Although the introduction of the methods and concepts of western archaeology was accidental, the Meiji government took some deliberate measures to preserve the nation’s archaeological heritage. It issued a series of edicts in 1871, 1874, and 1881 to help preserve ancient objects and to restrict the excavation of ancient tombs. It introduced the Law for the Preservation of Ancient Temples and Shrines in 1899, which was to become the basis for the 1950 Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties. The government also initiated, as early as 1871, the process that resulted in the establishment of the imperial museum (today’s Tokyo National Museum) as the depository of the nation’s heritage.

Archaeology as Science and Archaeology as History

The first generation of Japanese professional archaeologists was led by Shogoro Tsuboi (1863–1913), and he, along with several other science students of the time, formed the Anthropological Society of Tokyo (the precursor of the Anthropological Society of Nippon) in 1884. Having been sent to England to study anthropology (1889–1892), Tsuboi was appointed professor of anthropology within the College of Science at the University of Tokyo in 1893. Tsuboi is said to have emphasized the fact that he had not studied anthropology under Morse and made disparaging remarks about him (Goto 1977; Kudo 1977). Yet Tsuboi believed that anthropology should be considered part of zoology, and his position in what was to be called the Jinshu ronso (“race controversy”) was the same as that of Morse.

The controversy was over whether the cord-marked (jomon) pottery from shellmounds was made by the ancestors of the aboriginal Ainu people who lived in northern Japan or by pre-Ainu inhabitants mentioned in Ainu legend. Morse, like Tsuboi, believed that the pottery makers were the pre-Ainu people while Heinrich von Siebold, John Milne, and Yoshikiyo Koganei (1859–1944) maintained that the pottery had been made by the Ainu. Koganei was a professor of anatomy at the University of Tokyo who had studied in Germany for five years (1880–1885). He based his arguments on anthropometric data while Tsuboi, dismissing such data as useless, promoted the use of archaeological remains and ethnographic analogies. This preoccupation with the ethnic identity of the prehistoric pottery makers was to continue until Tsuboi’s death.

This group of archaeologists was referred to as “the race archaeology school” or “the university school,” in contrast to another group of archaeologists based at the Imperial Museum. Since the museum at that time employed scholars who continued the Tokugawa antiquarian tradition, the latter group was nicknamed “the museum school” or “the antiquarian school” (Terada 1980). Government policy at the time was to deposit the remains from prehistoric shellmounds in the Tokyo University Anthropology Department and those pertaining to the proto-historic and historic periods in the museum. The Anthropology Department of Tokyo University continued to be the major center for prehistoric research with a natural science orientation while more historically oriented work was conducted at the museum.

An additional major center for the latter kind of archaeology was created in 1913 when specialization in archaeology was formally recognized within the History Department of Kyoto University. Kosaku Hamada (1881–1938) was appointed professor of archaeology at Kyoto on his return from Europe in 1916. Most of his time in Europe (1913–1916) had been spent in England, where he studied with sir william matthew flinders petrie. Hamada’s Tsuron Kokogaku (1922) is considered to be the first systematic statement in Japanese on the methods and theory of archaeology.

Stratigraphy, Typology, and Chronology

Hamada put archaeological methodology into practice at a series of excavations and in site reports, emphasizing the importance of stratigraphy and the need to define artifact types explicitly (e.g., Hamada 1918, 1919). At about the same time, Hikoshichiro Matsumoto (1919) used the stratigraphic principles of paleontology to argue that variations in ceramics were the result of chronological, rather than tribal, differences. From the 1920s until the end of World