Excavated Items from the Imojiya Site, Yamanashi Prefecture

A Single Lot of Finds, an Important Cultural Property since 1995

Excavated Items from the Imojiya Site, Yamanashi Prefecture (山梨県鋳物師屋遺跡出土品) are Jomon-period archaeological materials held at 2727 Yagoshima, Minami-Alps City, Yamanashi Prefecture, listed as an Important Cultural Property on 15 June 1995. The listing is as an Important Cultural Property, not a National Treasure, and the owner is Minami-Alps City.

The reading field gives the site name as Imojiya.

The Agency records that these are a single lot of materials from the early part of the middle Jomon period, excavated at that site.

The Quantity Reads as a Lot, with No Number

How many there are is not written in the quantity field.

The field reads simply that they form one lot: not a number with a measure, but a grouping.

Properties covered here have been counted as one building, one blade, eleven items, one sheet, one hanging scroll. The Kadoya trade materials came to eleven items, their contents counted in four measures.

Here no number appears. The finds are treated as a body, and the individual pieces are not totalled in the field.

The commentary lists them instead: thirty complete vessels, twenty-two fragmentary figurines, one clay earring, one hundred and two clay discs, forty-six stone tools, and one conical figurine.

The numbers are written in Chinese numerals. At the Ishitani residence, the floor area was written that way. Here the counts of objects are.

The Listed Total Differs from the City's by Three

Two figures stand for how much was listed.

Adding the Agency's own itemised counts gives 202: one figurine, thirty vessels, twenty-two fragments, one earring, one hundred and two discs and forty-six stone tools.

Minami-Alps City records instead that 205 of the finds were listed together as an Important Cultural Property.

202 against 205, a difference of three.

With the boar-shaped clay object, the measurements differed between records and only the city added a foreleg length. That is a difference in the number of measurements.

Here it is the total itself. Since the quantity field gives no number, the records cannot settle which is right. This wants checking by hand.

The Two Records Place the Period Differently within the Same Phase

Where in the Jomon period the finds belong is written two ways.

The Agency places them in the early part of the middle Jomon.

Minami-Alps City writes of twenty-seven dwelling sites of the central part of the middle Jomon.

Early part against central part: two different positions within one phase.

At the Haba residence, the Agency gave a span of ninety years and Nanto City twelve: a difference in how closely the date was fixed.

Here the precision is the same and the position differs. At Otonashi Shrine, the period field read middle Edo while the commentary placed the style in the early Edo.

Seeing Them

The finds are at 2727 Yagoshima, Minami-Alps City, Yamanashi Prefecture, owned by the city.

How they were found is recorded. The Agency notes that most came from within the remains of pit dwellings.

Minami-Alps City records that excavation ran from February 1992 to the end of February the following year, ahead of work on an industrial estate, and that a great many features and finds came to light.

Some 13,000 square metres were investigated, yielding twenty-seven dwelling sites of the middle Jomon and one hundred and twelve of the Heian period. Two widely separated periods overlap on one piece of ground.

The city also records a history of loans abroad, to museums in Italy and Malaysia among others. The finds are a city holding, not kept on permanent display. Check before travelling.