The Nintokuryo Tumulus of Sakai, Osaka Prefecture is a 5th century keyhole Shaped burial mound surrounded by 3 moats.
It's 840 meters long, which makes it the largest burial mound in Japan.
A deep layer of trees cover the burial mound now, but at the time of its construction, its paved stone surface must have been very impressive.
An enormous burial mound like this took tens of thousands of people to build.
So people were gathered, housed, and made to work...
And the construction progressed.
Technical problems were solved...
And it was seen to that the construction went according to plan.
It obviously took authority, organization, and wealth to undertake a project of this magnitude.
A major part of a burial mound construction project was the manufacturing of the various things to bury with the dead.
A part of this model shows how these things were made.
To the left are bead making facilities. Here is where workers made comma-shaped beads, or magatama, and cylindrical beads, or kudatama. In the center, are the quarters of the people in charge and an array of food warehouses.
There is where workers made haniwa.
And then, the quarters of the workers that came from all over Japan.
This was how the thousands of people who built the burial mounds and did the diffrent types of bullding and manufacturing lived and worked.
Most of the things that were placed along with the body in the burial chamber were made at the construction site. Those that weren't were manufactured and brought in from China, the Korean peninsula, and all throughout the Japanese archipelago.
Around the Nintokuryo Tumulus, are 16 small and medium sized tombs.
Archaeologists think that many of the smaller tombs were made after the Nintokuryo Tumulus was finished.
Here, by looking at one of the small keyhole shaped tumuli, we can see the process used to construct burial mounds.
Workers pile up earth.
And set stones on the slopes.
The haniwa - or clay figurins that were buried along with the dead - were lined up.
And then the remains of the deceased were placed in the burial chamber.
The principal role in buildlng a tumulus was not played by the special materials, or even by administrators, but by the many unskilled laborers who did the actual building. And most or all of these people were assembled for the sole purpose of building burial mounds.
ESince The Construction of The Nintokuryo Tumulus (QuickTime Movie(184K))
