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.     

After Empire: Karl Renner's Danubian model of pluralism

This article argues that Karl Renner's multinational model for the Austrian‐Hungarian Empire is an alternative model for contemporary a‐territorial, multinational and federal arrangements. Nations, in his view, should act as intermediary bodies between the relevant communities and the state. His concept of ‘subjective public law’ combines principles that most authors find mutually exclusive: individual rights, choice over one's national cultural membership, non‐territorial administration of national communities and overseeing of equal collective rights by the state. Neither Staatsnation nor Kulturnation, the model is a combination of the two under the auspices of a federal state combined with a strong theory of individual and collective rights. I provide the reader with a comprehensive intellectual biography of Karl Renner, as I argue that an understanding of the man himself, his political pragmatism and his statism are crucial to comprehending this theoretical position. Throughout his life, Renner was a German nationalist, held a strong nostalgia for the Habsburg Empire and voted in favour of the Anschluß. His concurrent careers as a scholar and as a politician account for a series of contradictions. I argue however that these can be reconciled and explained by a careful comparative reading of his scholarly work and his political statements.     

Espacios locales y espacios trascendentales de la conversión: las Postrimerías de Carabuco y la producción performativa de epistemologías transculturales

The monumental paintings of the Postrimerías [Four Last Things] from the church of Carabuco (1684) serve as objects to study the complex dynamics of the visual and performative production of religious knowledge in a colonial contact zone. The article presents different ‘readings’ of the series that focus on possible uses and receptions of the paintings by local actors. These readings are based, on the one hand, on the idea of conceiving the series as a ‘cycle of meditation’ and product of the influences of Christian mysticism that played an important role in the ‘eschatological politics of conversion’ of the southern Andean Highlands. On the other hand, the paintings relate the eschatological message with the local hagiographic narratives of a pre-Hispanic apostle associated simultaneously with the Christian apostle Bartholomew and the Andean deity Tunupa—the most important figure of Aymara mythology. These works therefore represent objects of memory that participate in the local construction of time and space and that refer not only to Christian eschatological concepts but also to local Andean ontologies.     

Historicising Material Agency: from Relations to Relational Constellations

Relational approaches have gradually been changing the face of archaeology over the last decade: analytically, through formal network analysis, and interpretively, with various frameworks of human-thing relations. Their popularity has been such, however, that it threatens to undermine their relevance. If everyone agrees that we should understand past worlds by tracing relations, then ‘finding relations’ in the past becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Focusing primarily on the interpretive approaches of material culture studies, this article proposes to counter the threat of irrelevance by not just tracing human-thing relations but characterising how sets of relations were ordered. Such ordered sets are termed ‘relational constellations’. The article describes three relational constellations and their consequences based on practices of ceramic fine ware production in the Western Roman provinces (first century BC–third century AD): the fluid, the categorical and the rooted constellation. Specifying relational constellations allows reconnecting material culture to specific historical trajectories and offers scope for meaningful cross-cultural comparisons. As such, a small theoretical addition based on the existing toolbox of practice-based approaches and relational thought can impact on historical narratives and can save relational frameworks from the danger of triviality.     

Automated Detection of Missing Links in Bicycle Networks

Cycling is an effective solution for making urban transport more sustainable. However, bicycle networks are typically developed in a slow, piecewise process that leaves open a large number of gaps, even in well-developed cycling cities like Copenhagen. Here, we develop the IPDC procedure (Identify, Prioritize, Decluster, Classify) for finding the most important missing links in urban bicycle networks, using data from OpenStreetMap. In this procedure we first identify all possible gaps following a multiplex network approach, prioritize them according to a flow-based metric, decluster emerging gap clusters, and manually classify the types of gaps. We apply the IPDC procedure to Copenhagen and report the 105 top priority gaps. For evaluation, we compare these gaps with the city’s most recent Cycle Path Prioritization Plan and find considerable overlaps. Our results show how network analysis with minimal data requirements can serve as a cost-efficient support tool for bicycle network planning. By taking into account the whole city network for consolidating urban bicycle infrastructure, our data-driven framework can complement localized, manual planning processes for more effective, city-wide decision-making.     

The Politics of Policy Circulation: Unpacking the Relationship Between South African and South American Cities in the Adoption of Bus Rapid Transit

This paper utilizes the introduction of bus rapid transit (BRT) in South Africa to unravel the role of South–South connections in local policymaking. While the South African systems are unmistakably modeled after Bogotá's Transmilenio, whose accomplishments have been touted as the low‐cost, high‐quality transport solution, the process through which other Southern cities influenced the circulation of BRT remains underexplored. In so doing, this paper asks how and why certain cities are brought into conversation with one another and what happens as a result? This analysis suggests that policy circulation is never a rational survey of best practices but a political process through which policymakers select their sites of learning in accordance with wider aspirations, ideologies and positioning. Illustrating the way in which policymakers deploy different meanings of the global South and their position within this construct to justify local policy decisions adds a critical dimension to understandings of policy mobilities.     

古代近东小雕像的彩绘和彩绘工艺，公元前3000年到古波斯阿契美尼德王朝（公元前330年）

青铜时代的公元前3000年到希腊文化占统治地位的古波斯阿契美尼德王朝末期（公元前330年）。本文关注于人体的三维表现。同时会展示一些相关的动物形象。不同于古代希腊雕像,还没有开展对古代美索布达米亚雕塑彩绘颜料的化学分析工作。因此我将工作重点放在至今可见的彩色上。不同于秦俑,还没有古代美索布达米亚雕塑重建的例子。你可以看到大约公元2世纪女神伊施塔形象,这不是雕像,只是两维形象,在文中介绍了其彩绘重构工作。这将给你古代近东艺术彩绘的初始印象。