![Illustration by Hilda Klint](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_21_9__1920x825/public/2025-03/thumbnail_KNM_0.jpg?itok=FidLiu4m) 

 



 

#  Wood, Ghosts, and the Archaeology of Absence 

 





March 17, 2025

 

 

 [ Jonathan Thumas ](https://rijs.fas.harvard.edu/people/postdoctoral-fellows#JONATHANTHUMASJapaneseReligionHarvardUniversity2024) 

*Edited by* [*Aaron Michael Ullrey*](https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/people/aaron-michael-ullrey)*.*

*The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting spotlighting the academic study of religions.*

The archaeology of death is usually an archaeology of stones and metal; tombs and monuments should be built to last. Most mortuary sculptures in Japan, however, were made of wood, and wood, like the human body, begins to lose its integrity at death, dissolving and disappearing over time. Studying Japanese religion through archaeology requires interrogating preservation biases and reflecting on what is absent from the archaeological record.

The Shagūji Pillar, made of wood, reveals fascinating lore about an ambivalent class of spirit beings called hungry ghosts and Buddhist monks’ roles managing them. People in Japan used wood for dwellings, fuel, and ubiquitous daily objects. Wood and wooden objects were also used to manage the afterlife.

In 2005, archaeologists working in the city of Chikuma, in Japan’s Nagano Prefecture, excavated a river site called Shagūji, an area continuously occupied from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries CE. They unearthed lots and lots of ceramics. The most waterlogged section of the river site yielded the most exciting discoveries, and they were not made of stone or metal.

Preserved in the mud, which protected artifacts from the air and slowed decomposition, the team found two disks made of wood, various other wooden parts, and a wood pillar. One disk was hexagonal, about three feet in diameter. It was accompanied by another smaller wood disk. Joined, the two disks resemble the dome of an umbrella. Small wood knobs and finely carved strips with holes for string fit perfectly into the joined disks. The team also unearthed a hexagonal wooden pillar nearly six feet in height. Inscribed images of Amida, the Pure Land Buddha, cover the pillar’s surface. The components together form a six-foot tall tower, the pillar at its center. Archaeologists call it the Shagūji Pillar (or Stupa).

The wood for the tower derives from several different tree species, many from remote areas. Calibration of radiocarbon dates with tree ring analysis demonstrates that the wood used to make the larger components was harvested in the late tenth century and fashioned before the first quarter of the eleventh century. Materials used to repair the pillar prove that the pillar was utilized throughout the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Although the Shagūji Pillar is the only one of its kind discovered, a nearly identical structure appears in a twelfth-century illustrated scroll. The *Gaki zōshi*, “Scroll of Hungry Ghosts,” depicts stories related to the karmic origin, plight, and salvation of hungry ghosts, one of six forms of rebirth in Buddhist cosmology, an undesirable birth. Perhaps desirous or greedy in a former life, hungry ghosts are depicted as emaciated and starved, with bony limbs, gray skin, and characteristically large, always hungry, stomachs. Even when they can satiate their hunger with a grain of rice or quench their thirst with a drop of water, whatever touches their mouths bursts into flame. All around us, they invisibly haunt the human world.

*Segaki*, the “feeding of the hungry ghosts,” is a practice mediated by Buddhist monks and the ritual objects they sanctify; it eases the pitiable lives of hungry ghosts. A monk depicted in the scroll prays, and a nearby group of laypeople makes water oblations to three hungry ghosts. These laypeople ladle offerings of water, pouring it over a familiar-looking wooden pillar adorned with a painting of the Buddha Amida and bearing an umbrella-like top. Sanctified through the mediation of the wooden pillar, the water drips from the edges and flows down the pillar to the ground, where invisible, hungry ghosts drink it. The Shagūji Pillar and others like it were sites for the practices depicted by the “Scroll of the Hungry Ghosts.”

The Shagūji Pillar may be the first and only one of its kind in the archaeological record, but the depiction of such a similar pillar in a scroll produced in the capital city of Kyoto suggests it is not the only one to have existed. At one time, these wood pillars used to manage hungry ghosts were likely common.

The Shagūji Piillar is a reminder that the material world of medieval Japan was largely made of wood. Wood was once and still is a chief resource in Japan. Alongside constructing settlements and capital cities, wood was a sacred material necessary for the creation of religious statues and the construction of places of worship. Wood communicates warmth, vitality, and life.

Preservation bias shouldn’t make us forget that premodern Japan was a world made of wood. The materiality of death included a range of materials, and the majority are gone. Not unlike the ancestors and hungry ghosts, most of this past is now invisible to us. Considering this lost world in wood and invisible, hungry ghosts compels an archaeology of absence.



 

 

 



 

 See also:- [ Researcher Reflections ](/topic-tags/researcher-reflection)