What Happens After the Wooden Tablet is Excavated?

Feature Exhibition #4 What Happens After the Wooden Tablet is Excavated?

•10/17(Tue.) ~ 12/17 (Sun.) Closed: Mondays
（If Monday falls on a national holiday, the next day）
• 09:30~17:30 (last entry: ~17:00) 
• Adult: ¥200, HS and Uni.: ¥150, No charge for Junior High School Students and younger

-How the fragile wooden objects become a cultural asset to be displayed at the museum –

There are a lot of things discovered from the site of excavation. Sometimes, wooden tablets with inscribed characters are discovered from the site. Despite of their trashy look, they are really valuable as they carry a lot of important information about Japanese ancient history.

Wooden Tablets

Aside from the tablets, there are not so many written documents left from the Nara to Heian Period.
So, the tablet was found. It’s time for archaeologists to tackle some nerve breaking puzzles to learn something yet to be known from the already given information.

Wooden Tablets Again

At the same time, the researchers have to take good care of those tablets so that they won’t deteriorate. For wooden tablets are usually discovered from somewhere really wet, it usually contains water inside. If they keep it in the air for a long time, the color or shape will be damaged. The wooden tablets we see in textbooks took a lot of complicated steps in order for its content to be effectively preserved.
More than 100 wooden tablets were found in Fukuoka City. They are shipping tags, documents or calligraphy workbooks. This exhibition describes all the steps we take before displaying the wooden tablets.

Posted by Takamura