Marine geophysical acoustic methods are a powerful tool for high-precision, large-scale underwater archaeological relics investigations and research in the shallow water. There is a complex coupling relationship between the marine environment and the preservation of underwater cultural relics, which leads to great uncertainty based on the detection data to deduce the existence and distribution of underwater cultural relics. In the past 30 years, the controllable experiments of acoustic methods for underwater cultural relics show that different side-scan sonar systems have varied acoustic response. Multi-beam sonar can be used to study the temporal variation of underwater cultural relics, while shipwreck partially or totally embedded in seabed sediments can be detected by sub-bottom profile. The control experiment will increase the understanding of the acoustic response for different underwater cultural types. Control experiment on the underwater cultural relics can provide a reference for the correlation between detection results and interpretation accuracy, and hopefully provide a systematic solution for underwater cultural survey in an efficient way and on a wide-scale, thus better protecting and managing underwater cultural relics.