日本語ページ
Caution !
The following pages contain photographs of human bones.
If you wish to avoid viewing these images, please return to the
Kahaku home-page.
[[[ Preface ]]]
Welcome to our home page! The aim of this page is to provide
information on our Department's collection of human skeletal remains
which have been primarily excavated from various prehistoric and
historic sites in Japan. These specimens were collected in order to
more objectively understand ourselves as biological organisms and we
believe this collection and the results of investigations into it are
a precious resource that should be made accessible to everyone.
This page is still under construction, so please be patient, as in the not-too-distant future we will be updating the page to include a great deal more useful and interesting information. For the moment, the display includes relatively well preserved skulls as well as some 3-D data from them. We hope you enjoy the world of physical anthropology.
Our collection consists of about 1,800 skeletal remains. Of these,
about 220 individuals are from the protohistoric Kofun period of
Japan (ca. 300 - ca. 1200 A.D.); about 120 from medieval times (ca.
1200 - ca. 1600); and some 1,380 from the early modern Edo period
(1603 - 1867 A.D.). The remainder are from various times and sites,
not only from Japan but also from other countries. As well, there are
a small number of older specimens from the Pleistocene and the Jomon
Periods of Japan, etc.
The major problem in any skeletal collection is bone preservation, which varies from specimen to specimen and, in fact, some specimens have been so affected by the ravages of time that they are not very useful for research purposes. As a result, despite the fact that some parts of the collection are relatively well preserved, others are fragmentary and it takes a great deal of effort to extract meaningful information from specimens such as these.
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[[[ Human
Skeletal Remains from the Middle Ages and/or Early Modern
Times]]] |
You can experience first-hand three-dimensional (3D) mearurement
of those skulls in our web pages which are designated, "3D". The 3D
data files for these skulls were produced with the 3D measurement
device called "VOXELAN" (made by Hamano Engineering). To measure the
skulls, software dealing with data files such as "skull000.idt" and
"skull000.ddt" are required. If you do not have such a program, you
may download the free software, "3D-Sphinx of the National Museum of Nature and Science (Windows 95)," from this site. This program was written by Mr.
Toyohisa Tanijiri, Medic Engineering, who has kindly provided it to
us at no charge. If you want to download it, please click
here! The file is compressed into a self-expanding EXE-file
(1.86MB). For the time being, however, we regret that the
explanations in 3D-Sphinx are written in Japanese only. The manual is
also written in Japanese. If you want to view it, click
here.
Regarding the data files of skulls, please download them from any
of the pages containing skeletal remains. The data files for a skull
(a total of 720KB) are compressed into a ZIP-file (about 150KB). To
expand these ZIP-files, you will need to download a free- or
share-ware from sites on the internet.
With these programs and the data we have provided, you can measure
three-dimensionally the skulls on your computer (note: the initial
rate of conversion from pixel to mm in 3D-Sphinx = 1.1277).
[[[ Site-by-Site Database of the Human Osteological Collection ]]]
This is a site-by-site database of the human skeleton remains housed in our Department. You can refer to the information such as the number of the skeleton, and locality and chrolonlgical age of the site.
Database of the Human Osteological Collection (Compiled for Each Site)
Home Page Production
We are deeply grateful to Ms. Patty Lindsell and Dr. Peter Brown of
the University of New England, Australia; Professor Michael
Pietrusewsky of the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, U.S.A.; and Ms.
Gail Krovitz of the Johns Hopkins University, U.S.A., for help with
correcting the English version of our web pages.
Home
Page of National Museum of Nature and Science, Tokyo