Artifacts Excavated from the Murajiri Ruins in Niigata

A Clay Body Without a Head

In the winters of 1980 and 1981, before a stretch of farmland was levelled in the Shimojinai area of Shibata in northern Niigata, archaeologists opened a patch of ground about seven by eleven metres across. Inside a cluster of Yayoi-period burial pits they lifted out an object that still stops visitors in their tracks: a hollow earthenware figure, 45.3 centimetres tall, modelled on the human upper body but with no head and no face at all. Where a neck would rise, the clay ends in a plain flat rim. The interior is empty now. It was made to hold the bones of the dead.

That vessel is the centrepiece of a group registered as the Artifacts Excavated from the Murajiri Ruins in Niigata Prefecture, designated an Important Cultural Property of Japan on 19 June 2013. The full set runs to eighteen pieces, and nearly every one of them is bound up with a single, very old idea about what to do with a body after death.

A little background helps. The Yayoi period—roughly the fifth century BCE to the third century CE—is when wet-rice farming, bronze, and iron spread through the Japanese archipelago, following the long Jomon era of hunters, gatherers, and remarkable potters. The Murajiri ground had already seen Jomon people come and go. By the early and middle Yayoi centuries a community here was using the same low rise above the river to bury its dead in a particular, deliberate way.

Burying the Dead Twice

The custom is called saisobo, or reburial, and it worked in two stages. First the body was placed in the earth and left until the flesh was gone and only clean bone remained. The bones were then gathered up, set inside a pottery jar, and buried a second time. Often several jars went into one pit together.

This was no fringe rite. Reburial spread across eastern Japan and reached its height in the middle Yayoi period, in a cultural belt running from present-day Iwate in the north down to Aichi. The jars used as ossuaries are sometimes plain, sometimes marked with a human face, and—earlier in the sequence, around the close of the Jomon era—occasionally shaped like a whole human body. Scholars call these dogu-gata yoki, "figure-shaped vessels." The Murajiri example is one of them, and it is the largest yet found.

Why the designation matters comes down to context. Isolated figure-shaped vessels have turned up before, often without a reliable find-spot. The Murajiri vessel was recovered from the burial pits themselves, alongside the jars, bowls, and pots that made up the rest of the ossuary group. That ties an unusual, almost startling object directly to the funeral ground where it was used—exactly the evidence archaeologists need to work out what these human-shaped containers were for.

The designated ensemble comprises eighteen pieces: the figure-shaped vessel; ten jar-form vessels (tsubo); one bowl; two deep bowls; one wide-mouthed pot (kame); two small pendants cut from human finger bones and pierced for hanging; and a single stone fragment listed as an attached item.

What to Look For

Most people go straight to the big vessel, and they should. Stand close. The first thing to register is the rim: flat, open, finishing the body cleanly at the shoulders with nothing above it. Other figure-shaped vessels at least gesture at a head or a face. This one refuses to. A human form has been pared down to a torso that opens at the top like a jar, which is precisely what it is, and the plainness of it lands harder than any added detail would.

Then the size. At 45.3 centimetres it towers over the handful of comparable pieces from other sites, most of which would sit in two cupped hands. Look across the surface and you can still make out faint traces of the coiling and smoothing that built it—the record of someone's fingers, two thousand years on.

Do not overlook the two pendants. Each was made from a human finger bone, drilled through so it could be strung and worn. Whatever they meant to the people who carried them, they close the distance between the living and the dead in a way the larger objects cannot. Keeping a small piece of a relative near the body is, after all, a recognisably human impulse.

Where the Collection Lives

The artifacts belong to the city of Shibata, yet they are not kept there. For safekeeping they are held on deposit at the Niigata Prefectural Museum of History in Nagaoka, around 70 kilometres to the south.

One practical point is worth stressing. The Murajiri pieces are not on permanent display; they surface in special and themed exhibitions, and a dedicated summer show in 2022 brought the whole group together. If your reason for visiting is to see the headless vessel in person, check the museum's current schedule before committing to the trip.

The museum rewards a visit in any season regardless. It opened in 2000 and built its name on the Jomon, with galleries given over to the flame-style pottery of the Shinano river valley, among the most extravagant ceramics ever made anywhere. Life-size reconstructions walk you through a Jomon year and through a snowbound Echigo street of the mid-twentieth century. Free audio guides for the permanent exhibition are offered in English, Chinese, Korean, and Russian as well as Japanese.

Getting there: from Nagaoka Station on the Joetsu Shinkansen, Echigo Kotsu buses leave the Otedeguchi terminal and reach the museum in about 40 minutes. By car it is roughly five minutes from the Nagaoka interchange on the Kan-etsu Expressway, with ample parking. To build a half-day around the region's prehistory, the nearby Umataka Jomon Museum stands at the very site where flame-style pottery was first recognised.