Kadota Shell Mound

A Settlement from Early Yayoi to Kamakura, Historic Site since 1985

Kadota Shell Mound (門田貝塚, Kadota Kaizuka) is a site at Oku-cho, Setouchi City, Okayama Prefecture, designated a national Historic Site on 6 March 1985, within the class of monuments.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs carries no commentary. The field for a managing body is blank as well, so no words of assessment survive in the official record. What follows comes from Setouchi City.

The city records it as a settlement site running from the early Yayoi period to the Kamakura period, at the centre of which lies an early Yayoi shell mound, the accumulated remains of shells discarded after being eaten.

Long Occupied, but the Centre Lies at the Start

The span of this site is long, from the early Yayoi period to the Kamakura.

What is called the centre of the site, however, is the shell mound of the earliest phase. That people went on living here for a long time and that the site matters as heritage are two different things.

A shell mound is where shells discarded after eating built up over time. Everyday waste survives as a stratified deposit, which is what makes it evidence of how people ate.

Setouchi City records that animal bones were also recovered in numbers. Bone survives among shells because the shell keeps the soil neutral or alkaline, so that bone dissolves less readily.

The Site Gave Its Name to a Pottery Type

Of the finds, the city writes that Yayoi pottery called Kadota type, together with animal bones, was recovered in numbers from the shell mound.

Kadota type is a pottery classification named after this site. Pottery types generally take the name of the site where they were first found in quantity, so this mound became the reference point.

Being a type name means that when pottery of the same character turns up elsewhere, it is placed by reference to this site. The site itself functions as a measure.

The city describes the finds as valuable evidence for understanding how people lived at the time.

What Is Visible Has Been Reconstructed

Of the present condition, Setouchi City writes that the site is laid out as the Kadota Shell Mound Historic Park, with pit dwellings and the shell mound reconstructed.

A reconstruction is not the remains themselves. It is built anew on the evidence of excavation, while the buried remains are usually backfilled for their protection.

A reconstructed pit dwelling is worked out from post holes and hearth traces, which is to say from marks cut into the ground. Only those marks survive; everything above is inferred.

The same holds for the shell mound. What a visitor sees and what the designation covers, the remains beneath the ground, are not the same thing.

Visiting

The site is laid out as the Kadota Shell Mound Historic Park, an open-air park rather than a building with an entrance, so hours and any charge follow how the park is run.

Check the city's information for current details before travelling. The reconstructed pit dwellings and shell mound are what there is to see.

Pottery and bone recovered from the site may be kept and displayed elsewhere rather than at the park. Finds are not necessarily on view where they were found.

The site is at Oku-cho in Setouchi City, Okayama Prefecture.