The afterlife of earthen-core buildings: A taphonomic study of threatened and effaced architecture in Central Belize

Buried architecture poses an interpretive challenge to field archaeologists the world over. The depositional sequence of the site must be reconstructed through excavation and stratigraphic analysis, and the various phases of construction and use that occurred in the past must be inferred. Effaced earthen-core architecture (e.g., architecture that was once faced with a masonry outer layer that is no longer present) constitutes a heightened challenge in this regard, as events and layers are not always clearly distinguishable, an interpretive difficulty that can be compounded when such architecture is threatened and decay accelerated by modern-day land use activities such as bulldozing and plowing. The case study presented here focuses on an ancient Maya E-Group architectural configuration—a triangular arrangement of structures that served to commemorate astronomical events, among other functions—that is being degraded through repetitive plowing. The significance of this site in regard to Maya archaeology is undeniable, as it was used and reused over a period of at least eight centuries. The site warranted a salvage-based approach designed to gather maximal quantities and types of data when only a minimal amount of time, labor, and funding was available. The procedure presented here was developed for a specific example of endangered, earthen-core Maya architecture in Belize; however, it is applicable to any archaeological project that faces similar obstacles in examining and documenting architecture before it is either eroded or intentionally destroyed.     

Orientation of the Romanesque churches in the region of Val d’Aran,Spain (11th–13th centuries)

This study examines an ensemble of Romanesque churches in the region of Val d’Aran in the Spanish Pyrenees, built between the 11th and 13th centuries. Seven topographical studies performed between 2014 and 2015 examined these churches systematically using terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) as a data‐acquisition technique. The data obtained allowed for a geometrically accurate analysis of the orientation of these churches based on four Romanesque liturgies: Gemma animae (c.1120), by Honorius of Autun; Rationale divinorum officiorum (c.1150), by Jean Beleth; Mitralis de Officio (1190), by Sicard, Bishop of Cremona; and Prochiron, vulgo rationale divinorum officiorum (1291), by Guillaume Durand.     

Inside Checkpoint 300: Checkpoint Regimes as Spatial Political Technologies in the Occupied Palestinian Territories

As a part of the architecture of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories, the Israeli government introduced in 2005 a series of so‐called terminal checkpoints as “neutral border crossings”, to minimise the impact of these barriers on Palestinian lives through a different design and the use of several machines, such as turnstiles and metal detectors. In this article, we analyse terminal Checkpoint 300 in Bethlehem, framing it as a spatial political technology aimed at controlling the movement of Palestinians. More specifically, we investigate the interactions between Palestinian commuters, Israeli soldiers/security guards and the machines operating inside Checkpoint 300. We conclude by suggesting that Checkpoint 300 is a porous barrier whose regime is produced, reproduced but also challenged by such interactions, and that, despite the new “neutral design”, Checkpoint 300 is a place still filled with tension and violence, often exercised by the machines and their “decisions”.     

OBJECTS OF HISTORY: THE PAST MATERIALIZED1

What is the role of material culture in understanding the past? This review essay explores two principal approaches—the history of museums and antiquities and environmental history—to reflect on their shared investment in historical materialism. It reviews Timothy LeCain's The Matter of History and Peter Miller's History and Its Objects, discussing their perspectives on objects and the writing of history. One important part of this history concerns the relationship of academic historians to the idea of a history museum, curatorial practices, and public history. What kinds of history can we do in a museum, with things, that might not occur without the presence of objects? Why were nineteenth- and early twentieth-century efforts to encourage a close relationship between historical research and the history museum largely abandoned in favor of a document-driven approach? The second dimension of current interest in historical materialism concerns new approaches to environmental history. It draws inspiration from Deep History as well as recent work in archaeology and STS (Science and Technology Studies) to argue for a more integrated history of humans and nature that demonstrates how things have made us. The history of successive efforts to remake the environment in different parts of the world and their consequences offers crucial object lessons in how humans have responded to nature's own creativity. Both approaches to historical materialism highlight the virtues of a more interdisciplinary approach to historical scholarship, in the museum or in the field, but most important, in our own sensibilities about what it means to think historically with artifacts and to treat them as compelling evidence of a shared history of humanity and nature.     

Water and power in South Arabia: the excavation of “Monumental Building 1” (MB1) at Sumhuram (Sultanate of Oman)

The ancient port city of Sumhuram (Dhofar Governorate, Sultanate of Oman) has been the focus of over 20 years of research by the Italian Mission to Oman (IMTO), University of Pisa, in collaboration with the Office of the Adviser to His Majesty the Sultan for Cultural Affairs (Muscat-Salalah, Sultanate of Oman). Excavation has revealed most of the town layout, leading to the identification of several buildings, alleyways, squares and workshops, among which two massive buildings stand out, significantly named by the excavators as “Monumental Building” 1 and 2 (MB1 and MB2). This paper presents the results of the excavation inside MB1, characterised by the presence of the only well discovered within the city walls, which was previously interpreted alternatively as a palace or as a temple. The architectural development of the building, its distinctive features, the archaeological material discovered inside it, and its chronology will be discussed. These results highlight the absence of fitting parallels from other ancient South Arabian towns. Overall, it is clear that access to, management of, and control over the water supply of the town represented a key asset which justified the huge investment in workforce and building materials that is reflected in the monumental architecture of this edifice.     

Putting People on the Page: Material Culture as a Way in to Everyday Life behind the Facades of Tallis’s London Street Views

Tallis’s Street Views describe London as a commercial and professional centre but the visual representation of the street elevations gives an impression of quiet emptiness; it is hard to get a sense of the activity in and around the businesses portrayed. The household inventory of one of Tallis’s advertisers, a dentist who died in 1850, suggests a way of redressing this. An interpretive reading of the list of the dentist’s belongings, disposed around the different spaces of the premises, which housed his residence, his business and other households, gives some sense of the complexity and struggle at a daily level behind Tallis’s apparently orderly professional and commercial facades. This indicates that we can look more generally to material culture – whether in textual and visual representations or as actual artefacts – to provide a deeper understanding of people’s everyday life in a developing city.     

Organized Materiality

In the late medieval period the religious guilds along with trade guilds grew in importance, as did the role of material culture related to the guilds. This history has seen little examination from a Fenno-Scandinavian and particularly a Swedish vantage point. In order to analyse the role of material culture in the formation of this way of organizing people, the article investigates the existence of late medieval guildhalls, especially rural ones, and discusses remains of other material culture that can be connected to the guilds. The halls, drinking vessels and other material things were activated in the growth of a new more substantial way of organizing society outside the boundaries of feudal society and family control. It is argued that material culture had a significant role in the recurrent activities of the guilds of the Middle Ages and in the shaping of new ways of organizing people.     

The quest for a traditional style: architecture and heritage processes in a Pyrenean valley

In this article, I focus on the construction and restoration of houses in the Catalan Pyrenees, on their materiality, and specifically on the relationship between architectural and heritage processes that shapes them. I provide an analysis of how architectural forms, norms and regulations, as well as building aesthetics and materials, were transformed in the past decades following a parallel process of changes in the region. The aim is to explore the relationship between the built environment and the cultural and economic shift of the area in recent times. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research conducted in a valley of the Catalan Pyrenees, I show how the material culture, architecture and built environment evolved in close relationship to the spread of heritage discourses leading to a mutually constituting association that helped shape the elements of the new social realities.     

Conceptual Debts: Modern Architecture and Neo-Thomism in Postwar America

This article analyzes the formative role of medieval theology and aesthetics in the development of postwar American architecture by focusing on the architectural theory and practice of Mies van der Rohe and Jean Labatut, both of whom became actively interested in Neo-Thomism from the late 1940s. More specifically, a closer look at their reliance on the work of Jacques Maritain, the preeminent promotor of Neo-Thomism, sheds light on the transmission and circulation of old and new concepts within twentieth-century architectural theory. By revealing how Maritain’s ideas helped to codify the latter and thus exposed the premodern ideas at the heart of modern architecture, I argue that modernist aesthetics should be re-evaluated with regards to its definition of “the new” and its emphasis on the breakdown or mutation of premodern frames of reference.