Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2019 number

The work objective is to determine the similarity of the Gumsanni burial mound findings in the southern Korean Peninsula with Kofun materials from the mounds of Japan. The cultural contacts between the population of the Japanese islands and mainland, including the Korean Peninsula, is an actual topic in the modern science. The authors discuss the directions of contact, the time of their occurrence, nature of borrowing elements of socio-economic, political and cultural life, a degree of population mutual influence in these territories. The presence of clay sculpture fragments in the Geumsan-ni mound in the southwestern Korean Peninsula aroused interest from both Korean and Russian archaeologists due to its uniqueness. Producing clay sculpture was not typical of Korea in the V-VI centuries. Attempts to interpret the findings led to the Kofun materials in Japan. A comparative analysis of the burial mound’s upper part (the inner part excavation has not started yet), the funeral goods found in the mound, allows authors to find features similar to the characteristics of the Kofun period in Japan. Typologically the Geumsan-ni mound has similarities with Japan mounds in the embankment form and structure. The fragments of the sculpture have analogies among Haniwa clay sculpture in Japan. Korean findings are head fragments of two anthropomorphic figures, fragments of the horse head and legs, part of a bird head and body, presumably a chicken. Japanese Haniwa represent images of people, animals, houses, boats, household items, which were installed in a certain order around the mound perimeter, along tiers and on its top. The discovery of similar clay figures in the Korean mound leads to conclusions about the existence of cultural contacts between the two territories, borrowing of traditions, and even kinship ties between influential clans.