-buro
(clove-censer) and the graceful rice-bowl, while community of
conception with Chinese potters would seem to be suggested by some of
the forms of these ancient vases. Particularly interesting are
earthenware images obtained from these neolithic sites. Many of them
have been conventionalized into mere anthropomorphs and are rudely
moulded. But they afford valuable indications of the clothing and
personal adornments of the aborigines.

*Cooking-pots and pans, jars and vases, bowls and dishes, cups,
bottles, nipple pots, lamps, braziers, ewers, strainers, spindles or
drill weights, stamps, ornaments, images, and plaques (Munro's
Prehistoric Japan).

What end these effigies were intended to serve remains an unsettled
question. Some suggest that they were used as substitutes for human
sacrifices, and that they point to a time when wives and slaves were
required to follow their husbands and masters to the grave. They may
also have been suggested by the example of the Yamato, who, at a very
remote time, began to substitute clay images for human followers of
the dead; or they may have been designed to serve as mere mementoes.
This last theory derives some force from the fact that the images are
found, not in graves or tombs, but at residential sites. No data have
been obtained, however, for identifying burying-places: sepulture may
have been carried out in the house of the deceased. Whichever
explanation be correct, the fact confronts us that these clay
effigies have no place in the cult of the modern Ainu. History
teaches, however, that degeneration may become so complete as to
deprive a nation of all traces of its original civilization. Such
seems to have been the case with the Ainu.

INTERMEDIATE CULTURE

Traces of a culture occupying a place intermediate between the
primitive culture and that of the Yamato are not conclusive. They are
seen in pottery which, like the ware of the neolithic sites, is not
turned on the wheel, and, like the Yamato ware, is decorated in a
very subdued and sober fashion. It is found from end to end of the
main island and even in Yezo, and in pits, shell-heaps, and
independent sites as well as in tombs, burial caves, and cairns of
the Yamato. Thus, there does not seem to be sufficient warrant for
associating it with a special race. It was possibly supplied to order
of the Yamato by the aboriginal craftsmen, who naturally sought to
copy the salient features of the conquering immigrants' w