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The Ming Great Wall Military Defense System is the most complete ancient military cultural heritage in China, which is of great significance to the study of China’s ancient military defense mechanism and pattern. Military settlement is an important carrier of this mechanism. The estimation and in-depth understanding of its value can further excavat...
Citations
... Scholars have attempted to use a range of quantitative techniques to assess the potential value and spatial distribution characteristics of heritage corridors in terms of suitability evaluation. For example, the AHP is often used to construct the evaluation system of heritage sites or heritage areas, to measure the spatial suitability and sustainable development potential of cultural heritage [29,30]. In addition, the Tianjin University team led by Lin Feiyang utilized the MCR model for multi-factor spatial superposition to examine the distribution of the Ming Great Wall's intangible cultural heritage. ...
Traditional settlements are vital carriers of Chinese agricultural civilization yet face mounting challenges in protection and inheritance amid rapid urbanization. Taking ancient Huizhou as a case study, this research analyzes the spatial distribution patterns of cross-provincial traditional settlements and constructs a multi-level heritage corridor network through circuit theory modeling and space syntax analysis. The study reveals a “small aggregation, large dispersion” spatial structure shaped by natural geography and socio-cultural dynamics. Simulation of multi-path cultural flows and network analysis show that high betweenness corridors concentrate along the northeast–southwest axis, promoting efficient cultural circulation, while low betweenness areas highlight gaps in direct connectivity. Closeness analysis identifies She County as the cultural core with a single-center radial structure, though internal fragmentation persists. Based on these findings, the study proposes a “three-core-driven, two-axis linkage, multi-source synergy” protection strategy to strengthens the spatial integrity and resilience of the heritage network. This research not only provides a systematic framework for the holistic conservation of Huizhou settlement heritage but also offers methodological references for the protection of traditional settlements in broader regions.
... The sustainable development of cultural heritage depends on evidence-based decision-making and management systems, with the central focus of these systems being the comprehensive and scientific evaluation of cultural heritage value [9]. In recent years, an increasing body of research has concentrated on the multidimensional evaluation of cultural heritage, encompassing aspects such as history, tourism, economics, and risks, with the aim of providing systematic and scientifically grounded decision-making support for the preservation and development of cultural heritage [10]. Consequently, determining how to conduct a scientifically rigorous, objective, and standardized evaluation of cultural heritage value has become a pressing issue that demands immediate attention. ...
... At present, quantitative evaluation methods primarily focus on economics and statistics. Bertacchini and Frontuto [14], Bedatel et al. [15], and Provins et al. [16] have applied economic approaches to evaluate cultural heritage; Ma et al. [17], Fan et al. [10], Liu et al. [18], and Chen et al. [19] have utilized the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and other methods for evaluating heritage value. However, these methods exhibit certain limitations. ...
Cultural heritage value serves as a critical foundation for guiding the protection and utilization of cultural heritage. However, existing methods for evaluating cultural heritage value face several inherent limitations, including evaluator subjectivity, high resource demands, and a lack of timely and objective evaluation capabilities. To overcome these challenges, we present the first application of deep learning to heritage value evaluation through our proposed Vision Transformer-based Heritage Value Evaluation model (ViT-HVE). This novel framework represents a breakthrough in automated cultural heritage analysis, enabling both visual recognition and quantitative evaluation of heritage values through an end-to-end deep learning approach. In this paper, the cultural heritage of the Yellow River in Shaanxi province is selected as a case study. A ten-dimensional value system characterizing these cultural heritage is extracted using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model. Based on this, we developed the first Cultural Heritage Value Recognition (CHVR) dataset in this domain. To facilitate the quantitative evaluation of cultural heritage values, we further introduce a Top-k Heritage Value Weighting (TK-HVW) method, which performs value weighting by extracting and normalizing the probability distributions over heritage value categories. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conduct a comparative analysis between ViT-HVE and five state-of-the-art deep learning models, and validate the accuracy of the model’s weighted outputs using expert evaluation. Furthermore, three distinct fine-tuning strategies are systematically investigated to enhance the performance of our model on the CHVR dataset. Experimental results indicate that ViT-HVE achieves the best performance in heritage value recognition tasks, and our proposed weighting method shows a high degree of consistency with expert evaluation results. The ViT-HVE evaluation method significantly enhances the objectivity and accuracy of cultural heritage recognition and evaluation, substantially reducing the cost and workload of related tasks, thereby offering scientific methodological support and practical guidance for the protection and utilization of cultural heritage.
... The variety and design of armor directly corresponded to advancements in the weapons themselves, highlighting the reciprocal relationship between technological entities. It is worth noting that the types of armor increased obviously in the Ming and Qing dynasties, which may be related to the coastal defense construction and the defense system of the Great Wall in the Ming and Qing dynasties [40,41]. In the Spring and Autumn Period, armor mainly consisted of leather, bronze, and iron, and shields evolved from heavy chariot shields and iron plates to wooden and rattan shields in the Ming and Qing Dynasties. ...
The diachronic evolution of ancient Chinese military science is replete with profound philosophy and rich practical experience. This paper aims to delve into the diachronic evolution of the content of ancient Chinese military texts from the perspective of information science, utilizing information technology to address the primary research problem of how ancient military thought and practices evolved over time. By collecting representative military texts from various historical periods in China and supplementing the data with translations via machine translation technology, a comprehensive corpus of ancient Chinese military texts has been constructed. Based on this corpus, various methods such as BERTopic topic modeling, automatic summarization, and named entity recognition have been employed to meticulously explore and analyze the themes, ideas, and technologies within these ancient military texts. The results indicate that the inheritance of the ideas from “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu is primarily concentrated in the Warring States period and the Song and Yuan dynasties. Moreover, the themes and technologies in ancient Chinese military texts exhibit a trend of gradual enrichment and diversification over the course of history.
... In a holistic sense, the relationship between man and the land transcends the limits of the natural sciences in the fields of environment [18], ecology [19], and geography [20]. Interventions in the humanities and social sciences, such as sociology [21], anthropology [22], history [23], cultural studies [24], and heritage science [25], will provide interdisciplinary perspectives. ...
The relationship between humans and land environment within historical settlements reflects the intricate interplay between human societies, their construction activities, and the specific geographical contexts. Inadequate research into this relationship hinders a comprehensive understanding of the social spatial intricacies inherent in historical settlements. This paper adopts the theoretical framework of complex adaptive system and takes Shawan Ancient Town in Guangfu area of China as an example. Under the geographical background of sustainable land growth in the coastal zone, this study analyzed the subtle changes in the relationship between people and land during the historical construction, and the key findings of the investigation are threefold: (1) Land resources play a central role in the construction of human-land relationships in historical settlements. The geographical environment and social institutions serve as configuring factors in the formation and evolution of human-land relationships. These factors collectively determine the formation and evolution of human-land relationships. (2) Social space emerges as a pivotal manifestation of the human–environment relationship in historical settlements, transcending mere physical dimensions. Consequently, a holistic study of this relationship necessitates a comprehensive exploration not only of spatial configurations but also of the intricate interconnections among social bonds, structural formations, societal order, and settlement spatiality. (3) Drawing on the framework of complex adaptive systems theory, the study disentangles intricate elements within the human-land relationship of historical settlements. It distills and examines the manifestations of four intricate adaptive capacities—namely aggregation, non-linearity, flow, and diversity—alongside the mechanisms of tags, internal models, and fundamental building blocks. It is believed that the study of historical settlements in coastal areas needs to grasp the invariable social-spatial objects such as geographical environment, land form, local beliefs. Take it as a clue to sort out how other elements of change have iterated and transformed in the process of historical evolution, such as the rise and fall of families, land ownership changes and social class evolution. This paper explores the value connotation of historical settlements from the perspective of dialectic thinking of change and invariance with CAS theory, which has theoretical significance for protection of settlement's human-land relationship from the perspective of "social-spatial".
As a critical component of the Ming Great Wall Military Defense System (M-GWMDS) of Yulin Zhen in Shaanxi Province, China, castle-based military settlements have a horizontal distribution composed of three military routes and a vertical distribution consisting of two defense lines. These settlements played a key role in supervising the defense area and deploying troops. Exploring the spatial and temporal distribution of castle-based military settlements is a key link to revealing the in-depth distribution pattern of the M-GWMDS, but most studies have focused on their macroscopic distribution from a qualitative perspective. In this study, castle-based military settlements were selected as the research objects and were combined with architectural, archaeological, geographic, and military information. Their spatial and temporal analysis, including kernel density, slope/aspect conditions, and river systems, was explored based on GIS tools. By illustrating the military distribution nephogram and introducing the reachable spatial-temporal domains and viewshed, the deployment of military troops in this system was interpreted in depth. Taking both geographical and military factors into consideration, the XTENT model was comprehensively established to quantify the sphere of influence of castle-based military settlements, and the ranking and weights of factors influencing their distribution were eventually determined to illustrate the site catchment of these settlements, revealing the layout characteristics of the Ming Great Wall in the spatial and temporal dimensions to further reflect the military wisdom of the ancients. This research presents a new approach to thoroughly reveal the layout characteristics of the Ming Great Wall from a quantitative perspective, which will be beneficial to their subsequent protection and management.
Defensiveness is a pivotal characteristic of traditional military settlements in ancient China, influenced by various factors linked to settlement construction and the occurrence of battles. Previous studies have typically focused on specific periods or moments, overlooking the dynamic interrelationships that evolve over time. The study proposes the concept of ‘defensive efficiency’ as a specific indicator for measuring the level of military defense system construction. Meanwhile, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was introduced to decompose the complex defense efficiency indicators into a quantitative system consisting of four levels of evaluation factors, analyse and statistically analyse the individual evaluation factors, and finally integrate and visualise the comparison of the data over multiple periods of time with the help of a geographic information system (GIS). The results of the study show that the changes in defensive efficiency in the four periods reflected the four stages of coastal defense construction in Ningbo during the Ming Dynasty: the preliminary construction period, the full construction period after repeated Wokou infestations, the basic completion period, and the period when Wokou encroachments were reduced and the point of attack was relocated to the south. While the spatial distribution of battles drove the continuous construction and improvement of coastal defense settlements, the improvement of the coastal defense system had an obvious effect on resisting Wokou intrusion. The study enriches the understanding of the cultural significance of traditional Chinese military settlement systems, emphasises the importance of tailor-made strategies appropriate to different historical periods and regional contexts, and provides a basis for the sustainable conservation of extant remains.
