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Reviewed by:
  • State Formation in Japan: Emergence of a Fourth-century Ruling Elite, and: Himiko and Japan’s Elusive Chiefdom of Yamatai: Archaeology, History, and Mythology
  • Joan R. Piggott (bio)
State Formation in Japan: Emergence of a Fourth-century Ruling Elite. By Gina L. Barnes. Routledge, London, 2007. xxi, 261 pages. $160.00.
Himiko and Japan’s Elusive Chiefdom of Yamatai: Archaeology, History, and Mythology. By J. Edward Kidder, Jr. University of Hawai‘i Press, Honolulu, 2007. xiii, 402 pages. $60.00.

Archaeologists and historians consult together frequently in Japan these days, and these two books reveal how interdisciplinary scholarship is advancing our understanding of the transition from Yayoi to Kofun times in Japan’s third century. That the two volumes were published almost simultaneously is fortunate—the authors bring different perspectives to their work. Barnes’s focus is on the process of early state formation, while Kidder updates our knowledge concerning the famed Queen Himiko of Yamatai. Barnes is marvelously fluent in social scientific theoretical perspectives while Kidder reinterprets written records in Chinese and Japanese and adds new archaeological knowledge to the story. Both scholars agree that protohistorical Japan should be studied in its East Asian context and that artifacts, sites, and texts must be studied together. Reading these books provides abundant insights into how such research is done and into the state of our knowledge on a new historical field called “the Yayoi-Kofun transition.”

In previous publications, Barnes introduced critical concepts such as “protohistory” and “peer polity interaction” to our understanding of Yayoi- and Kofun-age Yamato.1 In this new book, which follows an earlier volume on state formation on the Korean peninsula, she extends her gaze far beyond Yamato while bringing historical texts front and center to explain the process of elite stratification across the archipelago in later Yayoi times.2 Specifically, she argues that in the Han world-empire, the mid-Yayoi political economy exhibited a “multi-level structuring of exchanges” to acquire [End Page 413] bronze and iron. As a result, the East Seto region developed a prestige-goods society early on. However, West Seto did so only during the third and fourth centuries, in interaction with China’s Wei Dynasty. By then, island chiefdoms fought over access to prestige goods such as Chinese mirrors and swords, their wars enabled by iron weapons. By the late third century, the Nara basin of Yamato was the victor, its settlement record filled with large and prosperous communities with a standardized ceramic repertoire. But in Barnes’s estimation, the best evidence of an expanding network of elites led by those in the Nara basin comes from mounded tombs, of which 5,200 had been identified all over the archipelago by 2003. These tombs represent the “Mounded Tomb Culture” (MTC) of the early Kofun period, for which a key site is the Hashihaka tomb at the foot of Mount Miwa in southeastern Yamato’s Makimuku vicinity.

Some researchers have understood Hashihaka (now dated 260–80) and other monumental keyholes as signs of early state formation.3 For Barnes, these tombs that first emerged near Mount Miwa and that were then replicated east and west across the archipelago evidence the emergence of a networked elite. Hashihaka has not been excavated because of its status as a royal tomb, but Barnes assembles the evidence concerning what has been found in its vicinity, which allows her to theorize who is buried there, relations between its chiefly occupant and others near and far, and why Hashihaka’s keyhole shape became standard for chieftains’ tombs across the archipelago.

Barnes thinks that myths and stories in the eighth-century chronicles can be reread in light of archaeological knowledge. For instance, she finds the Nihon shoki narrative of Jimmu’s incursion into Yamato consistent with the geography and timing of late Yayoi upland sites in the Nara basin. Jimmu is thus seen as a warrior chieftain who led his people from western Japan into mid-Honshu, perhaps from Kibi, in mid-to-late Yayoi times. Meanwhile, the Shōnai pottery found in late Yayoi Nara basin sites is not indigenous. It may have originated in Kibi. Queen Himiko is thought to have emerged around...

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