Yasuhisa Kondo

The Great East Japan Earthquake and cultural heritage. Towards an archaeology of disaster

The earthquake that struck Japan on 11 March 2011, named the Great East Japan Earthquake by the Japanese government, was one of the largest seismic events the world has seen for generations. Akira Matsui reported his experience of visiting the areas devastated by the earthquake and tsunami soon afterwards, outlining the initial assessment of damage caused to museums and cultural heritage assets, and the plans for their rescue (Kaner et a/ 2011; Matsui 201 I a). The present contribution reports how far the implementation of these plans has been successful, the prospects for the future, and situates all of this in a broader context of archaeological response to earthquakes.

Ecological Niche and Least-Cost Path Analyses to Estimate Optimal Migration Routes of Initial Upper Palaeolithic Populations to Eurasia

This paper presents a computer-based method to estimate optimal migration routes of early human population groups by a combination of ecological niche analysis and least-cost path analysis. In the proposed method, niche probability is predicted by MaxEnt, an ecological niche model based on the maximum entropy theory. Location of known archaeological sites and environmental factors derived from palaeoterrain and palaeoclimate models, are input to the model to calculate the niche probability at each spatial pixel and weights of the environmental factors. The inverse of probability score is then used as an index of relative dispersal rate to accumulate the travel cost from a given origin. Based on this cumulative cost surface, least-cost paths from the origin to given destinations are visualised. This method was applied to the Initial Upper Palaeolithic population group (probably of modern humans) in Eurasia. The model identified three migration routes from the Levant to (1) Central Europe via Anatolia and Eastern Europe, (2) the Russian steppe via Caucasus Mountains, and (3) the Altai region via the southern coastal Iran and Afghanistan.

Concurrent and sustainable development of a local-scale digital heritage inventory through action research at Bat, Oman

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a concurrent implementation of sustainable inventory for the UNESCO World Heritage sites of Bat, Al-Khutm and Al-Ayn in the interior of Oman. Design/methodology/approach – A digital heritage inventory (DHI) was developed through an action research to realize demands of the local agent and to co-design the solution. The Ministry of Heritage and Culture of Oman, the local agent, demanded to have archaeological information of the sites shared with foreign expeditions, which had worked at the sites for decades, for efficient heritage management, scientific research, outreach, and education. To this end, the Bat Digital Heritage Inventory (BatDHI) was implemented by a combination of network-access-ready database application, open source geographical information systems, and a web-based map service to incorporate and visualize previous works, which were concurrently cross-checked and updated by ground-truth surveys. Findings – The online inventory made it possib...