A Summary on Shipwrecks of the Pre-contact Period and the Development of Regional Maritime Trade Network in East Asia
Maritime culture has been the main driving force of globalization resulting from intercontinental cultural exchange over past 500 years. After the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498, Europeans ventured in increasing numbers into East
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A Summary on Shipwrecks of the Pre-contact Period and the Development of Regional Maritime Trade Network in East Asia Chunming Wu
Maritime culture has been the main driving force of globalization resulting from the intercontinental cultural exchange over past 500 years. After the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498, Europeans ventured in increasing numbers into East and Southeast Asia, gradually establishing colonies there. European contact and the beginning of trade globalization in Eastern Asia since the 16th century opened the gate to modernization of this region. Even before the European exploration, however, there had been a long and complex history of maritime trade in eastern Asian seas for hundreds and even thousands of years. This pre-contact “native” maritime network provided an important foundation for the early stages of globalization that would follow. Over the past twenty years, underwater archaeology has been broadly carried out in the seas off China’s east and south coasts. More than 200 shipwrecks and underwater cultural heritage sites have been investigated among which many merchant shipwreck sites dated from the 9th to early 16th centuries (China’s Tang, Song, Yuan and early Ming dynasties) reflect the development of maritime cultural interaction between this region and East and Southeast Asia. This paper introduces the main archaeological content of these shipwrecks, gives a synthetic analysis of seafaring history of each case, and presents a regional overview of the history of regional maritime cultural interaction prior to the period of European contact.
C. Wu (&) The Center for Maritime Archaeology, Xiamen University, Xiamen, China e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] C. Wu Harvard-Yenching Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016 C. Wu (ed.), Early Navigation in the Asia-Pacific Region, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-0904-4_1
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Investigation of Pre-contact Shipwrecks in Eastern Asia
The history of what has popularly been called the “maritime silk road” and “ceramic road” of eastern Asia was studied by historians and archaeologists for decades before the expansion of underwater archaeology began in the 1970s. However, scholars paid relatively little attention to the importance of materials and information from underwater shipwrecks in this region. Since 1970s, maritime archaeology has become more fully developed and a growing number of underwater salvage project as well as full-fledged excavations have been carried out on ancient shipwrecks. These works have revealed a large variety of cultural heritage sites including shipwrecks in the seas of east and southeast Asia and sheds new light on the maritime history of Asia-Pacific region. These shipwrecks and other underwater heritages dated to the pre-contact period are distributed across the maritime areas off the coasts of China, Korea, Japan, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia (Fig. 1.1). The brief description of selected wr
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