PREHISTORIC JAPAN—BAELZ. 5d 
more in height. That these were intended to be hung up is shown 
by the hole at their top, but what they were used for and where they 
came from no one knows. They are generally attributed to Chinese 
origin. They show finely worked geometrical designs and often quite 
a number are found together. 
The bells occur only in the vicinity of bronze weapons in southern 
Japan, especially in the part lying nearest the continent. The farther 
north the less frequently do bronze articles occur, and on the northern 
side of the inland sea there are none. 
Although there can be no doubt but that bronze weapons were cast 
in Japan, molds for casting swords having been found, it is doubtful 
whether the bronze itself came from Japan. Several Japanese 
archeologists think that all bronze was imported from China or 
Korea. In early times neither copper nor tin mines were known in 
Japan, and when the first copper mine was discovered there about 
700 A. D. it was considered an occasion for national celebration; and 
yet the bronze age must have antedated this by at least 1,500 years. 
Few ornaments of the bronze age are extant. They are principally 
beads, bugles, or magatama, made of rock-crystal, steatite, and jasper. 
Unfortunately all discoveries of the deposits of the bronze age were 
made by accident and by uneducated people, so that a systematic 
consideration of them is out of the question. The theory is that the 
places where the bronze pieces are found were originally graves, prob- 
ably covered by a small tumulus which gradually wore down or was 
destroyed by the farmer. Whether or not they inclosed sarcophagi 
of wood or of soft terra cotta can not be determined. *If there were 
any, they have been totally destroyed by the weathering, as have the 
bones of the persons buried. Anything like a stone lining has never 
been found. 
The iron age in Japan is at the same time the dolmen age. W. 
Déonitz has described the dolmens in the volume of 1887, page 114, of 
these Proceedings.* But since Dénitz himself only saw a few dolmens 
which were furthermore empty, little is added to the sum of knowl- 
edge by him, especially in comparison with the highly interesting 
investigations of Gowland, who published the results of his work 
begun more than thirty years ago in the London Archeologia. for 
1897. Gowland himself has examined more than 400 of the 1,200 
known dolmens, many of which were untouched, and has gathered a 
valuable collection of objects out of them, now exhibited in the 
British Museum. 
The dolmens in Japan are all megalithic structures and were cov- 
ered with tumuli, often of large dimensions. If many of them stand 
«Zeitschrift fiir Ethnologie, Berlin, 
