Sannai-Maruyama poem-card pendants

短冊形垂飾品

Source term: 短冊形垂飾品; 石製垂飾品; rectangular/stone pendant; serpentinite pendant

短冊形垂飾品 (tanzaku-gata suishokuhin): 'short-rectangular pendant', literally 'poem-card-shaped pendant'

Sannai-Maruyama produced a pair of flat serpentinite tablets that the specialists could not comfortably name. They resemble the rod-shaped pendants of the slit-earring horizon in their single upper hole and elongated form, but both ends are broad and straight, so an Aomori research bulletin coined a provisional label: tanzaku-gata, 'short-rectangular pendants,' after the paper strips poems are written on. Fujita Fujio, who named the related hera-shaped class, read such pieces as hairpin-like hair ornaments; the bulletin suggests these were pendants, sometimes worn as a set with the site's slit earrings. Cut from the same serpentinite as those earrings and — by figure scale — only three or four millimetres thick, the larger tablet is, in outline and section, as close to a miniature bullroarer as anything in the Jōmon record. Its exact phase is unknown even to its publishers, and no measurements have ever been printed.

仮りに「短冊形垂飾品」と呼称するが、棒状垂飾とは上部の1孔と細長い点が類似している。

I provisionally call them 'short-rectangular pendants'; they resemble the rod-pendants in their single upper hole and elongated form.

Aomori Prefectural Buried Cultural Property Center, Research Bulletin no. 4, on Fig. 4 items 37–38

Particulars

Object

Two flat serpentinite tablets, each pierced by a single hole near the upper end. By the published figure's scale, the larger is about 7.0–7.4 cm long, 2.8 cm at its widest and 0.3–0.4 cm thick, with a centred hole near its end and a thin, even profile; the smaller is about 4.6 cm long and 1.2–1.6 cm wide. Four other stone pendants from the site, 4.1 to 7.8 cm long, carry the same single upper hole.

Function

Published only under a provisional name, 'short-rectangular pendants', a label that leaves the function open; Fujita Fujio read the related hera-shaped class as hairpin-like hair ornaments. Thin and holed at one end, the larger tablet has the proportions of a whirled blade.