Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 8.djvu/25

 shown in the works of the Japanese immigrants and those of southern Europe. Another point worthy of attention is that the potters of the dolmen era seem to have had no acquaintance with the decorative motives which are inseparably associated with Chinese applied art, dragons, phœnixes, tigers, the key-pattern, and elaborate diapers. In the mediæval days, when Japan went to the Chinese for keramic instruction, she found all these designs, and adopted them permanently. But the dolmen-builders were ignorant of them.

It has plausibly been conjectured that the figures of men and animals modelled in high relief on the shoulders of dolmen-vases were sometimes intended to depict the pursuits or pastimes specially affected by the deceased during life, as hunting, wrestling, and so on. Were that the case, a natural expectation would be that battle-scenes would occasionally appear on the sepulchral vases of men who are believed to have been constantly engaged in war with the aborigines. But there is nothing of the kind.

The coarse terra-cotta objects of Mr. Gowland's classification are not the least interesting among dolmen relics. They consist of figures of men, women, and horses which were erected on dolmens in lieu of the human sacrifices made at funeral rites in earlier ages. From a technical or artistic point of view these objects deserve little notice, whatever value they may have for the historian and the archæologist. They were mere rudimentary effigies, made of half-burned coarse pottery, and such of them as have survived owe their preservation to the accident of having been overturned and covered with earth which protected them against climatic influences. Keramists who manufactured the