Preservation,storage and display of waterlogged wood and wrecks in an aquarium: “Project Aquarius”

A test aquarium containing water and waterlogged historical wooden material was observed during a three-year period at Vänernmuseum, Sweden, to test the feasibility of preserving and exhibiting archaeological wood or shipwrecks in a way accessible to the public. Experiments were also set up in a laboratory environment, to provide information on single factors that could influence the long-term preservation state of wood, and other processes that may occur in the water.     

硅酸酯低聚体在石材保护中的应用研究

石质文物是中华民族的灿烂文明,是无价的不可再生的文化遗产和旅游资源,对其进行必要的保护势在必行。现阶段封护材料主要是有机高分子和一些在位聚合低聚体材料,高分子封护剂由于渗透性差、固化应力大等原因应用已被限制,低聚体以其良好的渗透性,无固化应力,与石材相容性好等原因受到更多的应用。研究了一类以甲基三乙氧基硅烷(MTEOS)、正硅酸乙酯等为单体、溶液缩聚的硅酸酯低聚体石质文物封护材料。探讨了单体用量对硅酸酯封护材料性能的影响,进行了硅酸酯封护材料的附着力、憎水性、透气性、耐可溶性盐、耐酸碱老化以及耐紫外光老化等分析测试,还进行了红外、扫描电镜等分析。通过试验分析表明,聚合过程中,MTEOS用量控制在40%(wt)时附着力及接触角达到最佳。封护后试样的耐酸碱性、耐可溶性盐、耐紫外光、透气性和抗冻融性均有不同程度的提高,结果表明研究的硅酸酯低聚体材料能够满足石质文物的封护要求。     

Nostalgia as Affective Landscape: Negotiating Displacement in the “World City”

Bangalore, an aspiring “world city”, is rapidly transforming as factories and mills are sold to private developers. As their neighbourhoods now accommodate multi-million-dollar gated communities and post-industrial labour markets, residents experience an in situ displacement, staying in place while landscapes around them dramatically reconfigure. This paper makes sense of how old-time residents locate themselves within such urban growth through nostalgic invocations of the past. Emplaced within histories and geographies of neighbourhood change, nostalgia creates “affective landscapes” through which residents invoke their closeness to past landscapes of abundance and involvement in community-making. Such affective landscapes bring together embodied, sensorial, and more-than-human fields of action to shape an everyday politics in which residents narrate their marginalization within the world city and articulate their own value here.     

Creating environmental subjects: Conservation as counter-insurgency in Aceh,Indonesia, 1925–1940

This article examines the creation of Gunung Leuser Wildlife Reserve in the highlands of Aceh, Indonesia within the context of the Dutch-Aceh War in the early twentieth century, arguing that conservation was used as a form of counter-insurgency. While the agendas of the colonial military and conservationists diverged at times, they overlapped in their goals to secure Leuser from resident communities, whom they viewed as a threat to colonial order and the ecologies of the region. This article draws together the discourses of militarized conservation with their material implications. It does so by examining the nexus of military and conservation discourses, the historical context of park creation, and the processes by which colonial actors stole rights to land and created new laws and regulations dictating the people's relationships with and access to land. Scholars have shown that conservation discourses continue to normalize human rights abuses, Indigenous dispossession and displacement, and deadly violence against local peoples. These discursive tactics frame expertise and responsibility as residing in the hands of white elites who are tasked with saving imperiled environments from the people who depend on them for subsistence. I suggest that the military and conservation agendas were both operating within overlapping, constructed frameworks of crisis and emergency that constituted the resident communities as anti-environmental subjects. Discourses of environmental crisis in Leuser held a power that justified militarization while concealing the violence from international constituencies at a historical moment when an ideology of Western responsibility for threatened species around the world was growing. Moreover, the history of Leuser as viewed through the analytical framework of militarized conservation helps us rethink the history of Aceh. Through this framework, it becomes evident that the Dutch-Aceh War did not end in 1913, as many historians suggest, but instead continued throughout the colonial period.     

出土、出水饱水木质文物冷冻干燥研究进展

冷冻干燥是稳定出土、出水饱水木质文物的主要方法之一。该方法基于水由固态直接成为气态的升华过程不产生表面张力的原理,可避免饱水木材脱水时受到干燥应力的破坏。数十年来,经过实验实践和不断完善,冷冻干燥在出土、出水降解木材的稳定中取得了很好的效果,在大型、厚重木质文物的保护方面得到成功应用。本研究基于在出土、出水含盐饱水木质文物保护方面的多年实践,对国内外在脱盐、抗菌、热浸、预冻和升华干燥工艺等方面的进展进行了回顾,并提出了解决一些现有问题的技术设想。     

Naturalizing the state and symbolizing power in Russian agricultural land use

Land is intertwined with politics: both as a sine qua non for the territorial state, as well as a spatially limited natural resource through which geopolitical power and advantage are articulated and enacted. This remains the case, notwithstanding the emergence of global and planetary frameworks for land management towards collective environmental and developmental goals. Indeed, such frameworks contend with narratives and practices that not only treat land as a strategic national resource, but entangle it with the very ontology of statehood itself. This study examines such state-natures through the case of Russian agricultural land use. Analyzing governmental discourse from 2000 to 2020, it examines how in the extensive cultivation of agricultural land has come to be a hallmark of twenty-first century vertical and horizontal symbolic state-making: both as an instrumental means of enhancing the state's geopolitical power, as well as a means by which state is reified as environmentally sovereign and self-subsistent. So doing, the study complements a growing body of work in critical environmental geopolitics that has tended to eschew state-based analysis, or else leave the state underproblematized. As I argue, considering how the state is made natural, in turn helps to understand how nature is politically if not ontologically entangled in geopolitical thought and practice—in ways that attempts to act upon and indeed bring about wider-scale environmental subjects must contend.     

Pastoralism and conservation: The politics and notions of environmental justice under the grazing ban policy in Inner Mongolia,China

Environmental justice is a key concept for understanding the contested relationship between pastoralism and conservation. Our study adopted a political approach to examine conservation, pastoralism, and justice in the context of the grazing ban policy in China. Employing a qualitative, in-depth case study, we investigated the local political actors and processes that lead to environmental (in)justice. The evidence shows how injustice is perpetuated by both centralized and decentralized political processes and how herders use their knowledge and strategies in resistance to the injustice. In addition, the study contributed to a pluralistic understanding of justice by examining the different notions of justice held by the herders. We found that herders perceive injustices through different lenses, namely economic, ecological, and cultural aspects. Further, the similarities and differences between Han and Mongolian herders are discussed in terms of their notions of environmental justice and counteractions.     

X射线成像技术在文物保护与制作工艺研究中的应用

X射线成像技术在科技考古和文物保护研究领域的应用越来越广泛,可提供肉眼和其他分析仪器无法提供的信息。本文主要以金属文物和铸铜陶范为例,解析了X射线成像技术在实验室微发掘、文物状况研究以及文物制作工艺研究中所发挥的作用。研究结果揭示了大英博物馆收藏的一些重要中国青铜器(包括著名的康侯簋、邢侯簋、赵孟壶)不为人知的修复历史和现状以及复杂器物不同部件的制作工序和连接方式等,并首次披露了侯马陶范的复杂结构。X射线成像技术包括X射线探伤和工业X射线计算机断层扫描(X-CT),是科技考古和文物保护研究的一个重要手段,可为文物保护和保存提供建设性建议,为文物制作技术的解析提供重要的科学数据,为深入研究文物提供指导。     

The archaeology of industry; people and places

The development of industrial archaeology over the last 50 years can be traced through articles published in PMA. The early stages of recording the standing remains of industrial activity were augmented by detailed studies of groups of structures which revealed the organization of the manufacturing process. From the late 1980s, developer-funded excavations became important following extensive remediation work on brownfield sites. Greater attention was paid to the social context of past industrial activity including workers’ housing and institutional buildings, and this has continued with studies of oral history. New challenges considered include studies of modern technologies, de-industrialization and the digital revolution.     

The origins of New Zealand’s first government house

SUMMARY: In 1842 the former first government house located at Okiato, New Zealand, burnt to the ground and the site was abandoned. A well on the site was excavated in 1994–95, revealing a base layer of burnt timbers, a Maori digging stick and ceramic sherds with an estimated manufacture date range of 1823–41. We argue that this deposit is derived from the 1842 destruction of the Okiato government house building. An analysis of the wood identified kauri (Agathis australis) and kahikatea (Dacrycarpus dacrydioides), confirming that the building was not a prefabricated imported structure, but rather was constructed on site from locally available timber.