FLINT ARROW-HEADS. hammers, flint knives, and round pebbles, which were used as war ammunition. The arrow-heads vary in size, length, and breadth. The larger ones I saw measured an inch and three-quarters in length by an inch and five-eighths in breadth, while the smaller were seven-eighths of an inch by half an inch. They were triangular, with the angle at the point sometimes more, sometimes less acute, or lozenge-shaped; they are chipped, and not ground. Most of the arrow-heads and a good many of the knives were made of a dark reddish siliceous rock. The adzes also, of course, varied in size and shape, some being oblong in section, others almost rectangular, while others again were oval. They were ground, and always made so that the hand could have a good grip on them. The average length from the sharp edge to the other end would be about four inches, and the sides were rounded. It is apparent that most of these adzes were not originally fastened to a stick or club, but were held in the hand. They usually have a smooth surface, while the knives, as well as the arrow-points, exhibit marks of chipping quite plainly; their edges are very sharp. Hard stones are often found on which the people of the Stone Age used to grind their implements. The knives are mostly rectangular, with very sharp edges, sometimes on both sides. Then there are some in the shape of a sword-blade, rounded at the top, and with a rounded place at the other end, where they were held. Those with two sharp edges were triangular in shape, and were held by the upper part of the triangle, which point ends with a kind of knob.
FLINT KNIVES. It is a curious fact that bone and bamboo arrow-points—probably Ainu—are sometimes found in pits, and this would lead me to believe, either that the conquering Ainu used these weapons in their attacks upon the pit-dwellers, or, supposing for a moment that the Ainu themselves were the pit-dwellers in former days, that they had abandoned their stone implements and had adopted bone and wood, which they found easier to work. I am inclined to the first supposition as the correct one. The pits are numerous in Yezo, and, following the southern coast from south-west to north-east, we find that they increase in number towards the north. Though stone implements and fragments of pottery are numerous nearly all along the southern coast, but few pits are found either on Volcano Bay or on the south-west part of the coast as far as Erimo Cape. As we pass this cape and go north, on the south-east coast the pits become more numerous, and at Kushiro—or Kossuri, as the Ainu call it—they are found in great quantities. Further on are some at Akkeshi, and they are plentiful nearly all along that stretch of the coast as far as Nemuro, and on Bentenjima, the small island which forms one side of the harbour at that place. North-east of that, in the Kuriles, at Kunashiri and Etorofu, we have abundant evidence that a large population of these pit-dwellers once existed there. In Etorofu particularly the pits, besides being frequent, are in much better preservation than any on the island of Yezo.
The pit-dwellers do not seem to have been particular as to the shape of their dwellings, though they evidently had a certain predilection for the elliptical and rectangular forms. The pits at Kushiro are nearly all rectangular, while those from Akkeshi to Nemuro are either rectangular or circular.
The average dimensions of rectangular pits are about twelve feet by nine feet, but I have seen some as large as sixteen feet by twelve feet. The sides slope inwards, and the average depth is from three to six feet. Pits which are situated on cliffs, or at any height, are generally deeper, probably for the extra shelter required by those living at an altitude, compared with those living on the sea-level. The round pits are from ten to fourteen feet in diameter, and the elliptical have a length of about sixteen feet, and are about eight feet at the widest part of the ellipse. The pits which I found on the north-east coast of Yezo, from Shari to Cape Soya, were not so numerous as those on the southern coast; but some of them were larger in size, as probably, owing to the greater severity of the climate, more people lived in the same hut for the purpose of creating natural heat. At Tobuts, on the Saruma Lake, are three of elliptical shape. Near Abashiri several well-preserved specimens of pottery have been found, especially in the mud of swamps or lakes; but after leaving Lake Saruma, I did not see any traces of the pit-dwellers till I approached Soya Cape. When these pits are excavated, a stratum of sand is generally found, and beneath it a large quantity of charcoal in the centre of the pit. Under the charcoal the earth is burnt, showing that the hearth was in the centre of the dwelling, as it is now in the Ainu huts. This goes to prove that there was one fire, and not, as some travellers have endeavoured to show, five or six burning at the same time, round which, or, rather, between which, the pit-dwellers slept. I have often dug in different parts of pits, and have invariably come upon this burnt charcoal in or near the middle. I never saw any signs of more than one fire in the same pit. Digging in a large pit at Kushiro, I found some stag-horns, and numerous bits of black and red pottery. Some of the fragments had rough line ornamentations on them. There was also a large quantity of war ammunition, in the shape of big pebbles and round stones. Most pits contain heaps of rubbish and bones of animals. Sometimes there are heaps of oyster shells, as near the pits on Saruma Lake; and these shell-heaps are similar to those found on the main island of Nippon. In another pit on one of the forts at Kushiro I found what I thought was part of a human skull; but on a closer examination it turned out to be the skull of an animal—probably a fox or a stag. A bone arrow-point also came to light in the same pit, and several stone defensive weapons. It was interesting to note that this pit was built on the top of a small conical hill, and that the hill itself was surrounded by a ditch only a few feet wide, thus forming a kind of fort. On the side and at the bottom of the fort I saw numbers of stones, which had in all probability been used by the pit-dwellers as missiles against the attacking Ainu during a battle. Besides forts, the pit-dwellers had camps, generally situated in a commanding position above a river, a lake, or a harbour. Single pits also are found only under similar conditions.
Near Kushiro, on the Lake Harutori, which is divided from the sea by a sand isthmus, are several camps and one or two forts, the first of which overlooks the sea. Along the Kutcharo River are forts and camps. These camps are on the crowns of the hills, and each is surrounded by a small ditch. In the last, about three miles from the coast, were several square pits, larger than those on the other three forts. This last fort stands some distance back from the river, and is situated in a little plain at the summit of a detached mound, which has the appearance of having been artificially cut from the larger remaining portion of the hill itself. The shape of the fort is a broken cone, and the base measures about nine hundred feet in circumference, while the upper one is about three hundred. From the top, where there is only a small pit, the entrance of the river can easily be watched; and it must have been almost impregnable, as the walls of the fort, or, rather, the sides of the conical hill, rise nearly perpendicularly from the plain. A small stream runs at the foot of the fort.
On the Lake Harutori the range of hills which stretches from the sea for three or four miles along its eastern shores is literally covered with these pits, and on the sandy isthmus separating the sea from the lake some very large pits can be observed. The fort near the sea is called Shirito by the Ainu, and that at the other end of the range goes by the name of Moshiriya. It was in the latter fort that the well-shaped bone arrow-point was found, as well as one or two stone adzes, which were so shaped as to fit the hand, and evidently had been used as hammers, or weapons of offence at close quarters. In the same fort I found two stags' horns in good preservation, and many bones of different animals. It is doubtful whether these heaps of horns and bones were brought into the pits for the purpose of making arrow-points and other weapons, or whether the stags had been used merely for food. The bone arrow-point found in the same pit was not in such a decayed condition as most of the bones I found there, which led me to believe that it was not made out of the same kind of bone, or that the bone out of which it was made had been cured before its conversion into an arrow-point. I believe that in the neighbourhood of Kusuri—or Kushiro, as it is now called by the Japanese—there are as many as a thousand or fifteen hundred pits. In Etorofu, at Bet-to-bu, on the north-west coast of the island, nearly as many are to be found along the seashore, mostly on the plain at the top of the cliffs overlooking the sea, while the rest are situated on the banks of a narrow stream and along what appears to have been a river course. On the same island, at Ru-pets, are several pits of a similar description, and a fort.
As the pit-dwellers have disappeared from Yezo and the Kuriles, and only pre-historic remains and relics have been left behind to indicate their former existence, the questions naturally arise: Who were these pit-dwellers? Whence did they come? and whither have they gone? We can place no reliance on the accounts given by the Ainu or by the highly imaginative Japanese, who, moreover, are perfectly ignorant on this subject. Some Ainu say that Yezo was formerly peopled by a race of dwarfs, who were their enemies, and were extirpated by them after many sanguinary battles. The Ainu are very vague as to when and where these battles were fought, but according to their accounts these pit-dwellers, whom they call the Koro-pok-kuru—literally "men of holes"—once inhabited Yezo and the Kuriles. They were only three or four feet in height, and some semi-Ainu stories represent them as being only a few inches tall. This of course might be taken to mean that they were very small by comparison. A few Ainu, yet more imaginative than others, go so far as to say gravely that the Koro-pok-kuru were so tiny that when a shower of rain came they hid under burdock leaves for shelter. Others, however, tell us that these Koro-pok-kuru were their ancestors, and much more hairy than the Ainu of the present day. They were strong, fond of hunting, and able to cross the mountains with great facility and speed. According to Mr. Batchelor, some Ainu state that they themselves formerly lived in huts over pits, and that they changed their method of house-building on coming in contact with the Japanese; but if this were the case it seems unaccountable that they should distinguish their predecessors as pit-dwellers. Moreover, if the influence of the Japanese was sufficiently strong to cause them to make this most important change in their habitations and mode of living, how comes it that in other matters they have not adopted Japanese customs? I was unable to trace the slightest resemblance between Ainu huts and Japanese edifices of any kind, either in their general appearance or in any of the smaller details, and I was always struck by the small extent to which the Ainu have adopted the customs of the dominant race. Indeed, the character of Ainu buildings is peculiar to the Ainu themselves, and, far from constructing their dwellings over pits, they go to the other extreme, and perch their storehouses on piles or posts. It is a remarkable coincidence that on the Lake Kutcharo, not many miles from Kusuri, where the Koro-pok-kuru pits are numerous, the roofs of the Ainu huts and storehouses are not angular, but circular, which gives them the appearance of half a cylinder resting on the ground. This struck me as being in all probability the shape of structures built over rectangular pits, while the coverings of round pits must have been shaped like half a sphere, similar to the snow houses of the Esquimaux, and the elliptical like the longer half of an egg.
The present houses of the Kutcharo Lake Ainu, however, are not built on pits; and on my questioning the few inhabitants of the village, all were perfectly ignorant of the existence of the Koro-pok-kuru, and they knew nothing of their own ancestors, nor whether they had built structures over pits or not. The idea seemed to them highly ludicrous, and afforded them a great deal of amusement.