08 October 2020 SAL OM: William Gowland – pioneer of archaeology in Japan

history, who knows, in archaeological history elsewhere as well. This afternoon the presentation was put together by both myself and Dr Luke Edgington-Brown, my colleague who completed his PhD on this topic at the University of East Anglia and at the British Museum, courtesy of a collaborative doctoral award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Unfortunately Luke can't be with me in the tomb this afternoon but I believe he is with us in Cornwall looking on. This afternoon I'm going to talk about William Gowland and his contribution to archaeology both in Japan and in the UK. The way I'm going to do this is to introduce to you a research project, the Gowland project, which has been a collaborative international research project led by Professor Ichinose Kazuo of Kyoto Tachibana University and a team whose we'll list them all at the end of the talk, in conjunction with the Japanese section in the Department of Asia at the British Museum. The reason for that collaboration will become clear in the course of what I'm going to be talking about but in discussing Gowland and his contribution I want to create a context for you, we want to create a context for you, a little bit about early archaeology in Japan which I believe is probably not so familiar to many of you listening. Something about the early interactions, sometimes surprising interactions, between Japanese and British archaeology. I'm going to introduce you to the kofun, the burial mounds of Japan, which were Gowland's passion, in particular two sites, Shibayama and Rokuya, which were two sites close to where he was living and working. We'll then flip over and come and see, consider Gowland's contribution to our understanding of Stonehenge and this is where some of the Japanese-British connections become very entangled and interesting. And then we'll head back to Japan and we'll look at the World Heritage Movement over there in the light of the inscription of a number of these kofun for the first time as UNESCO World Heritage in 2018 and a little bit of a consideration about the public presentation of the Japanese past relating to this. We'll end up thinking about Gowland rather than as a Victorian pioneer only, but as a very modern archaeologist. In Japan he has the title of the father of Japanese archaeology. I don't know whether that's quite correct, I'll have a few words to say about that a little later on this afternoon. But he was very modern, first of all in his embracing of the latest technology of the time, not only cameras but any kind of surveying equipment and I believe he would have been thrilled by the prospect of having his work presented by Zoom in this way, but he was also rather unusual for his time in that he very much regarded human beings as only being limited by their technical abilities and he didn't really support notions of social or racial evolution which were very prevalent at the time that he was working in the later part of the 19th century. For my money that makes him, especially in this world where we are busy decolonizing curricula, makes him a thoroughly modern archaeologist and I hope you will agree with me by the end of the next 45 minutes or so. So what are kofun? Well they are burial mounds. The word kofun comes from two Chinese ideographs ko meaning old and fun meaning mound. So they're old mounds and the ones in Japan, some of them represent the largest burial monuments of the ancient world and here are just a few examples for you. Now Gowland didn't start out as an archaeologist by any means. He was an engineer training at the Royal College of Mining, now part of Imperial College in London, heralding from County Durham in the northeast and it was only after he had taken up a post in Japan working for the newly installed mint minting coinage in Osaka that his archaeological interests flourished and they flourished because of his interest in surveying and his interest in the development of metallurgical technologies. We know a lot about him, he's of great interest largely because of his tremendous set of material and archive that he left with the British Museum on his return from Japan and this formed the base of the Gowland collection which was, I think it's fair to say, rediscovered by the former keeper of Japanese antiquities at the British Museum, Victor Harris, and his colleague, a journalist from Asahi Newspapers, Goto Kazuo, who published this wonderful book William Gowland the father of Japanese archaeology back in 2003 and what stimulated this was the discovery of over a hundred glass photographic plates that Gowland had sold to the British Museum along with his collection of Japanese antiquities when he returned from Japan in the late 1880s. It was Harris and Goto that coined the term the father of Japanese archaeology and as I say we'll have a word or two to say about that as we move along. Now sadly the Mitsubishi Corporation Japanese galleries at the British Museum have yet to open post-pandemic lockdown but when they do, if you haven't already visited them, I very much encourage you to do so. They are tremendous and they have one of the best collections of Japanese art and antiquities outside Japan, anywhere in the world. We were involved back in 2006 in the reformulation of the Japanese galleries and I spent a lot of time getting to know the archaeological collections of which the Gowland collection is by far the strongest component. It's up on the fourth floor of the museum above the north entrance so you have to climb to get there, entirely appropriate for Gowland because amongst his hobbies was mountaineering in Japan in the 1870s and 1880s. But assuming that you don't run out of oxygen on your way up, you can take in my aerial work here. On the left-hand side of the gallery there is a display of the Gowland collection sitting in front of the largest of the Kofun tombs, the Daisen tomb which we'll talk about more later and a selection of the objects which have been recovered and were donated by or sold to the museum by Gowland when he came back. Now the Gowland project ran for about a decade from just about 2009 through to about 2019 and as I said it was very much an international project led by the leading archaeologists of the Kofun period in Japan. And one of the outputs was this wonderful book Shirarezu Daiei Hakubutsukan, the British museum that you don't know about. And this was a series of four, this was based on a series of four television programs produced by the Japanese state broadcaster NHK to celebrate the London Olympics and they focused in on the British museum and they produced a program on Greece, a program on Rome, I believe there was a program on Egypt and there was a program on the Gowland collection. That was seen as the archaeological link between Britain and Japan, viewed by several million people in Japan when it went out. There are many Kofun in Japan, over 160,000 are still known today and it's considered that maybe twice that many were built between the 3rd and the 7th centuries AD. This was the period when Japan, the Japanese archipelago, first of all saw the birth of a state-level governmental organization located in central Japan around the era of contemporary Kyoto, Nara and Osaka. And it was also the period at the end of which, by the 7th century certainly, that a new religion, Buddhism, had been introduced to Japan and was being taken up by the new elites. And it was these elites, both free and aware of Buddhism, who were being buried in these burial mounds all around Japan. Here are just a few examples of those that we're going to be visiting in a little bit more detail in the course of this afternoon's talk. Just to situate us geographically, here we have the western part of the Japanese archipelago, the main island of Honshu, the western island of Kyushu and the Korean peninsula. And what we see here is Japan on the peripheries, if you like, of the Chinese empire. The Han empire, of course, had come to an end in the beginning of the 3rd century AD and it wasn't really until the 8th century AD and when China was once again consolidated under the Tang dynasty that there was a strong central power in China. And it's exactly those centuries when we have what we call the Kofun period in Japan, when these elites are developing their political skills, if you like, very much in contact with elites at similar level of political development on the Korean peninsula. And the relationship between those two areas is central to understanding what's happening in Japan at this time. But I'm going to be focusing on this area here. You can see where it says Nara. Nara is the old, the first Chinese-style capital that was built in Japan at the beginning of the 8th century. And that's the area where Gowland was focusing his activities, although he was living in Osaka, which is this area here, just a little closer to the coast of the Seto Inland Sea. This just gives you some idea of the distribution of the mounted tombs of the Kofun themselves. You can see there are the greatest concentrations, in particular in what is called the Kinai region here of Nara, Kyoto, Osaka, as I mentioned, but also with very significant concentrations in the Isamu region in northern Kyushu and in between Shikoku and the area around Okayama in the Kibi region here. If we focus in on the Kinai region, what we have here, you can see the red blocks are the early Chinese cities that were constructed from the late 7th century through to the 9th century, starting with the sites of the Asuka region, which we'll come back to towards the end of the talk, Fujiwara Palace site, and then moving to Heijō, which is modern-day Nara, and eventually moving up to Heian, which is modern-day Kyoto, which served as the capital of Japan until 1868, when the capital was moved to what is now Tokyo, what was then called Edo, with the restoration of the Meiji emperor, the imperial system, and the end of the Tokugawa shogunate. That period, the later 19th century, is exactly, of course, when Gaoland was in Japan, and that forms the frame for the investigations that he was undertaking while he was there. So, as well as those capitals, this is roughly the same area, showing you clusters of mounded tombs that were built, and I haven't got time to go into these in a tremendous amount of detail, but we're going to come back to several of them in the course of this afternoon's talk. Most notably, we're going to start with Fujinoki, which is a little tiny mounded tomb just to the west of Nara. We're going to talk about the Shibayama tomb, because this is a tomb which Gaoland himself investigated in 1887. We'll have a quick look at some of the really big tombs, which here says Nintoku, here says Ōjin, and we're going to talk about that naming a little bit, and then we'll also come and have a look at some of the recent work in the Asuka region, at Takamatsuzuka, because that would have been a surprise for Gaoland. So, let's begin with one of the relatively recent discoveries of Kofun for you, and this is the Fujinoki Kofun that was investigated in the 1980s in Nara. It's a small mound, I think you can just see the outline of the mound there, a small circular mound, inside which there is a megalithic burial chamber with a passage, it's a passage grave, so there's a stone passage that leads into the burial chamber where there was a stone sarcophagus. I don't think Fujinoki would have registered on Gaoland's scale of Kofun requiring attention, but it became a sensation when it was investigated in the 1980s because of its incredibly well-preserved contents, and most of these tombs have lost their contents over the years, and it's not very common that we find one that's quite as rich as Fujinoki. It's a relatively late tomb, dating to the later part of the 6th century AD, and in fact, here we are, this was summer 2019, as the General Secretary said, seems like another world away, and here we have, I was there with the director of the society, Chris Gull, and we also have with us Professor Neil Price, a great Viking specialist from Uppsala in Sweden, and we were being guided around by Yoshimura Kazuaki, who's been working for the Kashihara Archaeological Institute and Museum all through his career and is one of the most knowledgeable specialists on the tombs of this area. Here you can see the stone sarcophagus inside the burial chamber, this is the plan showing you the entrance and the reconstruction of the structure of the burial chamber and passage. Now, I just want to show you these slides because they just give you an idea of the kind of material which comes out of these tombs when they haven't been previously opened and robbed. They tend to have a lot of wonderful gilt bronze metalworking, including a lot of horse material, this is a part of a saddle, and they also have large quantities of ceramics, especially this grey stoneware which is called sueware, and these red hajiware ceramics. The sueware is part of a technology which is introduced from the Korean Peninsula in the 5th century AD, it is largely a funerary ware, so only we find it in the tombs, and it's one of the things that immediately attracted Gowland when he first encountered it, because to make sueware you have to build a kiln that can get you temperatures up in excess of 1300 degrees centigrade, and its technology was based on steel making technology in China, we find these climbing kilns appearing in China from the 6th century AD, and then they're introduced into the Korean Peninsula and into Japan after that, and Gowland in fact was one of the very first people in Japan to gather up remains from kilns in Japan, from kiln sites, and we know that the ceramics were of great interest to him. Now it was known that Fujinoki hadn't been investigated or looted in antiquity, and the archaeologists from the Nara National Institute for Cultural Properties and the Prefectural Museums and Archaeological Institutes were tremendously excited to find a way into the tomb, and they used fiber optic cables to peer into the sarcophagus to see what was there, and there was clearly a lot, as became apparent when they lifted off the lid. What did they find? Here we go, here's just a little bit of a breakdown of the materials that were there. Gilt bronze crowns, gilt bronze shoes, all sorts of incredibly ornate accessories, belts, there are earrings, we think in fact there were three, the remains of up to three people were found in this one sarcophagus, two of whom were probably male. The preservation of human remains is not wonderful, as it wasn't in the tombs that Gowland had investigated either, but there's large quantities of armor, iron armor, which was found its way into these tombs with very large quantities on a regular basis, and of course the horse trappings that I've already touched upon, and close connections with tombs and material culture on the Korean Peninsula from the contemporary kingdoms of Baekje, Silla, and Koguryo up in the north, and there were also silk fabrics and brocades were recovered from the tomb. To give you an idea of what these things look like, here's some of these crowns, very similar to the Korean examples, and these very ornate shoes with gold, gilt bronze, little leaf attachments on them, possibly just for funerary purposes. At the Kashihara Institute, they've produced very high quality recreations of these things, so you really get a much better sense of the splendor of the material culture of this period. Now, as I mentioned, Gowland, who had lived in Japan for about 16 years from 1872 to 1888, had investigated a large number of Kofun while he was there, partly inspired by his interest in, as I say, early metallurgy and early technology, but also becoming increasingly interested in the tombs for their own right, and the techniques that were available to him for surveying and recording. And the project, the Gowland Project, that we've been running for the last 10 years or so, now starting to deliver results. And so here we have a poster for an exhibition that was held at Meiji University in Tokyo back in 2014, in fact, which had some large-scale reconstructions of Gowland and the tombs that he was investigating. As I mentioned, Gowland worked in Osaka, and he got a job at the Osaka Mint, or the Zouhei-kyoku, the Imperial Mint. And this was 1872. Japan had really opened its doors, or had its doors opened, by the Western powers in 1853, when Commodore Perry arrived in his famous black ships from the States across the Pacific, and under threat of bombardment insisted that five ports in Japan were opened to foreign traders. Prior to that, during the Tokugawa Shogunate of the Edo period, last from 1603 through to 1853, 250 years, the Japanese government, the Tokugawa Shogun, shut themselves off from the outside world. And Japanese people left on pain of death of return, and no foreigners were admitted, apart from a small number of Dutch traders who were based at the trading factory of Dejima in the modern-day city of Nagasaki, and a Chinese trading delegation as well. That was it. But despite the very small funnel through which information flowed, information and goods, there was a remarkable level of knowledge of what was happening in the outside world, and we'll touch on that in just a couple of minutes. But this is the Osaka Mint. This is the building where Gowland worked, as I say, 16 years as an assayer, and looking for metal sources so that the new Japanese government would be able to mint its own coins. He had a house in the campus. It's nice. I visited the Osaka Mint just a couple of years ago. It's still there. Many of these buildings still survive. It was one of the very few parts of Osaka to survive the firebombing at the end of the Second World War, and it still continues to be the Osaka Mint. It's still there, and some of the buildings that Gowland would have used are still standing. Now, Gowland was in Japan in the 1870s, at a time, of course, when the art political world was in a state of considerable ferment, following on from the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species and Lubbock's Prehistoric Times. He would have been a well-read Victorian gentleman, and I'm sure he would have been aware of these theories and ideas were being propagated. But the real influences, the real archaeological influences on Gowland seem to come from slightly different directions. So William Pengelly of the Geological Society, whose excavations of the Brixham Cave in Dublin in the 1850s developed new stratigraphic methods of investigating caves, which I think would have very much appealed to Gowland with his geological training, and we know that he was aware of that work. And later on, he came across the works of Augustus Williston Franks at the British Museum, and Franks's assistant Charles Reed. I think these three between them are definite influences on Gowland as well. Now, as I said, the 1850s through to the 1880s were a period of tremendous change in Japan, and some Japanese have gone out of their way to find out what was going on in the rest of the world, including a mission of students. Here we see the Satsuma Mission, which came to Europe between 1865 and 1867. And the gentleman sitting right in the middle of the front road here is Machida Kisanari, the Japanese name order, so you have the family name first and then the given name after that. And Machida and his two brothers, one here and one here, were amongst this delegation that came, largely in response to an unfortunate incident where some Brits were injured by a crowd in Tokyo in 1863, resulting in a British bombardment of their city of Kagoshima. And out of this came a desire to know what this outside world that was imposing itself on Japan was really all about. Machida is a very interesting figure because we know that he visited the British Museum when he came to London, and on his return to Japan, he was instrumental in setting up the first legislation to protect antiquities and ancient sites in Japan. And ultimately, he became the first director of what was to become the Tokyo National Museum when it was established in 1882. It was the Tokyo Imperial Museum. And here it is, you can see some drawings of it in contemporary woodblock prints and the painting. All this dealt with in great detail by Atsuo Noriko's wonderful book on Public Properties Museums in Imperial Japan. I just want to give you a little tiny bit of a timeline of what's going on here and sort of relate a little tiny bit to what's happening in the UK at the same time. So 1868 is when the Meiji period, when the Meiji Emperor was restored. So it takes 15 years between 1853, the arrival of the black ships, and 1868 for a new government to be established. It's a time of great unrest in Japan. Gaoland himself arrives in 1872. And from 1874, just two years after his arrival, we start to find that imperial tombs or tombs of imperial ancestors start to be identified, designated, and set aside, managed by the predecessors of what is now the Imperial Household Agency. And thereby lie some of the seeds of the great controversy that surrounds the Kofun tombs, or many of the Kofun tombs today, that I'll come back to in a little bit. 1877 is when we see what is regarded as the first proper archaeological excavation in Japan, investigating the Omori shell middens. And of course, in 1882, the same year the Tokyo Imperial Museum was established, in the UK, we have the Ancient Monuments Protection Act. 15 years after that, in Japan, we have the Law for the Preservation of Ancient Shrines and Temples, which is one of the earliest pieces of legislation of its type, certainly in Asia, and pretty much anywhere in the world, I think. And this is when the concept of national treasures and special protected buildings were developed. And all this was in formation while Gowland was working at the Osaka Mint. 1868, the same year that the Meiji Emperor is installed on the Chrysanthemum Throne, we see the third prehistoric, sorry, the third session of the International Congress of Prehistoric Archaeology taking place in the UK. And with my Norwich hat on, I was delighted when I discovered this actually partly happened in Norwich, partly in London. I was even more delighted when we found that this is perhaps the first paper given at a major international conference about Japanese archaeology. And here we've got an illustration of stone implements from Japan, and this is the paper which is delivered by Augustus Wollaston Franks of the British Museum. Now Franks, those illustrations, these stone tools, I think there's probably some obsidian stone tools in there, were probably collected by this gentleman, Heinrich von Seebolt. And von Seebolt deserved several lectures all of their own really, but they were early pioneers, Germans working for the Dutch East India Company in the first instance, and then as diplomats in Japan, and published some of the first references in English, or in German, to Japanese antiquities, and putting together some of the very first collections, many of which now have been scattered through museums across Europe, including the British Museum itself. So there was interest, when Gowland was in Japan, there was definitely interest in archaeology. Heinrich Schliemann passed through Japan in 1866, so that's a few years before he becomes famous for his work at Troy. He leaves a lovely narrative travelogue as he passes through. He goes to Japan and China as part of a world tour. He doesn't comment on anything archaeological there, but he's somebody who's very much inspired by mythological accounts of Homer looking for Troy and Mycenae, and it's mythological accounts which are in some ways comparable to the accounts that were available in Japan at the time. And again, Gowland is very aware of these things, and he refers to some of Schliemann's work in some of his publications. On the other side, on the Japanese side, there is some awareness of European antiquities, and this is a rather intriguing woodblock print attributed to Utagawa Toyokuni, one of the very famous woodblock print artists of the earlier 19th century. The view of the form at Rome, and it's quite possible this is part of a portfolio of drawings which drew on maybe an original portfolio that would have been introduced to Japan through Dejima, through that Dutch trading station in Dejima. So again, an awareness that there were antiquities and they were of interest. And all of these things, all of these elements, meant that there was a network of local, of Japanese antiquarian interest, which Gowland was able to tap into when he arrived and when he was working at the Osaka Mint, and it was a network that he was able to very effectively use, as this note from Mr Yamagata demonstrates. As once news got out that he was interested in antiquities and ancient sites, people started writing to him from around Japan. This is a letter from Tottori Prefecture up on Japan Sea Coast, and describes a tomb and invites Gowland to go have a look. There's a very distinguished tradition of antiquarian interest in Japan that may be of interest to our other colleagues at the Society of Antiquaries here in London. Stretching back to the beginnings of the Edo period, in fact, and we have their politicians, literati, traders, people like Arai Haseki, who had a very important political career in early Edo period Japan, and Kimura Kenkador, who was the son of a sake brewing family in Osaka, made a fortune for itself, but then got into difficulty with the authorities for the strength of the sake that it was producing, and he then went into trading and paper production, but he was one of the first people to create something which looked like a museum collection, and he invited his colleagues around to come and admire the antiquities that he had collected. So there's a strong indigenous tradition of antiquarian interest in Japan that I've long felt deserves more attention, and one of the stars for me is this gentleman Minamichi Sanjin, that's his pen name, his working name, if you will, who in the middle and later part of the 19th century travelled around eastern Japan, undertaking his own excavations, digging up some of the earliest Jomon pottery, which as Chris mentioned is one of my main interests in Japanese archaeology, and here he is in his own little bivouac with a Jomon period figurine just behind him, because what he was doing is not only digging these things up, but he was putting them on display for the local people to come and see and tell about other collections that existed as well. So what we have in the late 18th century, sorry the late 19th century, are these well-established networks of antiquarian interests across Japan, and the new Meiji government was able to tap into those when it started listing important sites across the country and cataloguing them, and these were materials that were available to Gowland because of his government role in the Osaka Mint, and one of the most significant of those documents is this, the Seisekizushi, the plan of sacred sites which was compiled in the middle and later 19th century by Kiyokage Tsukui, and of which we have a wonderful copy in the British Museum, and in the Seisekizushi we have quite detailed drawings of some of these mounds, and this is the Daisen tomb, also known as the Nintoku-ryo tomb, which is the largest of all of the Kofun in Japan. I'll say a bit more about that in a second or two. There are also other sketches of these tombs because this is with the re-establishment of the imperial government, it was decided that it was time to attend to what was a 1500 year tradition of burying emperors and their families in mounded tombs, many of which would fall into a state of disrepair over that period. Japan has a very active environment, there are many earthquakes, there are floods, there's torrential rains, all of that has a deleterious effect on these mounds, and repairs were undertaken and surveys and sketches were produced of many of these sites, and this is an archive which is in the British Museum, and my money is an invaluable thing. I know our Japanese colleagues are very interested in these materials. Now Gowland got to know this gentleman, Ernest Sato, who was one of the very early diplomats based in Japan, and Sato and his contemporaries were very interested in the early history of Japan, part of the British interest in developing connections in the countries where they were based, and it was with Ernest Sato that Gowland first visited Kofun in, we think, 1880 to 1881, and one of the sites that he visited was this one, the Goshikizuka Kofun, in Hyogo Prefecture near the city of Kobe, still there, it's all been beautifully restored and tidied up by the Agency for Cultural Affairs, and this is a very fine example of what is called a keyhole-shaped tomb in English, for obvious reasons, it's a in Japanese, it means it's got a round mound and the extending platform, traditional Japanese keyholes were a different shape, so it doesn't translate all that well, but these were the sites that really excited the interest of Gowland, and he was aware of earlier discoveries, there was a famous site, 1873, the Etafunoyama Kofun in Kyushu was excavated that produced a sword with an inscription on it, talking about one of the 5th century emperors, and he became intrigued by all of that, and the reports that were made about Ernest Sato at the Asiatic Society of Japan, who was the first person to report on that. Now, Gowland was to eventually investigate over 400, I think it was 406 Kofun altogether, and make detailed records of over 150 of those, including this one, which is the Misei Maruyama tomb in Nara Prefecture, which is one of the largest late Kofun tombs, and there's been a lot of debate about who was actually buried in there, but this was one of the tombs that was in the process of being designated as the final resting place of an imperial ancestor while Gowland was investigating. Here he is in the Tsukuhara tomb, where we've been all this time, as you can see that he's wearing, apparently there are descriptions by his assistants at the Osaka Mint of how he dressed himself, and of particular significance here are his long boots, his nagakutsu, which were his trademark in many ways, and which he used while he was exploring both the mountainous areas and other parts of Japan in his search for metal sources. We don't have any diaries from Gowland, I'm afraid, and so it's difficult to know precisely what he was thinking or what his experiences were, but one of his companions in exploring these tombs was Roman Hitchcock, who had been sent to Japan by the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC in preparation for the Great Exposition in Philadelphia, and Roman Hitchcock had none of the reserve that Gowland did, and in his archives in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, we find many very fulsome accounts of his time in Japan, a lot of complaints about how much little he was being paid to be there, but here is a really rather wonderful account of visiting one of the sites with Gowland, and I don't have time to read it all out, but Hitchcock was also a photographer, and there they are, and I particularly like this bit where it says, finally the light flashed, and if the spirit of the department departed, the ancient still hovered around its tomb as the people leave, and it had not progressed far enough in the transcendent thought of the western world to grasp the fantastic idea of a bodily rising from the dust, I think it must have believed the resurrection day had come, and that may explain partly Gowland's slightly surprised expression as he's having his photograph taken there as well. This is an aerial shot of modern day Osaka, this is the Mazu Kofun group in Sakai in southern Osaka, and the tomb just over here on the right is the Nintoku tomb, the Daisen-yama tomb. This is what it looked like in Gowland's time, as you can see the landscape has changed somewhat. Gowland notes in the reports that he put together, and it took him some time to write up his investigations, he doesn't publish anything on the tombs until about 1897, so there's a big gap after he gets back from Japan, but he describes how the tombs are, even in the 1880s and 1890s, are the focus of imperial rituals, and here we have one of these rituals taking place at the tomb of the Emperor Jumu, who is the first Japanese emperor. One of Gowland's tremendous contributions is methodological. The work by Edward Morse in 1877 at the Omori shell middens was really literally just a digging out of shell middens to find artefacts. Gowland used a framework, he used a gridded system to record his discoveries, and rather than just picking up large pieces, he was at pains to gather up all the fragments of the materials that he was encountering in the tombs. He left detailed plans and sections of all the tombs he visited, and here at Shibayama, which was a site that he excavated in 1887, shortly before returning to the UK, he used his trademark gridded technique to record precisely where in the tomb the artefacts were coming from. He then records all the materials in great detail according to that grid, and in the British Museum there's still some evidence of these objects being kept in accordance to that grid. These are some things that he was finding and buying as well. Here are his excavation plans and sections at Shibayama, and he's using as a model a man called Tsuboi Shoguro, who was doing similar kinds of excavations, and here is one from the Ashikaga co-fund, and I'll talk more about Tsuboi in just a few minutes. One of the most amazing things for me about the Gowland project was that towards the end of the project we were able to use these very detailed records of Gowland's investigations and the fact that we've got the artefacts in the British Museum to recreate what the Shibayama tomb and the interior of the Shibayama tomb may have actually looked like, and this was a life-size model that we're able to stretch out in the study room at the British Museum and formed one of the central focus points for the NHK documentary that I spoke about a little while ago. Investigations have continued. Here's Luke Eddington-Brown with some of our colleagues, Isahara-san, for example, at the Rokia site, which is another tomb that Gowland investigated closely and whose archive is in the British Museum. Here we have drawings and the sword from the Rokia site, Isahara-san paying close attention to that. A lot of horse trappings which have all been conserved courtesy of the Sumitomo Foundation, and these alongside some of the objects that Gowland was able to purchase while he was in Japan, including his famous dancing haniwa, a terracotta tomb guardian. We know that several thousand of these would have been set up around many of these tombs and this now graces the steps up to the Japanese galleries. All these form the basis of the Gowland collection and in the paper archive that Gowland brought back with him, there are some rather wonderful illustrations of these pieces prior to Gowland purchasing them. Another thing that's very significant about Gowland's contribution is that many of the sites that he recorded with his camera have long since disappeared. This example, for example, at Domyoji-yama in modern-day Osaka, is no longer there despite the scale of the megalithic stones which were used to build the entrance passage. Hitchcock talks about his time with Gowland very fondly and in this quote from Hitchcock's Ancient Burial Mounds of Japan, which came out actually just before Gowland was able to publish his own research, he pays tribute to Gowland's extensive knowledge of the material and also recalls some of the cozy comfort of those neat matted floors, the bronze hibachi with its steaming food and the savoury and unsavoury dinners and gives us a little bit of a flavour of these exhibitions that Gowland was undertaking. Now this is Edward Morse who undertook the excavations of the All-Mauritian Riddens in 1877 and I think it is fair to say now that it should be Morse would be the first very active western archaeologist as such and he was a zoologist really interested in evolutionary theory. But it was, and there was a bit of a mistake in Victor Harris and Gotō Kazō's book where we thought that the Shibayama tomb was actually excavated in 1877 prior to the All-Mauritian excavations, that wasn't the case and so that title should really probably go to Morse. And Morse himself published on Kofun in 1880 and we think that they may have encountered each other in Tokyo. But Morse's trick was to publish very rapidly which Gowland wasn't able to do. Morse obviously was only excavating one site, Gowland had investigated over 400. But Morse was able to publish his report, it was the first published archaeological report from Japan at the University of Tokyo in 1879 which he rather intriguingly also dates as 2539 which would be the traditional Japanese date, marking the the date from 660 BC which is when the Emperor Jimmu, whose tomb we were at a few minutes ago, is considered to have started his great progress east and set up the Yamato dynasty. Another person that I want to think about in brief is Tsuboi Shoguro and here's Tsuboi Shoguro excavating at some, these are small, they're Kofun period, but they're smaller graves which are cut into the side of a hill. This is Yoshimi Kyaketsu, they're considered to be about a hundred of these side passage burial chambers cut into the cliffs. This is up near modern day Tokyo, this is Tsuboi undertaking these investigations in the 1870s and 1880s. Here he is. Now Tsuboi then comes to London in 1888 and he stayed for three years and he studies with Edward Tylor, one of the founding fathers of British social anthropology of course. Gowland writes about Tsuboi, describes him as a most indefatigable archaeologist, but one of the reasons that Tsuboi has to come to London, and Tsuboi is actually the Professor of Anthropology, he's the first Professor of Anthropology at the University of Tokyo, and he has been investigating tombs such as this, and he also starts to investigate some of the ones which are related to imperial ancestors, and it is convenient for him to leave in 1888 and come and spend an extended spell in London. And he spends time at the British Museum, he writes all kinds of interesting stories about figurines, he has encounters in the British Museum which were used to us in other projects, and in many ways he lays the foundation for a visit by later by Hamada Kousaku, who comes and stays in London from 1913 to 1915 and studies with Flinders Petrie before going back to Japan to set up the first proper Department of Archaeology at what was then Kyoto Imperial University. So my point here is really that there are very close connections between early British and early Japanese archaeology. And this just arrived this afternoon in my inbox from my very good colleague Mr Miao Toru from the Niigata Prefectural Museum of History. I told him I was giving the talk this afternoon, he said, ah well in that case we're talking about Japan and Stonehenge, you need this, which is pages from the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Tokyo, the Jinri Gakusachi, all talking dated to 1895, and this is a report by Tsuboi Shoguro of a visit to Stonehenge, and he's drawn on illustrations from John Lubbock's publications as well. We've got, he was in France at Carnac as well, we know that, but this is a rather a wonderful set of illustrations. I'm not quite sure we've got any, I've never seen anything quite as early as this in Japan about realistic representations of European antiquities. So just in the last few minutes I want now to turn to Gowland and Stonehenge. So Gowland returns from Japan in 1888, he sells his collection to the British Museum, there are wonderful records in the Society of Antiquities telling us how much he sold it for, and he then resumes his career as a professor at the Royal School of Mines, but he's very active on the London society's scene, both with the Royal Anthropological Institute and latterly with the Society of Antiquaries. And people obviously know that Gowland has engineering skills, and I don't know whether they know he has much of an archaeological background, he gives lectures at the Society of Antiquaries in the late 1890s, so he'll be known for that. And when the stones collapse, famously in 1900 at both Stone 22 and 122 at Stonehenge, it's Gowland who gets the job to go and set them up. There's a lot of discussion about this which involves previously, previous discussion about the state of Stonehenge involved Pitt Rivers, the discussion in the 1900s involved Flinders Petrie who of course was going to go on to become the mentor for Hamada Kōsaku back in Japan. Flinders Petrie writes to the Times about this and sets out very clear instructions from what should be going on, but unfortunately he's in Egypt, he's in Upper Egypt at the time, so he can't be involved. And here we've got Gowland then in 1901 at Stonehenge setting up all kinds of gantries and using his engineering skills to set up those trilithons. I put a arrow on here because what I quite enjoyed about this was there's a policeman standing on the site, and of course we're all very familiar with the security presence at Stonehenge over the years, but this one made me smile because in Gowland's accounts of his work at Shibayama there are Japanese policemen in attendance there when he's excavating at Shibayama to make sure that he undertakes his investigations there in a sensitive way and isn't going to upset all the local authorities who are concerned about the designation of tombs as the final resting places of imperial ancestors as we talk about. Gowland again uses his signature method of a gridded excavation and he records all very carefully and in his report, possibly the first use of Japanese analogies for interpreting British archaeology, but he explains how Japanese in the Edo period moved very heavy blocks of stone on rollers and things and also this kind of maul that they were using to grind to pound those stones. And most intriguingly for me he also then illustrates at the end of the report with this rather splendid block print of Fukami Gaoda and these two rocks which are very important in Japanese Shinto mythology with Mount Fuji in the background and the sun rising over Mount Fuji and he concludes that just like in Japan sun worship was clearly very important to the people of Stonehenge and he also concludes that on the basis of the antler picks that he finds in his excavations that Stonehenge was built by pre-metal using peoples. Doesn't say that they're primitive or simple or anything like that but he cleared simple statements about they just don't have the technological knowledge of metallurgy yet and that is the first time when Stonehenge is dated to being in the later Neolithic rather than in a more since it'd be a more advanced metal using culture. I believe that Gowlan would be surprised by this site the Oyu stone circles in eastern Japan because he writes in his report on Stonehenge that there were no stone circles in Japan but certainly over the last half century or so we now know that we have many of these sites and indeed some of them are now being put forward for UNESCO World Heritage. Now I'm aware that I'm a little tight on time so I'm just going to whiz through the rest of these sites and I was going to say something about World Heritage because some of the sites in the Osaka Kofun groups have now been as I said have now been inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage in the Mazu Furuichi Kofun group including the Nintoku tomb, the Daisen Yama tomb, the largest of all of the Japanese tombs, 486 meters long, a massive burial monument, the largest burial mound of the ancient world is how it's portrayed. Here we are, the Mazu Furuichi nomination was for 49 Kofun out of the 160,000 that are known. Why was it controversial? It's controversial because the 900 or so of those 160,000 Kofun which were designated as the final resting places of imperial ancestors in Japan back in the late 19th century are not accessible for archaeological or any other investigations apart from by the Imperial Household Agency, the equivalent of Buckingham Palace I suppose, who have complete control over it and regard these tombs as the tombs of private individuals and all through my archaeological career in Japan it's been one of the big problems because many archaeologists want to be able to access these and see what's in them. Part of that is because up until 1945 these two books, the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, which are the histories of Imperial Japan that legitimate the imperial family in Japan, the Yamato family, which claimed direct descent from the sun goddess Amaterasu, who you can see here emerging from a cave in one of the Nihon Shoki stories. These two early 8th century books were the official version of Japanese history until 1945 and anybody who questioned it could find themselves in difficulties, especially post-1890 and the Imperial Rescript on Education. Gowland was there in Japan at a very interesting time while the designations were going on and that's part of the reason why a lot of the materials that he was excavating and collecting, there was a lot of official interest in what he was doing and I'm sure that his official post at the Osaka Mint would have helped very much in that process. Translated by W.G. Aston over a hundred years ago, not been retranslated since, this is Aston's view of much of the Nihon-gyu, the works that he was translating. It's a lot of legend and fable, it's a very colourful language that he uses in his introduction to the text. All of this brings us to my final point really, which is the way in which these myths are being reincorporated into Japanese archaeological interpretations. That's centred in the Asuka region where tombs such as these, this is Takamatsu Zuka, which again would have surprised Gowland very much because he didn't think that there was any tomb art to speak of in Japan. We now know that there were many tombs that were decorated with these are with Chinese motifs. These are later about the same period as Fujinoki where we started and they've got Chinese style Taoist and directional deities on the inside. There's a lot of argument about who from those historical sources is buried in these tombs. Same thing after a more recent discovery at Kitora Kofu and also in Nara very close by. You see the scale of these burial mounds now extensively restored by the Nara National Institute for Cultural Properties. But in all of this discourse, the naming of the tombs has become interesting. For a long time they were given local topographic names. For example, the Daisen-yami just means big mountain, the largest of the Kofun in the UNESCO documentation is described as the tomb of the Emperor Nintoku and thereby lies much of the controversy about we don't know necessarily who was in these tombs and there continues to be a debate around that. Finally I'm just going to take us down to the western part of Japan. Because normally in Shinto, which is the traditional Japanese religion which draws very much on the Kojin and Nihon Shoki, there's very clear separation between the world of the living and the world of the dead. The world of the dead is considered to be a very polluting world. Here are the Miyajidake shrine and Kofun. Here is a Shinto shrine and actually the Kofun is just behind it. Investigated in the late 19th century. Here we have the mound. Incredibly inside the tomb itself, inside the burial chamber, we actually have a Shinto shrine. So here we have entirely counter-intuitively the bringing together of the worlds of the dead and the worlds of the kami, the Shinto spirits, at this shrine. This is also part of a World Heritage associated set of sites in that part of Japan and we see increasingly this very interesting blurring between the world of myth and the world of archaeological science. I suspect the world of archaeological science is what would speak more to Gowland than to interpretive fantasies based on some of the early historical accounts. I've spoken for too long already. Those of you who would like to know more, there are publications on this that the Sainsbury's Institute has been involved in putting out over the last couple of years. There are online resources that I would urge you to consult as well. I'd just like to close by thanking everybody who's been facilitating all of the research and taking part in the research in particular. I'm afraid there wasn't space on this screen, but I want to thank the librarians of the Society of Antiquaries for their very generous making available the archives associated with Gowland that are held in the library at the Society of Antiquaries. I hope this afternoon I've just been able to give a little bit of an overview of the significance of Gowland and his collections and perhaps encourage some of you to follow up a little bit more with the wonderful world of Japanese archaeology. Thank you very much. Thank you very much Simon.