The Story Of Ancient Japanese Burial Mounds
Across Hokkaido and northern Honshu, archaeologists have documented earthwork mounds and ritual spaces dating to the Jōmon period—thousands of years before the political state and keyhole tombs of the Kofun era. Recent fieldwork and renewed attention since UNESCO inscription have cast these sites in a new light: carefully planned cemeteries and ceremonial earthworks that predate the region’s earliest historical civilizations, yet display social coordination, memory-making, and ritual sophistication in their own right.
A Landscape Older Than History
When many people think of ancient Japan, they picture the iconic keyhole-shaped kofun tombs of central Honshu. But farther north, Jōmon communities were shaping earth and stone into monumental ritual places millennia earlier—long before rice agriculture and the emergence of the Yamato state.
Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport Government of Japan & moja resized, Wikimedia Commons
What “Earliest Civilizations” Means In Japan
In Japanese archaeology, “civilization” often refers to the rise of agrarian, stratified societies from the Yayoi period onward (roughly first millennium BCE), culminating in the politically centralized Kofun era. The Jōmon, by contrast, were complex hunter-gatherers whose monuments challenge simple definitions of “civilized.”
Rc 13, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
Meet The Jōmon North
Hokkaido and northern Tōhoku preserve a string of Jōmon sites—settlements, cemeteries, earthen mounds, and stone circles—recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage serial property in 2021. This network anchors a re-examination of how early communities organized ritual life long before state formation.
663highland, Wikimedia Commons
Kiusu: Earthwork Burial Circles In The Forest
Just outside Chitose, archaeologists mapped a cluster of large earthwork rings known as the Kiusu Earthwork Burial Circles. Constructed around 1200 BCE, they enclose sunken interior spaces with encircling embankments—planned, communal works of labor in a wooded landscape.
Monumental Rings That Focus Memory
Kiusu’s embankments stand roughly two meters high, creating a secluded interior where mourners and ritual specialists likely gathered. The circular plans are deliberate—spaces for processions, offerings, and remembrance.
Bigger Than A Jumbo Jet
Individual rings at Kiusu reach extraordinary scales: the largest measures roughly 75–83 meters in diameter, rivaling modern aircraft wingspans and testifying to ambitious communal engineering.
A Cemetery Unique To Hokkaido
These “shuteibo”—earthwork burial circles—are a cemetery form unique to Hokkaido in the late Jōmon. Their planning and clustering suggest shared rites and a landscape-wide dialogue with ancestors.
Torii Ryuzo (Torii Ryuzo)（1870-1953, Wikimedia Commons
Ofune: A Coastal Powerhouse Of Ritual
On Hokkaido’s southern coast, the Ofune Site preserves a large mid-Jōmon settlement accompanied by prominent ritual earthen mounds. Excavations yielded hundreds of thousands of artifacts that illuminate ceremonies, subsistence, and spiritual life over millennia.
Everyday Life, Sacred Time
Ofune’s remains—marine mammals, tuna and salmon, nuts and lacquer—show communities deeply attuned to sea and forest. The ritual mounds there knit seasonal abundance to funerary practice and communal memory.
Jōmon Time Runs Deep
Some Jōmon sites in Hokkaido extend back toward 7000 BCE, with stratified evidence for dwellings, burials, and ritual practices unfolding across thousands of years—an extraordinary longue durée of place-making.
Why This Predates “Civilization”
If we mark the arrival of Japan’s “earliest civilization” with wet-rice agriculture and strong hierarchy in the Yayoi (later centuries of the first millennium BCE), then Kiusu’s c. 1200 BCE earthworks clearly predate that threshold—yet already embody monumental labor and social coordination.
Monuments Without Kings
These mounds showcase monumentality without palaces or royal names. The builders were hunter-gatherers who nonetheless mobilized communities to shape enduring ceremonial landscapes. That paradox is at the heart of current research interest.
Takashi Koike, Wikimedia Commons
Rings In Conversation
At Kiusu, multiple circles—30 to 75+ meters wide—sit in proximity, suggesting processional routes and nested zones of activity. The cemetery’s layout reads like a dialogue across generations.
Planning Beyond The Hearth
Far from ad hoc burials, the Jōmon rings reveal surveying skill and a shared blueprint. Embankments enclose, pathways guide, and the forest setting frames ritual with seasonal change.
Takuan~jawiki at Japanese Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons
A Northern Counterpoint To Kofun
Centuries later and hundreds of kilometers south, Japan’s Kofun period would usher in elite keyhole tombs—vast earthen monuments aligned with emerging state power. The contrast highlights distinct ways to make memory in earth.
Keihin Nike, Wikimedia Commons
The Iconic Keyhole Tombs
Kofun tombs (c. 250–710 CE) dot the Kansai plain, culminating in colossal royal mounds. They’re the namesake of the era and a hallmark of early Japanese statecraft.
A Sensational Find In Nara
In 2023, excavations at the Tomio Maruyama tumulus—Japan’s largest circular kofun—unveiled a 2.3-meter serpentine iron sword and a shield-shaped bronze mirror, likely placed to guard the deceased against malevolent forces. These headline-grabbing finds remind us how richly furnished later tombs could be.
663highland, Wikimedia Commons
Opening The Coffin To The Past
The same mound also preserved an unusually long wooden coffin, revealed to media in early 2024, whose contents help date and contextualize the spectacular grave goods.
xavier pou gonzalez, Shutterstock
Two Traditions, One Question
Juxtaposing Kofun grandeur with Jōmon earthwork cemeteries raises a core question: how do societies remember and organize themselves long before—or apart from—states and kings? The northern mounds push that inquiry back in time.
Hovering Cat, Wikimedia Commons
UNESCO Spotlight, Fresh Science
Since inscription, collaborative research across the Jōmon serial property has refined chronologies, site functions, and landscape use—building a more nuanced picture of ceremony in deep time.
Dating The Circles
Kiusu’s principal rings belong to Stage IIIb of the local sequence, around 1200 BCE, based on stratigraphy and associated material. That anchors the cemetery squarely before Yayoi rice agriculture arrives in northern Japan.
Scale And Labor
Moving and piling earth into near-perfect rings 70+ meters across required surveying, soil knowledge, and sustained cooperation—evidence for organized communities even without rulers.
Ritual Ecology
At Ofune, ritual mounds sit within a food-rich coastal ecology—salmon runs, shellfish beds, forests of chestnut and walnut—suggesting ceremonies timed to seasonal flux and ancestral ties.
Fumikas Sagisavas, CC0, Wikimedia Commons
A Northern Grammar Of Death
The shuteibo design—a sunken center ringed by embankment—creates liminal space: neither village nor wilderness, but a boundary where the living negotiate with the dead. It’s a grammar of death distinct from later Kofun iconography.
Community Over Kingship
Where Kofun monuments encode elite lineage, late Jōmon cemeteries look communal, perhaps segmenting space by clan or season rather than by throne. Both are monumental; their politics differ.
Pilgrimage Through The Woods
Today, trails weave among Kiusu’s rings under deciduous canopy. Visitors encounter prehistory at human scale—a subtle, immersive monumentality.
Rewriting Origins
These northern mounds don’t merely “precede” civilization; they help redefine it. Monumental ritual landscapes belong not only to farmers and kings, but also to hunter-gatherers who braided memory into earth.
663highland, Wikimedia Commons
A Wider Northern Network
Beyond Kiusu and Ofune, related Jōmon sites span Hokkaido and northern Honshu—shell middens, stone circles, and habitation layers—together mapping a long arc of ritual and community.
Sapphire at Japanese Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons
From Field To Museum
Artifacts and reconstructions at regional centers help translate these sites for the public, while ongoing surveys refine maps of buried features before development—especially on university campuses and town projects.
Why This Matters Now
The story is timely for two reasons: new excavations keep illuminating Kofun-era tombs to the south, and UNESCO recognition has energized research and conservation up north. Together, they offer a fuller, continent-spanning view of how societies in the Japanese archipelago commemorated their dead.
Geospatial Information Authority of Japan, Wikimedia Commons
The Takeaway For Archaeology Lovers
“Civilization” is not a switch. In Japan, monumental burial landscapes appear in multiple guises across millennia—Jōmon circles in the forest, Yayoi mounds in the west, and Kofun keyholes in the heartland—all part of a deep tradition of building with earth to bind the living and the dead.
Cup of tea, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
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