An ethnography of grain storehouses and elevated graves in the Ryūkyū archipelago and Southeast Asia

This paper comprises a report of field surveys on raised-floor grain storehouses and elevated graves, with details on locations, scale, construction, and associated beliefs.Surveys of raised-floor grain storehouses were undertaken in Okinawa, the Amami Islands, the Tokara Islands, Hachijōjima, Borneo, Java, Sulawesi, Lombok, and Sumbawa. The similarities in the construction of the storehouses and in associated rice-spirit belief systems provide evidence to support the idea that rice cultivation spread to Japan from the south.Surveys of elevated or hanging graves were undertaken in Okinawa, the Amami Islands, Hachijōjima, Sulawesi, and Bali. Comparison of practices in Japan and Indonesia is made of terms of the forms of such graves, death rites, the relationship between the living and the dead, and views of the other world