Excavated Items from the Pit at Minamihatori Nakakyu 1 Site,

A Clay Face from a Burial Pit Near Narita

In December 1994, a survey crew clearing a wooded plateau in Minami-Hatori, on the eastern edge of Narita in Chiba Prefecture, lifted the soil from a shallow pit and found a hollow head modeled in fired clay. It lay on its side, low against the pit wall, with its eyes and mouth shaped closed. The head stands 15.1 centimeters tall and measures 13.5 centimeters across at its widest. It had been built up in clay coils, the same way as the pots buried around it, then finished with thin strips of clay pressed on to raise the brows, the nose, and the line of the lips. Nothing quite like it has been recorded at any other Japanese site.

The find belongs to the Minami-Hatori Nakanokogi Site No. 1, a settlement and burial ground of the Early Jomon period, roughly 5,500 years ago.

The plateau itself rises about 32 meters above sea level, cut into ridges and hollows by the Nekonagawa, a stream that drains toward the Tone River system. The 1994 excavation, carried out ahead of golf-course construction, recovered traces of human activity spanning the Paleolithic to the Heian period across six separate areas. One of them, Point E, held the centre of the discovery: nineteen Early Jomon pit dwellings arranged in a ring, and near the middle, packed into a circle barely 35 meters wide, 314 pits cut into the ground. Most are thought to be graves. The objects now protected together as one Important Cultural Property came from fourteen of them.

A short note for readers new to the term: the Jomon period covers the long stretch of Japanese prehistory before wet-rice farming, when people lived by hunting, fishing, and gathering and produced some of the earliest pottery anywhere. Graves with carefully placed offerings are known from the period. A clay human head laid among them is not.

Why Twenty Pieces from Fourteen Pits Were Designated

The designation, granted on 29 May 2003, covers twenty objects: the clay head, nine more pieces of pottery and clayware, and ten of stone. Together they read less like discarded household gear and more like things gathered for the dead.

The head is the reason the group is singled out. Its body was shaped like a round-bottomed jar set upside down, so the curved base became the crown. The maker left the lower edge finished like the mouth of a pot and pierced four small holes just above it; one of the four is a modern restoration. There is no hair and there are no ears. The face only closes its eyes and mouth, an expression that more than one writer has likened to a death mask. Tucked inside the hollow head, excavators found a single flake of stone.

Among the clay objects are five slit-ring ear ornaments, known in Japanese as ketsu: flat rings with a single cut through one side, worn through a pierced earlobe. They came from two of the pits, two rings from one and three from the other, and in each pit a closely matched pair could be told apart from the rest. In at least one case the rings lay in the position they would have held on the body, as though the dead had been buried still wearing them.

The rest of the clayware is two deep cooking jars and two shallow bowls. The bowls are thin-walled, delicately made, and reddened with pigment. The stone objects include two further slit-ring earrings, a tube bead, three pendants (some of amber, with serpentine among the worked stone), two stone knives, and a single spear point. That spear point carries its own depth of time: it was reshaped from a leaf-shaped blade of a much older type, made thousands of years earlier at the very dawn of the Jomon era.

Drawn as a set from what looks like a shared Early Jomon cemetery, the group gives archaeologists an unusually plain view of how a community treated its dead. The clay head, with its quiet modeled face, points toward ideas about death that pottery and stone tools on their own seldom let us glimpse.

Looking Closely at the Clay Head

The original finds are kept in storage and are not on public display. A careful replica of the clay head is shown instead at the Shimousa Museum of History and Folklore in Narita, and it repays an unhurried look.

Notice first how little the maker did, and how much it carries. The features are reduced almost to the minimum that still reads as a face: a ridge for the brows running into the nose, two shallow eyes, a closed mouth. Because the eyes and lips are shut rather than open, the expression settles somewhere between sleep and death, which is part of why the death-mask comparison sticks. The four small holes near the base have invited guesses for years; whether they once held a cord, a covering, or something now lost is not known.

It helps to picture where the head was found. Not displayed upright, but resting on its side at the foot of a grave pit, turned roughly to face outward. Whoever placed it there meant it to keep company with a burial. Seen that way, the slit-ring earrings nearby stop being curiosities and become personal belongings, and the thin red bowls become offerings rather than tableware. The single reused spear point, older than everything around it by thousands of years, suggests an object kept, handed down, and finally given up to the grave.

Around the Site and Where to See the Finds

The site itself, in farmland on the Narita plateau, is not set up for visitors. What you can see is split between two places, both worth the trip for different reasons.

The replica of the clay head is at the Shimousa Museum of History and Folklore, inside Shimousa Sports Park near Namegawa Station on the JR Narita Line. Admission is free, and the small gallery also holds local archaeological and folk material from the surrounding district.

The original twenty objects are held at the Fudoki-no-Oka Museum, part of the prefectural open-air museum Boso-no-Mura in Sakae, just west of Narita. This piece is not normally on show, but the museum and its grounds reward a half day on their own. Boso-no-Mura reconstructs a late-Edo townscape and farmhouses where visitors try crafts such as soba-making and straw work, while the surrounding Fudoki-no-Oka park spreads across some 32 hectares of woodland.

That park sits in the middle of the Ryukakuji Kofun Group, a cluster of 115 burial mounds, most of them several thousand years younger than the clay head. Footpaths run past dozens of them. The standout is Iwaya Kofun, a square tomb about 78 meters on a side and 13.2 meters high — the largest seventh-century square mound in Japan. The seventh-century temple of Ryukakuji lies a short walk beyond. For a fuller day in the area, Narita's great pilgrimage temple, Naritasan Shinshoji, and Narita International Airport are both close at hand.