Anthropological study of human burial practice and culture in Asia and Pacific islands

Keywords

burial practice,Island Environment,human history

Objectives

The objective of this research project is to reconsider notions of movement in human history with a particular emphasis on the friction between “free” and “unfree,” and construct a new horizon for migration studies. There are a variety of aspects in the factors for the movement of people, including “evacuation” due to phenomena related to survival such as persecution, conflict, and natural disasters, “forced movement” of specific groups or individuals, and “migration/immigration” based on free-will. With “forced movement,” the unfree-ness, victimhood, and tragedy of migrants have been emphasized above all else, and they have been understood as lacking subjecthood. In contrast, this project will consider the friction between free-ness and unfree-ness in cases of movement phenomena included in the category of “forced movement” (e.g. slave trade, forced migration, contract labor, and political refugees) of different temporal and spatial nodes, and reconsider the concept of movement in human history while attempting to compare each case. Specifically, we will reinterpret movement phenomena from the standpoint of the people and groups moving, taking into account political, religious, economic, cultural, and environmental factors that caused the movement. By combining a macro and micro approach in this way and comparing and relating various types of movement in different contexts with a focus on the friction between “free” and “unfree,” we aim to reconstruct notions that will contribute to new developments in the study of migration in human history.

Research Results

This project was extended for a year longer than scheduled owing partly to the COVID-19 pandemic, but this extension also enabled more extensive discussions and presentations than were originally planned. With regard to the project’s first goal—to explore how the funerary practices and burial cultures thought to have emerged in continental areas in human history changed over time, through to the present day, after people migrated to unique island environments—we were able to pursue our investigations using studies of remains from the groups of Homo sapiens that first migrated to southeast Asia and the Japanese archipelago. Studies of burial among these early Homo sapiens are still quite limited, but it is possible that a wide variety of burial practices existed, ranging from primary burials to the kinds of secondary aerial burials discovered in the Ryukyu Islands. One of the distinctive features of island worlds is the possibility that in island chains such as the Ryukyus, early Homo sapiens were already engaging in reburial practices similar to the aerial burials observed in Okinawa in the modern and contemporary eras.
While the project addressed the above cases of human burial practices in relatively early Pleistocene and Paleolithic ages, most of the project’s reports and discussions on prehistoric times concerned cases from the Jomon period and later in the Japanese archipelago, and the Neolithic and metal ages in the island environments of southeast Asia and Oceania. In planetary scale chronology, these periods are known collectively as the Holocene: an era, which includes the present, of relatively warm temperatures following the final ice age. In the Holocene, humans have made great advancements in new forms of livelihood such as agriculture and livestock rearing, as well as achieving dramatic population growth through to the present day. The fixed settlement and population growth that accompanies progress in agriculture is thought to lead to expansion in burial areas, but our project was able to confirm that along with these changes, human burial systems also grew significantly more diverse, developing characteristics distinctive to each region and era. Our investigations based on ethnographic cases ascertained not only diversity in burial sites but also significant diversity in human outlooks on death and burial practices.
In regard to the project’s second aim—comparative analysis of regional characteristics across the four regional categories of southeast Asia, Taiwan, the southwest Japanese archipelago, and Oceania—we found that despite significant regional diversity, burial practices in a relatively large number of regions placed emphasis on skull bones, that there was a tendency even in the ethnographic period to use cliffs and caves as key burial sites, and that there are always cases of primary burial practices such as extended burial. At the same time, however, graves used for secondary burials such as aerial burial and group burial tend to have remained relatively well preserved through to the present. This is one of the project’s major findings.