The changing World : A review

Abandoned farmsteads are a characteristic feature of Scotland's marginal uplands. Yet little is known of the quantity or location of these early settlements or indeed, of the date of their abandonment. This paper outlines a method of mapping and dating deserted settlement sites and exemplifies the method by reference to abandonment in the Lammermuir Hills in South East Scotland. In this area alone it appears that more than 230 settlements were abandoned before 1860, and a further 104 over 1860‐1970. The scale of this abandonment is greater than has been generally supposed and must lead to speculation about the extent of former settlement elsewhere in upland Scotland.     

我国墓葬壁画的保护方法

壁画的发展与不同民族在各个历史时期的生活习俗、宗教、哲学、美学观念等紧密相连。同时,壁画的制作也与当时社会的政治、经济、文化、技术发展水平相适应,因此古代壁画极具历史、艺术、科学技术价值。墓葬壁画出现并最终形成一种丧葬文化现象是在汉代。汉代墓葬壁画自西汉前期形成以后,不断发展演变并形成了一套非常系统完整的体系,表达了深邃而复杂的信仰和丧葬观念,丰富和发展了中国古代绘画的造型技巧和艺术表现形式,因此墓葬壁画在早期绘画史和思想史上都占有非常重要的地位。本研究对发表在《考古学报》、《考古与文物》等十余种期刊自创刊至2015年的有关墓葬壁画方面的资料进行了系统整理,据此研究了我国墓葬壁画的分布区域及其特征,总结墓葬壁画的保护模式与方法,并就墓葬壁画保护的研究方向提出建议。     

泉州闽台馆馆藏木质类文物的保护处理

福建泉州闽台关系史博物馆多年来收藏的大批木质类文物,不少遭虫蛀和霉菌侵袭。为了不让这些滋生虫菌的文物带到新馆,对这些文物进行了保护处理。先采用溴甲烷常压熏蒸方法杀灭木质文物体内和体表的成虫、虫卵和菌丝。再用软毛刷对木雕文物表面灰尘等物进行小心刷除,然后用水或25%酒精或酒精和丙酮混合液仔细擦拭清洁处理。再用Sparpec 08木材防蛀防腐剂进行渗透处理。保护处理结果表明,本方法技术简单、快捷、易于掌握、实用性强,适用于大批量藏品的杀虫灭菌保护。     

基于视觉的明清古家具数字文化档案高精度三维重建

文物是人类在社会活动中遗留的具有历史、艺术、科学价值的遗物和遗迹。优秀物质文化遗产的体系庞大、内容繁杂,数字化三维重建是保存、管理文物的一种切实可行的方案,对文化传承意义深远。相比于三维激光扫描、结构光技术等在成本和效率方面都有待改进的现有方法,数字近景摄影测量在确保低成本、高效率的同时,还能够满足数据的精度要求和详细程度。如何应用摄影测量技术对文物进行高效三维重建,实现纹理、部件、结构的精细化描述,并综合管理文物以便线上欣赏、未来修复与辅助断代,对优秀物质文化遗产的保护与传承至关重要。 本研究提出了基于视觉的三维建模方案,分为明清家具分层管理体系构建、高效率数据采集与精细化三维重建、高精度三维数字文化档案建设三步。首先针对明清家具的文化特点,从类别、纹饰、部件出发进行分层分类管理,构建独特编码体系;其次基于数字近景摄影测量技术,提出了对明清家具进行非接触数据采集的低成本高效率方法,进行高精度三维重建;再次从三维信息中提取家具纹饰、部件、结构特征,以编码为依据建立索引,为三维数字文化档案的建设提供信息基础;最后设计分层索引结构,建设高精度数字文化档案,搭建互联网共享平台进行展示。 以100套明清古家具袖珍模型为实例进行精细化数字建模,基于数字近景摄影测量技术,将模型精度控制在毫米级别,完成了文物要素提取、分类体系搭建、属性信息管理与索引结构设计,构建了历史文化和三维模型融合的数字文化档案。研究结果表明,基于视觉的非接触视觉处理算法能够实现高精度三维重建,提出的技术方案能够保留模型的细节程度,并且降低了成本、提升了效率,对文物类别、部件、纹饰的属性管理与索引架构能有效管理文化信息,数字文化档案兼具科技、人文与传统美学,满足文物保护需求。明清家具三维数字文化档案可用于古家具的研究,有利于中国古代家具工艺的传承,而其中对于家具的历史年代的介绍鉴别能够辅助断代。下一步将考虑运用人工智能对家具纹饰和部件进行元素组合,生成个性化定制家具。同时将完善技术方案,应用范围拓展至小型文物,支撑数字博物馆建设。     

The evolution of the cultural policy regime in the Anglophone Caribbean

This paper addresses the complexities involved in developing cultural policies in the Anglophone Caribbean. The first section examines the evolution of the cultural policy agenda in the 40‐odd years since the independence era. It traces and analyses the policy trajectory from one that sought to promote the intrinsic values of culture, to one that currently espouses the more instrumental value of the cultural industries. The next section analyses the efficacy of the policy path by examining a regional cultural policy initiative, the Caribbean Festival for the Arts (CARIFESTA). The paper suggests that the Caribbean cultural policies have under performed because of critical disjunctures. These generally involve the imposition of a nationalistic policy framework on the transnational structure of the Caribbean cultural sector. The paper concludes by suggesting a regional cultural approach to policy formulation can provide a more effective mechanism to encourage and harness the cultural wealth of the Anglophone Caribbean.     

Interpreting the Moon Landings: Project Apollo and the Historians

By focusing on the key book‐length studies of the Apollo program that landed American astronauts on the Moon in the 1960s and 1970s, this essay seeks to evaluate the historiography about Apollo in the first decade of the twenty‐first century, dividing the subject into five major areas. The first area is the foreign policy and public policy antecedents of Apollo and its immediate ramifications; some of these efforts have yielded significant studies. The second area involves the evolution of space hardware, in many instances these are overwhelmingly detailed studies of rockets and other space flight technologies. Third, there is a great fascination with the astronauts and their actual flights, and a rich tradition of memoir and narrative exists in this arena. The fourth area receiving attention from historians of Apollo and the lunar voyages emphasizes the history of science, in which much of the focus is on the scientists, scientific findings from the voyages of discovery, and the use of this evidence in developing larger theories about the origin and evolution of the solar system. Finally, and increasingly so in the last 20 years, the Apollo story has been recontextualized through social and cultural investigations of its meaning in modern America. Assessing the five major areas enumerated above, this essay also offers some possibly fruitful avenues of future research.     

An Angel on the Wind: How Heroic Policy Narratives Shape Policy Realities

Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) is a new and maturing theory of the policy process that takes a systematic, scientific approach to understanding the social construction of policy realities. As such, NPF serves as a bridge between postpositivists, who assert that public policymaking is contextualized through narratives and social construction, and positivists, who contend that legitimacy is grounded in falsifiable claims. The central questions of NPF are: What is the empirical role of policy narratives in the policy process and do policy narratives influence policy outcomes? First, the contributions of NPF scholarship at three levels of analysis—micro, meso, and macro—are examined. Next, necessary conditions of a policy narrative are specified, accompanied by detailed discussion of the narrative components: narrative elements, narrative strategies, and policy beliefs. Finally, an empirical illustration of NPF—a case study of Cape Wind's proposal to install wind turbines off Nantucket—is presented. Although intercoalitional differences have long been studied in the NPF scholarship, this is the first study to examine intracoalitional cohesion or the extent to which a coalition tells the same story across narrative elements, narrative strategies, and policy beliefs. NPF is a new approach to the study of the policy process that offers empirical pathways to better speculating the role of narrative in the policy process.     

Community,Connection and Conservation: Intangible Cultural Values in Natural Heritage—the Case of Shirakami‐sanchi World Heritage Area

Intangible cultural heritage, according to a UNESCO definition, is ‘the practices, representations, expressions as well as the knowledge and skills that communities, groups and in some cases individuals recognise as part of their cultural heritage’. Using a case study of Shirakami‐sanchi World Heritage Area, this paper illustrates how the local community's conservation commitment was formed through their long‐term everyday interactions with nature. Such connectivity is vital to maintaining the authentic integrity of a place that does not exclude humans. An examination of the formation of the community's conservation commitment for Shirakami reveals that it is the community's spiritual connection and place‐based identity that have supported conservation, leading to the World Heritage nomination, and it is argued that the recognition of such intangible cultural heritage is vital in conservation. The challenge, then, is how to communicate such spiritual heritage today. Forms of community involvement are discussed in an attempt to answer this question.     

Transport Infrastructure in the Mountains: Why and How to Protect Landscape with Human Activity as Part of its Heritage

In mountain areas without permanent settlements, human activity is entirely dependent on spatial interaction. For centuries, local and regional traffic has followed livestock trails and footpaths. Mainly during the 20th century, new public and private roads changed this situation significantly in large parts of Norway. While mountain summer farming decreased, hydropower development and leisure use became dominant. Protected areas have been established to preserve possibilities for outdoor recreation and ‘wilderness’. However, seasonal farming activity is still an important upholder of cultural heritage. In the investigated area in western Norway, parallels between accessibility and human activity on mountain summer farmsteads have been identified with the abandonment of dairy production between ca 1905 and 1973, recent use by landowners and hikers’ use of publicly accessible tourist cabins. Increased differences in accessibility and protection status have resulted in diversification of human activity in different locations. Custom and tradition represent different principles according to which cultural landscape can be maintained—with emphasis on dynamics or invariance, respectively. Recent landscape protection focuses primarily on tradition. The necessity of easy access to maintain the living cultural heritage in addition to ‘wilderness’ areas, however, requires taking both concepts into account, most probably treated as geographically separate.