi culture.

Ishikawa raises another possibility for the Oshoro Stone Circle — that it could have been a trash dump, which would explain the roughly 400,000 tool and pottery fragments so far unearthed there.

"Things may have been brought on purpose to such a site for ritual disposal," he says.

"To the Jomon, each object, animate and inanimate, housed a spirit. Throwing things away would have been done ceremonially."

Report Spam   Logged
Starla St. Germaine
Hero Member
*****
Posts: 147



« Reply #5 on: December 15, 2008, 01:42:15 am »



Lives gone by: A tableau in the superb Otaru Museum in western Hokkaido, showing Jomon people going about their daily lives as they likely would have done from around 10,000 to 2,500 years ago. ANDREW KERSHAW

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fl20081214x3.html
Report Spam   Logged
Pages: [1]   Go Up
  Print  
 
Jump to:  

Powered by EzPortal
Bookmark this site! | Upgrade This Forum
SMF For Free - Create your own Forum
Powered by SMF | SMF © 2016, Simple Machines
Privacy Policy