The Archaeology Of Japan: From the Earliest Rice Farming Villages to the Rise of the State (Cambridge World Archaeology) - Softcover

This is the first book-length study of the Yayoi and Kofun periods of Japan (c.600 BC–AD 700), in which the introduction of rice paddy-field farming from the Korean peninsula ignited the rapid development of social complexity and hierarchy that culminated with the formation of the ancient Japanese state. The author traces the historical trajectory of the Yayoi and Kofun periods by employing cutting-edge sociological, anthropological and archaeological theories and methods. The book reveals a fascinating process through which sophisticated hunter-gatherer communities in an archipelago on the eastern fringe of the Eurasian continent were transformed materially and symbolically into a state.

Koji Mizoguchi is Professor of Social Archaeology at the Graduate School of Social and Cultural Studies, Kyushu University, Japan. He is the author of An Archaeological History of Japan: 30,000 BC to AD 700 (2002) and Archaeology, Society and Identity in Modern Japan (Cambridge, 2006). Dr Mizoguchi is regarded as a leading Japanese archaeologist, particularly in the study of the Yayoi period and mortuary archaeology. His many contributions to scholarly journals focus on the postcolonial archaeologies of East Asia with special emphasis on Japan, the relationship between modernisation and the disciplinisation of archaeology, and the study of the centralisation and hierarchisation of social relations by using formal network analysis methods.