Погребальные комплексы и обрядовая практика культуры яёй, Японский архипелаг

Abstract

In the 1st millennium BC in Western Japan, emergency a new cultural tradition, which was different from the Jōmon Period. If in an early stage (approx. 10th — 8th centuries BC), during the transitional phase, was peaceful coexistence between the Jomon and Yayoi populations, then during the period from the 7th century BC to the 3rd century AD we can see a change from the economy of hunter–gathering to the producing one (agriculture, animal husbandry); the emergence of new technologies (metallurgy), innovation in the funeral rite and the social structure of Yayoi society. As a result of the gradual expansion of settlers from the Korean Peninsula, the Jōmon cultural tradition practically ceases to exist in most of the archipelago, with the exception of local variants on Hokkaido and Ryukyu Islands. In a number of popular science publications, we can read that these events and their significance for the territory of the Japanese archipelago are to a certain extent comparable with the discovery of the New World by Europeans and the subsequent dramatic destinies of the aborigines. The only difference is in the scale of the territories and in the fact that the Europeans actually interrupted the evolution of state and early state societies in pre–Columbian America, and on the territory of the Japanese islands, migrants from the continent, on the contrary, stimulated the emergence of proto–state formations. However, the process of introducing a new culture and accompanying technologies in reality was much more complicated, differed in different regions of the archipelago in its dynamics and degree of continuity with the previous Jōmon culture.