Sannai-Maruyama tapering greenstone pendant

石製垂飾品

Source term: 石製垂飾品; 有孔石製品; stone pendant; official Sanmaru Search object

石製垂飾品 (sekisei suishokuhin): 'stone pendant'

Flat, green and ground smooth, this Early Jōmon pendant is 7.8 centimetres long and pierced once near its rounded top. It comes from Japan's most celebrated Jōmon settlement — the great Aomori village of monumental posts and a millennium of continuous occupation — and it is catalogued exactly as what it appears to be: a stone pendant. In profile it is a thin, elongated, end-hung blade — the silhouette that reads as a bullroarer wherever an ethnographer rather than an ornament specialist happens to describe it. It survives exactly as it must once have hung: labelled a pendant, photographed, and never asked to make a sound.

Particulars

Object

A flat, tapering slab of green stone, ground smooth, 7.8 cm long, with one round hole near its narrow top.

Function

Catalogued as an Early Jōmon stone pendant (石製垂飾品) in the official Sannai-Maruyama database; no wear or function study is published.