ABSTRACT
The Far East, Southeast and South Asia: Indo-Pacific Beads from Yayoi Tombs as Indicators of Early Maritime Exchange
Oga Katsuhiko and Sunil Gupta
In this paper, our focus is upon Indo-Pacific beads found in Yayoi Culture horizons in Japan. Indo-Pacific beads are distinguished by their circular design (doughnut shaped) and small size (outer diameter range of 6 mm and under). The beads are monochromatic and cut from 'drawn' glass. Available evidence shows that Indo-Pacific beads were first produced at the southern Indian site of Arikamedu in 4th-3rd century BC and similar production centers emerged in South and Southeast Asia in time.
In Japan, Indo-Pacific beads appear for the first time in burials of the Yayoi period (300 B.C.- 250 A.D.). In the succeeding Kofun period (250 - 600 AD), we find an greater distribution of microbeads in tomb sites, both in terms of quantity and spread. Since no production center of Indo-Pacific beads has yet been located in Japan (or neighbouring Korea) we can assert - for the present - that these beads found in funerary contexts in Yayoi-Kofun Japan were imported from production centers outside these countries. In the first part of the paper, distributional and quantified data is submitted on Indo-Pacific beads found in Yayoi funerary sites in Japan. In the second part - the discussion - the data is analysed from the broader perspective of bead trade between Yayoi Japan and and Indo-Pacific bead production centers in the eastern Indian Ocean region. The earliest Indo-Pacific bead depositions in Japan indicate that maritime networks had become active between Southeast Asia and the Far East in the 3rd century B.C. The database shows dramatic increase in imports of Indo-Pacific beads into Japan in the beginning of the Christian Era. The sharp rise in depositions of Indo-Pacific beads in Japan coincides with the spread of microbead production centers from South to Southeast Asia in the same period. The parallelism suggests that eastward 'migration' of beadmaking centers from South-Southeast Asia was motivated, inter alia, by the lucrative Far Eastern markets.
Oga Katsuhiko: Department of Archaeology, Kyoto University, Japan
and Sunil Gupta: Allahabad National Museum, Indi