Five Objects, One Lost Label
Volunteers at a small city museum in Kanazawa found five objects in storage with their labels lost. The curator left a note: 'Place them in chronological order and write one sentence of evidence for each.' The objects are: (A) a clay figure with a cord-marked pot, found in a shell mound; (B) a bronze bell (dotaku) dug up from a field, with a copy of a Chinese coin of the Xin dynasty beside it; (C) a wooden tablet recording a tax payment in the capital, Nara; (D) a matchlock gun and a small Christian medallion found together near a castle town; (E) a printed notice dated 1873 announcing a new school district and a call to send children to school. A sixth box holds a label reading 'Kamakura period, 1185-1333', but the two historians on staff argue: one says the period began in 1185, the other in 1192.
1. Place objects A to E in chronological order and give the evidence for each placement.
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Order: A, B, C, D, E.
- A (Jomon). Cord-marked pottery, clay figures and shell mounds belong to hunting-and-gathering communities that made pottery before farming reached Japan.
- B (Yayoi). Dotaku are Yayoi ritual bronzes, and bronze and iron working came with wet-rice agriculture from the continent. The Xin coin (Wang Mang, around the first century CE) gives a rough date. Note the trap: a metal object is not automatically later than a wooden one; what dates it is the object type and its context.
- C (Nara). Wooden tablets with tax records fit the ritsuryo state, which recorded household taxes; the capital at Nara dates this to the eighth century.
- D (late sixteenth century). Matchlock guns were brought by the Portuguese in 1543 and Christianity arrived in 1549; a castle town places this in the Sengoku to Azuchi-Momoyama age.
- E (Meiji). The date 1873 and the school district fit the school system order of 1872.
The general rule is to date by the object type plus its excavated context, not by the material alone.
2. Which object is hardest to date from the description alone, and what would you ask the curator to settle it?
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A is the hardest. The Jomon period lasts roughly 13,000 years, and cord-marked pottery is made across nearly all of it. 'Cord-marked pot plus clay figure plus shell mound' places the object in the Jomon period but leaves a margin of many thousands of years, so no single date can be written.
Questions to ask:
- Stratigraphy: which layer was it in, and what was above and below it?
- Pottery type: the rim shape and the pattern of cord marks can usually be matched to a named regional type with a known date range.
- Scientific dating: is radiocarbon dating possible on charred material attached to the pot?
- Associated finds: were stone tools, shells or pit dwellings found with it?
A reasonable second answer is D: guns span 1543 to the early seventeenth century. There the questions would be the exact type of gun, whether the medallion can be dated, and whether the site shows a Christian burial or a hidden cache. In both cases the point is the same: the description fixes a period, not a date.
3. Explain why one historian says the Kamakura period began in 1185 and the other in 1192, and what this disagreement shows about period names.
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1185 is the year the Taira were destroyed at Dannoura, after which Minamoto no Yoritomo gained the right to appoint shugo and jito - military governors and land stewards. From that point he had practical control over land and warriors.
1192 is the year Yoritomo received the title of shogun from the court. That is the formal start of the title 'shogun'.
The historians are not disagreeing about facts; they are disagreeing about the criterion for the start of warrior government. If the criterion is effective control of land appointments, 1185 fits. If it is the formal title, 1192 fits.
What this shows. Period names are conventions, not natural objects. A boundary is only useful if the criterion behind it is stated, and the same is true of 'the start of the Meiji era' or 'the start of the Yayoi period'. The museum label should therefore say which criterion it uses. Japanese school textbooks commonly adopt 1185 for this reason.