Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/63

 chamber, and sometimes of a gallery and two chambers; over it was built a mound of earth which occasionally assumed enormous dimensions, covering a space of seventy or eighty acres, rising to a height of as many feet, and requiring the labour of thousands of workmen. The builders of the barrows were in the bronze age of civilisation; the constructors of the dolmens, in the iron age. In the barrows are found weapons and implements of bronze and vessels of hand-made pottery; in the dolmens, weapons and implements of iron and vessels of wheel-turned pottery. There is an absolute line of division. No iron weapon nor any machine-made pottery occurs in a barrow; no bronze weapon nor any hand-made pottery in a dolmen. Are the barrow-builders and the dolmen-constructors to be regarded as distinct races, or as men of the same race at different stages of its civilisation? Barrow and dolmen bear common testimony to the fact that before the ancestors of the Japanese nation crossed the sea to their inland home, they had already emerged from the stone age, for neither in barrow nor in dolmen have stone-weapons or implements been found, though these abound in the shell-heaps and kitchen-middens that constitute the relics of the Koro-pok-guru and the Ainu. But, on the other hand, barrow and dolmen introduce their explorer to peoples who stood on different planes of industrial development.