Research Center for Heritage Science

Heritage science is the study of revealing the value of culture and the diagnosis of cultural properties for conservation treatment after destruction, damage, or deterioration to transfer them to future generations.
In European countries, the public commonly recognises the need for cultural preservation, and heritage science and archaeology are often treated as scientific disciplines such as applied physics and geology, which are more likely to obtain large research funding. In Japan, heritage science is a humanities discipline, which makes experimental research requiring large equipment budgets extremely difficult. On the other hand, scientific institutions with human resources and equipment are less likely to conduct heritage-related research into official projects, and they only contribute on the basis of the personal interests of the researchers.
Collaboration between the humanities and sciences in the field of cultural heritage can support systematic research into the use of science and technology. Furthermore, in the future, ethnographic information can be integrated to develop into a new academic discipline that provides an overview of global cultures across time and space.