Browse Items (12 total)

East Asia is rich in maritime and underwater cultural heritage. Not only conventional shipwrecks or submerged archaeological sites but also stone tidal weirs or prehistoric shell mounds along coastal zones have extensively been identified by many…

Namban screens, a well-known Japanese art form, were painted by skillful Japanese artists from the late 16th century to the 17th centuries. Approximately 90 of these screens have been handed down up to the present. Not only they show some important…

This paper is about the wrecked ships found in Tae-an, Korea, and the ongoing investigation. Four cargo ships of the Middle Ages were excavated from Taean, Korea during 2007 - 2011. Three of these four ships were found in a 1 km radius, as such, this…

Underwater archaeology in Japan has a long history, as a report of artifacts from Lake Suwa in 1908, as well as discoveries at Tsuzura Ozaki site in Lake Biwa in 1924 detailed. The attempts to find the ill-fated fleet of Khubilai Khan at Takashima…

Yarabuoki site, which contains iron grapnel anchors and early modern Okinawa ceramic jars in 12 to 32 m depth off the western Coast of Ishigaki Island, was discovered by a local diver and reported to Okinawa Prefectural Archaeological Center. In…

Lake Biwa, the largest in Japan, is in the heart of Shiga Prefecture, occupying an area of 670 square kilometers. Because the lake has about 4,000,000 years of history, it has been closely related to local people's everyday lives which have largely…

At the end of the 19th century the Japanese government built several military forts on the sea or artificial islands inside Tokyo bay in order to defend its capital from foreign sea powers. Three outer forts or Kai-hou, which were between the cape of…

Shodo Island in the Seto inland sea used to be the major entrepôt of wall stones, which were taken to the Osaka castle, gathered from some islets around this island. The processes of constructing Japanese castle walls are composed of three…

As the most important qualities of ancient Chinese sailing junks, the square bows and sterns with transverse watertight bulkhead and the lugsails with bamboo mat and strip remained the same over thousands of years. Of which, the traditional Fujian…

The Ryukyu Archipelago is located at the northwestern Pacific, between the islands of Formosa and Kyushu of southern Japan. It consists of 199 islands of all dimensions and the total range of its accurate distribution lengthen is approximately 1,200…

The stone tidal weir is a kind of fish trap, made of numerous rocks or reef limestones, which extends along the shoreline on a colossal scale in semicircular, half-quadrilateral, or almost linear shape. At the flood tide these weirs are submerged…

China has large number and various types of underwater cultural heritage resources, which altogether forms an essential part of China’s cultural heritage. In order to manage such valuable cultural resources, the nation has been playing the most…