Hashihaka and Mounded Burials (3rd Century)

We saw in Chapter 4 how references to alleged 3rd-century ruling figures in both the Chinese documents (Queen Himiko) and the Japanese chronicles (Emperor Sujin) can be tied to the archaeological record in Japan. The Hashihaka Tomb in the southeastern Nara Basin serves both as a tie to the documentary evidence for rulers of a 3rd-century polity and as one of the type sites for defining one aspect of the Mounded Tomb Culture (kofun bunka) that characterizes the period of state formation.