Ritualized beadstone in Kofun-period society © GINA L. BARNES This article was first presented at the British Museum Symposium on Man Nature & Art, 6-8 September 2001. Submitted to the “East Asia Journal: studies in material culture” in 2005, it has been accepted but is yet to appear. This version is the author’s preprint. In ancient China the stone with immense ritual significance, from the Neolithic onwards, was jade. Jade animal totems are known from the northern Hongshan culture as well as the southern Liangzhu culture. The term ‘jade’ embraces two distinct types of stone, the softer nephrite and harder jadeite — both forms of metamorphic minerals. For the majority of Chinese history, only nephrite was available for working. Japan, however, is one of the few sources of the harder jadeite in the world. Found primarily in the Itoigawa river drainage of Niigata Prefecture, this local jade, whitish to green in colour, was used from the Jōmon period onwards for pendants and earrings. Still today, jade pebbles can be collected from the Japan Sea beaches of the Hokuriku district of northern Japan, and cobbles of jasper, jade’s substitute, are even used in local architecture in the San’in district of western Japan. Jade’s limited source distribution and difficulties in working the hard stone contributed to its becoming a precious resource during the Yayoi and Kofun periods, when other lighter or darker green beadstones were chosen to imitate or substitute for it. In Kofun-period Japan (AD 250–710), beadstone functioned in contexts of both funerary ritual and landscape worship. Although these contexts initially seem quite different in intent and content, they are tied by the concept of matsuru 祭ࡿ, meaning both ‘to worship’ and ‘to rule’ (Tanaka 1970). The evolution of political ritual, which eventually led to the establishment of formalized Shintō, was clearly related to control over economic resources and political unification. These themes will be consolidated in the final section which investigates the production of beadstone objects under the auspices of the major ritual and military clans of the Yamato state, as known from Nara archaeology. Funerary ritual With the rise of stratified society from the mid-3rd century AD, the political rulers came to be buried in monumental mounded tombs in which status- laden objects were deposited with the elite. Grave goods included bronze mirrors of great ritual significance, a variety of bracelet-shaped objects, and various shapes and sizes of beads including cylindrical beads and the curved magatama 勾玉 beads. The ‘bracelets’ were usually made of jasper or green tuff, while the beads could be made of jade (particularly magatama and jujube-shaped beads), jasper (particularly cylindrical beads), and glass (small beads kodama 小玉). While the spectacular discoveries of bronze mirrors in 4th-century tombs are well known, recent excavations have demonstrated that the stone bracelets were sometimes deposited in equivalent numbers – far beyond that required for personal ornamentation. The Shimanoyama Kofun in central Nara, a late 4th-century tomb 190 m in length, yielded 140 stone bracelet-shaped objects, in uncanny resemblance to the jade bi disks deposited in Late Neolithic Chinese Liangzhu culture graves. There is no doubt that the bracelets here represent a ritualized deposit.