The Measurement by Airborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) of Disturbance Within the Nasca World Heritage Site

In this paper we report on our use of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) as a means of monitoring the Lines and Geoglyphs of Nasca and Pampas de Jumana World Heritage Site in Peru, where the colossal ground drawings, popularly known as the Nasca Lines, are found. Our research to date indicates that the environment in which the Nasca geoglyphs are found, and the nature of the geoglyphs themselves, are suited perfectly for investigation by SAR. SAR also provides a new and valuable tool for understanding the human activities and natural processes that have damaged the geoglyphs and which, unchecked, will continue to do so in the future. Further, SAR can be used to categorize geoglyphs according to structural differences and similarities in ways that have heretofore not been possible, thereby serving as a basis for a geoglyph catalogue.     

Contested Identities: The Dissonant Heritage of European Town Walls and Walled Towns

Town walls have always played a critical role in shaping the identities and images of the communities they embrace. Today, the surviving fabric of urban defences is a feature of heritage holding great potential as a cultural resource but in management terms one that poses substantial challenges, both practical and philosophical. Town walls can be conceptualised as a ‘dissonant’ form of heritage whose value is contested between different interest groups and whose meanings are not static but can be rewritten. Evidence is gathered from walled towns across Europe, including member towns of the WTFC (Walled Towns Friendship Circle) and inscribed UNESCO World Heritage Sites, to explore the cyclical biographies of town walls in their transformation from civic monuments, through phases of neglect, decay and destruction to their current status as cherished cultural resources. To explore this area of interface between archaeology and tourism studies, the varying attitudes of populations and heritage agencies to walled heritage are reviewed through examination of policies of conservation, preservation, presentation and restoration. Areas of commonality and contrast are thus identified.     

Major Systems of Thematic Resonance in the Iliad

It has been suggested (Heiden 1996) that in the Iliad thematically analogous "Achilles-decision" books (books 1, 9, and 16) and thematically analogous "Zeus-decision" books (books 8, 15, and 24) are arranged in analogous positions at the beginnings and ends of three "movements" (1-8, 9-15, 16-24 = A₁-Z₁, A₂-Z₂, A₃-Z₃). This observation provides the key to a comprehensive system that relates many distant segments of the Iliad. The parallel relationship of thematically resonant beginnings and ends extends to the interior segments of the "movements". Moreover, each movement displays an internal arrangement based on symmetrical ring composition. These two systems are coordinated. They might have served to cue audience recall and comparison of distant thematically resonant segments.     

Pigments from the Zuiddorp (Zuytdorp) ship sculpture: red,white and blue?

SUMMARY: The Dutch East India Company ship Zuiddorp (also known as Zuytdorp) met its demise in 1712 at the base of steep cliffs along the Western Australian coast. Material from the shipwreck includes an extraordinary example of a caryatid herm from the ship’s stern counter. A recent study of this sculpture and the pigments found on its surface demonstrates Zuiddorp’s archaic stern construction and adornment, which is more of a late 17th-century, than an early 18th-century, Dutch Indiaman. This paper discusses the results of this study and emphasizes how the smallest pieces of evidence can broaden our understanding of contemporaneous regional Dutch East India Company shipbuilding practices.     

Editorial

Similarities in late Middle Cambrian trilobite, inarticulate brachiopod and molluscan faunas are apparent between Bornholm (Denmark) and New Zealand. Tuarangia gravgaerdensis sp. nov. is described from the late Middle Cambrian Andrarum Limestone of Bornholm, Denmark. The Andrarum Limestone is stratigraphically correlated with the Tasman Formation, New Zealand, from where the genus Tuarangia was first described. A single specimen, referred to Tuarangia, has been found in an erratic boulder from NW Poland. The boulder is estimated to be of early Late Cambrian age. The initial taxonomic assignment of Tuarangia to the Bivalvia, Subclass Pteriomorphia, is upheld. The distance between Bornholm and New Zealand, the position at opposite hemispheres, and the palaeogeography in general clearly indicate isocommunities with restricted possibility of exchange of the gene pool at species level.