Abstract

Tombs first appeared in Japan during the Jōmon period, after which various types of tombs began to be constructed. Reburial then emerged as a practice within different social contexts. One form of reburial that came into use during this time was the “bone collection tomb,” in which only selected skeletal remains from multiple bodies were gathered and buried together. During the Jōmon period, these bone collection tombs took the form of pits. In the Yayoi period, the tombs evolved into multiple-vessel reburial graves, in which several vessels—each containing a portion of the bones from a single body—were buried together in a single pit. The process of reburial, in which only certain bones from a single body were selected, was carried out against the conceptual backdrop of a rite of passage that led to the deceased’s recognition as an ancestral spirit. By contrast, the practice of collecting the bones of already-recognized ancestral spirits and burying them together in one place rested on a different conceptual basis: it served as a mechanism to avoid conflict between groups and strengthen mutual bonds by having each group bury its own ancestral spirit in a single shared location. During the Jōmon and Yayoi periods, reburial and collective burial were most prevalent in times of severe social upheaval, marked by the downsizing of settlements due to climate cooling and contact with foreign cultures. Reburial and collective burial therefore functioned as social mechanisms to overcome this instability by fostering solidarity among individual groups.