Abstract
Abstract. Since the new millennium, living in historic cities has become extremely popular in the Netherlands. As a consequence, historic environments are being adapted to meet modern living standards. Houses are constantly subjected to development, restoration and renovation. Although most projects are carried out with great care and strive to preserve and respect as much historic material as possible, nevertheless a significant amount of historical fabric disappears. This puts enormous pressure on building archaeologists that struggle to rapidly and accurately capture in situ authentic material and historical evidence in the midst of construction works. In Leiden, a medieval city that flourished during the seventeenth century and that today counts over 3,000 listed monuments, a solution to the problem has been found with the implementation of advanced recording techniques. Since 2014, building archaeologists of the city council have experienced first-hand that new recording techniques, such as laser scanning and photogrammetry, have dramatically decreased time spent on site with documentation. Time they now use to uncover, analyse and interpret the recovered historical data. Nevertheless, within building archaeology education, a strong case is made for hand drawing as a method for understanding a building, emphasising the importance of close observation and physical contact with the subject. In this paper, the use of advanced recording techniques in building archaeology is being advocated, confronting traditional educational theory with practise, and research tradition with the rapid rise of new recording technologies.
Highlights
Cultural heritage in every part of the world is always in peril and demands constant vigilance and preparedness (Araoz, 2010)
Heritage threatened with natural disasters or human conflicts, and monuments and sites presented in the ICOMOS World Reports on Monuments and Sites in Danger
A medieval city that flourished during the seventeenth century, the so called Dutch Golden Age, with over 3,000 listed monuments
Summary
Cultural heritage in every part of the world is always in peril and demands constant vigilance and preparedness (Araoz, 2010). To keep costs as low as possible, houses were modernised by installing a new façade, whilst interiors were only altered in representative rooms and by reusing, covering or leaving in place the original building materials The new city dwellers are well educated and wealthy (Marlet, 2016a), whilst building materials are cheaper than ever before (Figure 2) This process of gentrification led to sky high housing prices, which put enormous pressure on historic urban structures. From the perspective of building archaeology, the impact on the historical material in the city is substantial Within these new developments, historical houses are often being stripped down to the bare structures, removing different layers of past wall, floor, and ceiling finishing. Even applying new layers of paint or stucco means that valuable information about the construction of historical buildings can be removed
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