Results of micrometallographic analysis of metalworking tools in graves of metallurgists in Moravia/Czech Republic

The number of finds relating to metalworking, without evidence of mining and processing facilities, is very limited. In Final Eneolith graves of specialized metallurgists that have occurred, they contain a metal-founding or metalsmithing toolkit, whose origins were from eastern Europe (the Maykop, Yamnaya Culture). Such metallurgical tools may have reached central Europe as part of the so-called Yamnaya Package before the onset of the Bee Beaker Culture (BBC); and unlike the Pontic region, these two types of metallurgy separated here. There are found an accumulation of metallurgists' graves in Moravia, where the complete metalworking toolkit is deposited in a predefined place in richly furnished male graves with a distinctive funerary architecture that exhibit a clear relationship to the grave goods. EDX-analysis detected a high content of metals (Cu, Ag, Au, Au–Ag alloy) on all working surfaces of stone tools, grinders, and boar tusks used for the final treatment of their metal products. This makes us believe that the used artefacts were laid as symbolical objects in the graves of these craftsmen who perfectly knew these advanced technologies. Due to their knowledge, their social significance gradually rose and finally reached the level of social elites, who were usually buried in a spectacular manner, including the quantity of grave goods (Überausstattung) and the pars pro toto deposition in one part of the finds.     

Cultural rights and their contribution to sustainable development: implications for cultural policy

Abstract

This article aims to analyse the meaning and implications of cultural rights for cultural policies concerned with sustainable development. Although references to both cultural rights and sustainable development have become widespread within cultural policy documents in recent decades, the actual conceptual and operational implications often remain vague, as an ambitious discourse that may conceal a poverty of resources and capacities. As a result, the ideal horizon suggested by cultural rights and sustainable development may not always be achieved in practice, nor are the mechanisms to achieve it always well known. In this respect, the article aims to dissect the actual requirements posed by cultural rights and sustainable development, including their different notions and areas of synergy and intersections, in order to shed light on relevant cultural policy approaches. To this end, a range of examples taken from a variety of contexts will also be examined as areas of expressed needs or areas of possible solutions.     

Identification of Employment Concentration Areas

This article presents a method to identify “Absolute and Relative Employment Concentration (AREC) areas” for a particular industry. Two novel characteristics of the method are that it simultaneously analyses AREC, and that it combines spatial concentration per area with the spatial concentration in neighbouring areas. The method is easy to understand and apply. It is developed to assist regional policy makers and corporate decision-makers with their investment decisions related to new infrastructure or plants. The identification of concentration areas also allows for analysing the performance of these areas in relation to characteristics such as infrastructure availability and the housing and labour market. This can yield new academic insights that are relevant for regional planners. An application of the newly developed method to five industries in a Dutch province subdivided into 502 areas illustrates the value of the method in comparison to other methods.     

The Bohunician in Moravia and Adjoining Regions

The Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition in the Middle Danube area is characterized by the presence of two transitional technocomplexes, the Bohunician and the Szeletian, together with the early appearance of the Aurignacian. The Bohunician lacks a local predecessor and seems to be intrusive to the area. Both the Bohunician typology and technology combine Middle and the Upper Paleolithic components. Although the Bohunician sites are mostly concentrated within the Brno basin, collections with characteristic traces of Bohunician technology have been documented during the same interval in surrounding areas, as well as far to the south and east. A preliminary comparison of the sites indicates a high degree of similarity among assemblages and may represent the same expansion event hypothetically associated with anatomically modern humans.     

Command Celebrities: The Rise and Fall of Hanzelka and Zikmund

In the 1950s and 1960s, the travellers, explorers, authors, and filmmakers Ji?í Hanzelka and Miroslav Zikmund became celebrities both in Czechoslovakia and abroad. The Communist cultural authorities actively supported the transformation of the two men into cultural icons, which could be exploited as a model for the suppression of ‘old’, ‘decadent’, and indeed ‘popular’ culture, and as a tool for recruiting members of the intellectual, cultural, and social elites into its service. Hanzelka and Zikmund’s multimedia travelogues, as well as their dashing public personae, blended in a unique way the ‘high’ and ‘low’, the accessible and unreachable, the familiar and the exotic, in the officially promoted culture of the time. But in the later 1960s, as Hanzelka and Zikmund’s political loyalties towards some form of reform socialism became more blatant, the two men fell into disfavour, and they found themselves banished from the public sphere following the events of 1968 until the regime fell in 1989. This article investigates how the curious ‘command celebrity’ of ‘H&Z’ straddled socialist ideology and capitalist consumerism, political affirmation and cultural critique.     

UNIQUE PRE‐ROMANESQUE MURALS IN KOSTOĽANY POD TRÍBEČOM,SLOVAKIA: THE PAINTING TECHNIQUE AND CAUSES OF DAMAGE

Pre‐Romanesque murals at Kosto?any pod Tríbe?om, Slovakia, have been investigated by portable X‐ray fluorescence and by microanalytical methods to identify painting materials (pigments and binders), and to explain the degradation of colours. Today, missing green and blue shades have been reconstructed according to residual concentrations of Cu, which correspond to copper chlorides—products of salt corrosion of the copper carbonates azurite and/or malachite, accelerated by micro‐organisms. As confirmed by powder X‐ray microdiffraction, original minium (Pb₃O₄) has been transformed to brown–black plattnerite (PbO₂). In increased humidity, even insoluble pigments are washing down from the walls and the intensity of colours further diminishes.     

Citizen Participation in Planning: Climbing a Ladder?

Certain levels of public access in the process of the statutory land-use planning have been part of Czech planning legislation since the 1970s, but actual citizen participation has become an issue in practice only during the last decade. Currently citizens have a say but their involvement seldom exceeds mere opposition towards active involvement. Their attempts to be heard in the decision-making process is perceived as a nuisance by developers and some local governments as well. Except for the opponents of specific project proposals, most people feel that involvement in the planning process is futile, having little comprehension of how urban and regional planning may actually influence their lives, their property and their local environment. The paper analyses the effects of the pre-1989 powerlessness on the recent changes in the planning process and it reviews the research and opinions of several scholars in this field. The formal planning process, which deals mostly with land use, is often felt to be too narrowly defined and too restrictive, with limited opportunities for citizen involvement. Strategic planning has been introduced by some municipalities in recent years as a less rigid, more flexible and potentially more participatory approach, but also here the trend that copied the accustomed patterns of statutory land-use planning prevailed in the end. Apart from the 'mainstream' planning, alternative, 'informal' planning has emerged, often supported from abroad and organized by non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Although still marginal, it has introduced active planning by citizens. The absence of legal definition and guidance in the case of non-statutory planning allowed greater diversity in the planning method itself. After several years of this experience, however, it has primarily proven just how diverse the concept of citizen participation might be. On the basis of the analysis of the current diversification of planning methods, an attempt is made to draw some conclusions concerning the evolving process of citizen empowerment and participation in Czech planning, as well as to indicate patterns of the changes of the involvement process in the current stage of transformation.