The preservation states of excavated/salvaged waterlogged wooden artifacts vary greatly. The inhomogeneity of degradation and restricted acquirement of sampling make many necessary qualitative or quantitative analyses of wood properties and protection effect evaluation tests difficult to carry out. Therefore, it is urgent to develop a laboratory-controlled artificial degradation method to obtain sufficient waterlogged wood samples with good repeatability and uniform properties for preservation method research. This paper selected sound Pinus sp. wood to make artificially degraded waterlogged wood by NaOH-vacuum impregnation-hydrothermal combined method. The maximum water content (MWC) of the artificially degraded waterlogged wood was 260%, 340% and 575%, respectively, corresponding with the widely recognized degradation states level of low, medium and high degraded waterlogged archaeological wood according to their MWCs. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) results indicated that the cellulose structure of the wood was well preserved though the hydrogen bond partially broke. Hemicellulose was degraded significantly, the main chain, as well as side chain, were broken, and the characteristic peak at 1 732 cm^-1 disappeared; Lignin was partially degraded, and the relative intensity of the vibration absorption peak of aromatic lignin ring at 1 508 cm^-1 decreased and shifted. Near-infrared reflectance spectroscopy (NIR) showed that all the three major components in the samples were degraded. Hemicellulose was the most degraded, followed by lignin. The increase of relative content of lignin, reflected by the increase of relative content of C=O. A broad peak was formed in the 1 536~1 580 nm region with decreased peak intensity, indicating that the hydrogen bond structure within and between molecules in the cellulose crystallization region was broken.Compared with traditional methods, the concentration of NaOH solution using the combined method was reduced from more than 50% to 1%, and the treatment time was significantly shortened from several months to 10 hours, which proved that the degradation efficiency was greatly improved. The MWC and the degradation degree of the chemical structure of wood cell wall of artificially degraded waterlogged wood was many controller and higher than that of the existing methods. The state and performance of artificial waterlogged wood in this research were similar to archaeological wood.