Medieval Ruins Research Articles

Reading Medieval Ruins: Urban Life and Destruction in Sixteenth-Century Japan, by Morgan Pitelka

<i>Reading Medieval Ruins: Urban Life and Destruction in Sixteenth-Century Japan</i>, by Morgan Pitelka

Enjoying Europe, yearning for Russia? Russian travel writing on the Baltic provinces during the 19th century

ABSTRACT After the end of the Napoleonic Wars it became popular in the Russian Empire to investigate one’s own country. Inspired by Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinskii’s bestseller A Journey to Reval (1821), the Russian elite also travelled through the Baltic provinces with their romantic medieval ruins and Hanseatic cities. During the first half of the nineteenth century, Baltic German culture was usually understood as enhancing Russia’s imperial diversity and ‘Europeanising’ the state. From the 1830s onwards, travel accounts concentrated on traces of the empire in the region and imagined the city of Reval/Tallinn as a site of memory for Russia’s first emperor, Peter I. This article argues that Russian travel writing on the Baltic provinces used tourism imaginaries that mirrored a growing imperial consciousness in which the Baltic provinces became more ‘Russian’ in the perceptions of the Russian public. This process has to be seen in the context of the nationalisation of Russian elite perceptions that also affected the general idea of this region as culturally ‘German’. In the end, the better accessibility of the region due to infrastructural modernisation paradoxically contributed to a growing sense of alienation, the romantic attraction of ‘Europeanness’ turned into a source of threat for the empire.

Reading Medieval Ruins: Urban Life and Destruction in Sixteenth-Century Japan by Morgan Pitelka (review)

Reading Medieval Ruins: Urban Life and Destruction in Sixteenth-Century Japan by Morgan Pitelka (review)

Urban Conservation in International Charters: From the Athens Charter to the Historic Urban Landscape Recommendation

The Interreg CE project “RUINS. Sustainable re-use, preservation and modern management of historical ruins in Central Europe - elaboration of integrated model and guidelines based on the synthesis of the best European experiences” has implemented cultural development strategies through knowledges exchange developed within a local and regional context and suitable to be applied at a wider European level.&#x0D; The project has applied an empowering bottom-up approach, in which local and regional stakeholders have been actively engaged throughout the project’s running time.&#x0D; Cooperation of 6 countries with various traditions and experiences resulted in the development of universal models that could be applied for management, use and protection of medieval ruins all over Europe, providing European added value. The comprehensive management plans elaborated, help owners and managers of historical ruins to exploit economic potential of this heritage in economic development of regions, and to preserve value of medieval ruins as cultural heritage.&#x0D; Due to the transnational character, the project has contributed to create a common European identity, strengthen cooperation between international, national and local stakeholders both vertically and horizontally, and promote exchanges between boundaries.&#x0D; The paper aims to present the results and the experience gained during RUINS project implementation by LINKS Foundation (project partner), focusing on the inclusive and shared approaches carried out. A summary of goals and recommendations achieved within the discussion panels/seminars arranged by LINKS Foundation as well as objectives and structure of the Output O.T2.1 “BEST PRACTICES HANDBOOK - Transnational model form of socially useful use of medieval ruins" will be provide.

The case study of Villa Beatrice d’Este: management planning of a multi-layered site with Medieval ruins in the Veneto Region, Italy

Villa Beatrice d’Este is a 17th century Venetian Villa in the Veneto Region, Italy, located within the area of the Euganean Hills Regional Park. The villa was built to replace a previous 13th century Medieval Monastery, whose structure was integrated in the villa. Remains of the Medieval structures are still visible today. The monumental complex constitutes an example of a multi-layered site with continuous life from Medieval times up to the present days. For this reason, the site was selected as a case study by the EU-funded project RUINS[1], in view of proposing a management plan to protect and valorise its complex heritage, as an example of heritage site with Medieval ruins in Europe.&#x0D; &#x0D; [1] RUINS, Sustainable re-use, preservation and modern management of historical ruins in Central Europe - elaboration of integrated model and guidelines based on the synthesis of the best European experiences. A project funded by the EU through the Interreg Central Europe Programme.

Sustainable re-use, preservation and modern management of historical ruins. RUINS’ tools &amp; guidelines

Owners and managers of the thousands of medieval ruins around Europe face the challenge of preservation despite limited options for modern use of their sites. The RUINS project develops approaches that help managers to find contemporary, social uses for old ruins while keeping historical heritage intact. Research and evaluation of various sites will create a basis for comprehensive management plans.&#x0D; A lack of functionality of medieval ruins leaves limited opportunities for establishing a viable economic future of these sites. Giving new functions to ruins can result in broad, economically profitable ways of using the medieval ruins.&#x0D; The aim is finding the balance between the needs of stakeholders and public expectations concerning use of medieval ruins on one hand, and on the other hand preservation of authenticity and historical value of medieval ruins.&#x0D; The individuation of the new function requires a specific knowledge of the building in all its aspects, but also considerations regarding socio-economic values of the context that identifies its historical meaning and artistic value. The approach is to find new aims to monuments, but in harmony with the characteristics that give value and meaning to them.&#x0D; Within the INTERREG Central Europe project RUINS, is developing an handbook that supplies an operational tool useful to guide owners and managers of the thousands of medieval ruins around Europe toward a stainable re-use, preservation and modern management of historical ruins.&#x0D; The work follows an outline composed by 5 chapters that will try to respond in an exhaustive way to the aims related to contemporary use of historical ruins.

Integrated natural sciences approaches to the protection of medieval ruins

The aim of this paper is to present the Report of innovative restoration techniques, technologies and materials used in conservation in the context of natural sciences and heritage science of the RUINS Project. First, the specifics of preservation and maintenance of ruins are briefly described. Subsequently, the context of natural sciences and the new scientific discipline of heritage science, including the link to innovation, are indicated. The paper then presents the structure of the report and an example of one record representing one specific technique. Record structure is ready to be transferred to versatile data set so it could be converted into an updatable online database in the future.

When We Say Post-Industrial – We Mean Ruins

ABSTRACT This paper examines new-ruins in a post-industrial urban landscape on the example of Łódź, Poland. It analyses which ruins are depicted (industrial vs. domestic) and how they are framed (within the wider urban context or on their own) and interpreted (social and political critiques, local history, and aesthetics). It argues that contrary to the suggestions in the academic literature, these sites are not seen as symbols of failing capitalism but are sites and sources of meditative reflection, akin to the role played by medieval ruins during the nineteenth century. Furthermore, heritage is virtually absent from these discussions because modern ruins are not understood to be part of the industrial heritage by the actors in the post-industrial city.

Winslow Homer and His Cullercoats Paintings: An American Artists in England's North East by David Tatham

Reviewed by: Winslow Homer and His Cullercoats Paintings: An American Artists in England's North East by David Tatham Leann Davis Alspaugh (bio) Winslow Homer and His Cullercoats Paintings: An American Artists in England's North East, by David Tatham (Syracuse University Press, 2021), 90 pp. It has been said that Winslow Homer arrived in the English village of Cullercoats in April 1881 an illustrator and departed eighteen months later an artist. This is something of an exaggeration—we have only to see his pioneering works from Reconstruction Virginia—but it is true that the works in Homer's "Cullercoats manner" display a newfound assurance and maturity worth a closer look. The Cullercoats period has typically been regarded as something of a mystery. With relatively little documentation from or about the artist, these months are often considered merely a transition period for Homer (1836–1910), bridging the Barbizon mood of the 1860s with the later, so-called Darwinian works. Homer specialist David Tatham is too experienced a scholar to be entranced by romantic fictions. He establishes in the book's early chapters that we in fact know rather a lot about Homer's movements in the area and can assert quite credibly how the artist arrived, set to work, and quickly adapted to his surroundings. Primed with a three-week stay in London, mainly to examine the British Museum's watercolor paintings, Homer came to Cullercoats intending to stay only three months. Although he was surely aware of the region's rich cultural heritage, he included few examples of the ancient and medieval ruins in the vicinity. That Homer chose to concentrate on a living community rather than a bygone one is a sure sign of a turn toward pictorializing that was motivated more by inquiry into the present than sentiment about the past. Homer, ever the pragmatist, was also attracted to the area for its reputation as an art colony, which meant easy access to painting supplies, studio space, willing models, and exhibition opportunities. (Homer was also attuned to the value of his work in the marketplace and didn't hesitate to take an active hand in its promotion, even suggesting to one art dealer that putting an attractive girl at the front desk might increase foot traffic.) Of course, it was the hardworking fisherfolk of Cullercoats that kept Homer painting in Northumberland for more than a year. Tatham dispels any tendency to romanticize the village by pointing out that although it had a lively fishing population, it had neither docks nor a fishing market. Its denizens were not hardscrabble peasants carving out a brave existence in the face of encroaching industrialization—in fact, the majority of the town's non-fishing population were commuters making the daily trek by rail to Newcastle upon Tyne. Cullercoats itself (the name is thought to derive from dove, or culver, cotes) was cramped and not at all quaint. Its elevated position above Whitley Bay added geographic interest, especially in times of storms, when the fisherfolk stood lookout there. The village's most significant feature was the new Life Brigade Watch House, a waterfront base for the volunteer rescue squad that monitored the bay for vessels or individuals in distress; Homer often depicted its distinctive, russet-colored roof and clocktower in his Cullercoats works. [End Page 632] Since his days as a Harper's Civil War correspondent, Homer had become adept at capturing how groups of people move, separate, form smaller groups, and regroup whether on the battlefields or in the camps. He developed the ability to create a sense of narrative within a static image, deploying a few figures or hundreds to convey story and mood. In addition, he was one of the first American artists to record the interaction of the races with respect and sensitivity and to depict women as individuals rather than as conventional types. By the time he arrived in Cullercoats, Homer was an accomplished watercolorist, master of a delicate and unforgiving medium, and one that he deployed to great effect in his portraits of the fisherfolk, in particular, its women. Tatham notes that Homer's portrayals of the fishwives and fisherlasses as equal partners with the men...

Socialist Heritage: The Politics of Past and Place in Romania by Emanuela Grama

Reviewed by: Socialist Heritage: The Politics of Past and Place in Romania by Emanuela Grama Maria Bucur Emanuela Grama. Socialist Heritage: The Politics of Past and Place in Romania. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. 268 pp. “Heritage” entrepreneurship has been an important site for constructing legitimacy and accumulating power in the modern world. Though presumably revolutionary in ideology and goals, state socialist regimes have also used this memorialistic framework to articulate the cultural legitimacy of their ascent to power. How that heritage discourse has fared in the post-socialist world is at the heart of the analysis Emanuela Grama offers in Socialist Heritage: The Politics of Past and Place in Romania. By focusing on a neighborhood in Bucharest that has been dubbed “the Old City,” Grama takes us through a journey of how the heritage discourse was first constructed and operationalized through archaeological, historiographic, and urban planning activities under state socialism, and then repurposed as well as contested after 1989, with results that show profound fissures in the ability to deploy “heritage” as a successful legitimating tool. Though the author focuses on a relatively small site of heritage building and negotiation, the case study is meant to represent a larger trend in Romania. The overall argument of the book can be divided into two parts. To begin with, Grama shows how after 1948 Romanian architects, archaeologists, and members of the Politburo turned the Old City neighborhood in Bucharest into an object of personal attention on the part of these various players. Uncovering and restoring medieval ruins became a way to gain visibility and resources from the political leadership. These heritage entrepreneurs eventually helped grow the Marxist-nationalist brand of historical narrative about the past that culminated under Nicolae Ceaușescu. Historians joined the chorus by unearthing or simply adhering to a historical materialist [End Page 563] discourse imposed by the Marxist ideological straight jacket dictated by the Politburo, for the sole purpose of aligning historical narratives—together with archives, archaeological sites, and thus any representation of the past through institutional means—with the ideology of the Romanian Communist Party. Within that universe of constrained access to power, entrepreneurial professionals constructed discourses and practices that advanced a dialectic inscribed in the urban landscape, for the purpose of bolstering the claims of the political leadership to have played the revolutionary role of liberating the nation from the shackles of capitalist oppression. That argument was made most powerfully over two decades ago by Katherine Verdery, who appears quite frequently in the footnotes. I see the current contribution as a distinct articulation of the theoretical insights made in National Ideology under Socialism (Verdery 1995), confirming the workings of hierarchies of institutional and discursive power detailed in that analysis of knowledge making under state socialism. It is in tying that analysis of power relations among the communist elites to the lived environment—in short, as material and not just intellectual consequences of those struggles—that this book deepens our understanding of state socialism. And by starting Socialist Heritage with the reactions of someone who lives in that area today, Grama makes clear that revealing the consequences of these contests for the citizens of this lived environment is ultimately the stake of her work. The book excels especially when she brings in the concept of heritage as a means for governance and shaping the everyday experience of the bucureșteni (Bucharesters). The first three chapters are dedicated to exploring how various knowledge makers became heritage entrepreneurs and helped turn streets and buildings in the Old City into so many signposts of the political order that dominated Wallachia’s medieval period. The focus here is on the political negotiations among intellectual and professional elites of the early state socialist period. Archaeological speculation became historiographic certainty about evidence of specific forms of feudalism that would enable the telling of a longer story about class struggle and the dialectics of power in the premodern period, enabling the Romanian Communist Party to generate a genealogy of oppression and struggle that fit neatly with the Marxist dictates of the Politburo as articulated both in Bucharest and in Moscow. But, ironically, the specific inflections of the archaeological and historio-graphic speculations...

Pilgrimage and Visual Genre: The Architecture of Twentieth-Century Roman Catholic Pilgrimage in Scotland

As Roman Catholics gained confidence in twentieth-century Scotland, they revived pre-Reformation shrines and pilgrimages and created new shrines with transnational connections to the modern Catholic world. Three sites in this campaign were Carfin, a new pilgrimage center based on Lourdes; Whithorn, site of medieval pilgrimages to Saint Ninian; and Dunfermline, associated with the canonized Queen Margaret of Scotland. Each had different meanings for Scottish Catholicism. The landscapes of these shrines included proposed new buildings, completed buildings, including shrines and churches, and existing features, notably caves or grottoes and medieval ruins. Whether found, professionally designed, or made by the clergy and their congregations, these sites framed and ordered pilgrimage rituals and lent them meaning. Seeing common architectural, visual features across these pilgrimages, and drawing on new archival research, we suggest that the employment of recognizable visual genres was a key way of creating a consensus among the faithful. International symbols of saintly presence were remade for the local context, with intertwined religious and political intentions, giving tangible expression to a revived Catholicism in Scotland, and promoting a new vision of Scotland as a Catholic nation.

Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi by Anand Vivek Taneja

Reviewed by: Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi by Anand Vivek Taneja Georgina Drew Anand Vivek Taneja, Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018. 336 pp. Despite the periods of colonization and modernization that have refashioned much of the city now known as New Delhi (henceforth Delhi), glimmers of past ways of being are apparent in the ruins of the centuries-old buildings that have been left behind. For Anand Vivek Taneja, these relics of Delhi's medieval and Mughal past speak not only to what is lost; they also offer a bridge to recognizing what is still present, inviting discovery for the sincere and the faithful. This observation is part of the inspiration for his book, Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi. Taneja's work is guided by what he declares to be a love of these living Islamic artifacts from a bygone era—buildings that are often otherwise misunderstood and underestimated in their revelatory powers. The affection for these buildings includes a reverential awe in the spirits known as jinn that believers contend are capable of healing real and invisible wounds, of righting past and present wrongs, and—perhaps as much as anything else—providing solace in the conviction that powerful forces are operating beneath the mundane. In a seven-chapter text, Taneja explores a range of themes and topics that weave the past with the present, the ethnographic with the archival, and the academically astute with the prose of Rekhti poets. In his introduction and his first chapter, for instance, Taneja sets up his conceptual framework for Jinnealogy—which, in an early articulation, he refers to as "a theological orientation that encompasses the registers of ironic commentary, counter-memory, and apotropaic magic" (25). He later also describes it as a study of "the superseding of human transmission of memory by the longevity of the jinn" (44). To explain how the study of the jinn illuminates [End Page 295] pasts, histories, memories, and practices that are not only human in origin and scope, he offers a second chapter on "Saintly Visions: The Ethics of the Elsewhen" and a third chapter on "Strange(r)ness" (which includes an interesting discussion of an act of humility known as gharib nawaz(i) which demonstrates kindness to the meek, the poor, and the foreign). These chapters permeate the text with a longstanding fascination for the jinn for those present and past who have encountered these powerful beings. In Chapter 4, "Desiring Women," Taneja explores the allure of jinn for women devotees from a range of faiths who occasionally engage in surprisingly bold and candid discourse—and of the lure that these women hold for men visiting the ruins that jinn inhabit. Chapter 5, "Translation," and Chapter 7, "The Shifting Enchantments of Ruins and Laws in Delhi," converge to capture the different registers of value that the jinn and their habitats hold for devotees from a range of religious backgrounds and historical groundings. Along with the book's conclusion, Chapter 6 offers ecological insights and anecdotes to be elaborated upon in further detail below. Throughout the book, the belief in jinn is made visible in acts of everyday worship and religiosity at the ruins of Delhi's Islam-influenced past, and of a particular building and its environs known as Firoz Shah Kotla. They are also made visible in the numerous letters and petitions to jinn that the faithful leave posted on or near the ruins to plead for the help of the supernatural, the more-than-human. Each petitioner has their own requests to save a loved one (especially, it seems, from alcoholism), to marry a lover, to leave an abuser, or to find better employment and improved economic standing. To those familiar with these practices, and even some of the successful outcomes, they are evidence that something lurks in Delhi's ruins. For Taneja, the aggregate of these practices and the myriad socio-cultural worlds that grow around them are evidence of an enchantment with ruins, and with jinn. To be more precise, following the author's arguments, these...

What Is a Ruin? The Western Definition

What Is a Ruin? The Western Definition

The religion at the south foot of Mt.fuji and medieval ruins

The religion at the south foot of Mt.fuji and medieval ruins

Book Reviews

102 Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. 41, No. 2, Winter 2018 Book Reviews Edited by Nadia Barsoum Middle East, South Asia, and North Africa ARCHITECTURAL HERITAGE OF YEMEN: Buildings That Fill my Eye edited by Trevor H.J. Marchand: United Kingdom, London, Gingko Library 2017, 231 pages. In bringing together the astute observations and reflections of an international and interdisciplinary group of acclaimed scholars, this book aims to raise awareness of Yemen’s long history of cultural creativity and the urgent need for international collaboration to protect it and its people from the destructive forces that have beset the region. EMPIRES AND ANARCHIES: A History of Oil in the Middle East by Michael Quentin Morton. United Kingdom, London, Reaktion Books Ltd, 2017, 263 pages. Empires and Anarchies is an unconventional history of oil in the Middle East. In the author’s account the burnt-out remains of Saddam Hussein’s armaments and the human tragedy of the Arab Spring are as much of the story as the shimmering skylines of oil-rich nations. From the first explorers trudging through the desert to the excesses of the Peacock Throne and the high stakes of OPEC, Morton lays out the history of oil in compelling detail, arguing that oil simultaneously enriched and fractured the Middle East, eroding traditional ways of life, and eventually contributing to the rise of Islamic radicalism. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in the promises and peril of the world’s oil boom. FROM INDEPENDENCE TO REVOLUTION: Egypt Islamists and the Contest for Power by Gilian Kennedy. United Kingdom, London, Hurst & Company publishers 2017, 262 pages. The author is taking an approach to emphasize those studies of political Islam concentrate on either ideology or strategy rather than using a framework, which argues for both to be accounted together. It concludes that in Egypt from 1952 to 2012, the absence of this dialectical process of ideology and strategy was the decisive factor in the failure of radicals, conservatives and progressives to create and maintain lasting consent to their national project. Chapter 2 examines the Nasser period (1952-1970). Chapter 3 examines how political Islam evolved during Anwar Sadat’s presidency from (1970-1981). Chapter 4 examines how political Islam evolved during Mubarak’s presidency from (1981-1992) and the author will outline the continuation of Sadat’s economic liberalization and how the Islamist movement reacted to Mubarak’s political overtures and the continuation of economic liberalization policies in light of a spiraling socio-economic crisis among the lower and middle income class. Chapter 5 examines how Mubarak moved from containment to confrontation against Egypt opposition groups (1992-2011). TRIBES AND POLITICS IN YEMEN: A History of the Houthi Conflict by Marieke Brandt. United States, New York, Oxford University Press 2017, 466 pages. This book is based on years of anthropological fieldwork expertise both on the ground and through digital anthropological approaches. It offers a detailed account of the local complexities of the Houthi conflict and its historical background and underscores the absolute imperative of understanding the local, personal, and non-ideological nature of internal conflict in Yemen. The Houthi conflict is multifaceted and complex, and its local narrative as recorded in this volume constitutes only one manifold ways of approaching and explaining the conflict. The many other narratives of the Houthi conflict sometimes compete: the sectarian narrative, the domestic political narrative, the boundary narrative, the proxy war narrative. The Yemeni government has its own version. Foreign nations have their different claims. This book research objective is to explore the local dynamics of the Houthi conflictthus required spanning a broad period, from 1960 to the present time. 103 104 JINNEALOGY: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi by Anand Vivek Tasnneja. California, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2017, 312 pages. The author discover that in the ruins of a medieval palace in Delhi, a unique phenomenon occurs: Indians of all castes and creeds meet to socialize and ask the spirits for help. The spirits they entreat are Islamic jinns, and they w In the ruins of a medieval palace in Delhi, a unique phenomenon occurs: Indians of all castes and rite...

Book Reviews

105 Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. 41, No.3, Spring 2018 Book Reviews Edited by Nadia Barsoum Middle East, South Asia, and North Africa ARCHITECTURAL HERITAGE OF YEMEN: Buildings That Fill my Eye edited by Trevor H.J. Marchand: United Kingdom, London, Gingko Library 2017, 231 pages. In bringing together the astute observations and reflections of an international and interdisciplinary group of acclaimed scholars, this book aims to raise awareness of Yemen’s long history of cultural creativity and the urgent need for international collaboration to protect it and its people from the destructive forces that have beset the region. EMPIRES AND ANARCHIES: A History of Oil in the Middle East by Michael Quentin Morton. United Kingdom, London, Reaktion Books Ltd, 2017, 263 pages. Empires and Anarchies is an unconventional history of oil in the Middle East. In the author’s account the burnt-out remains of Saddam Hussein’s armaments and the human tragedy of the Arab Spring are as much of the story as the shimmering skylines of oilrich nations. From the first explorers trudging through the desert to the excesses of the Peacock Throne and the high stakes of OPEC, Morton lays out the history of oil in compelling detail, arguing that oil simultaneously enriched and fractured the Middle East, eroding traditional ways of life, and eventually contributing to the rise of Islamic radicalism. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in the promises and peril of the world’s oil boom. 106 FROM INDEPENDENCE TO REVOLUTION: Egypt Islamists and the Contest for Power by Gilian Kennedy. United Kingdom, London, Hurst & Company publishers 2017, 262 pages. The author is taking an approach to emphasize those studies of political Islam concentrate on either ideology or strategy rather than using a framework, which argues for both to be accounted together. It concludes that in Egypt from 1952 to 2012, the absence of this dialectical process of ideology and strategy was the decisive factor in the failure of radicals, conservatives and progressives to create and maintain lasting consent to their national project. Chapter 2 examines the Nasser period (1952-1970). Chapter 3 examines how political Islam evolved during Anwar Sadat’s presidency from (19701981 ). Chapter 4 examines how political Islam evolved during Mubarak’s presidency from (1981-1992) and the author will outline the continuation of Sadat’s economic liberalization and how the Islamist movement reacted to Mubarak’s political overtures and the continuation of economic liberalization policies in light of a spiraling socio-economic crisis among the lower and middle income class. Chapter 5 examines how Mubarak moved from containment to confrontation against Egypt opposition groups (1992-2011). TRIBES AND POLITICS IN YEMEN: A History of the Houthi Conflict by Marieke Brandt. United States, New York, Oxford University Press 2017, 466 pages. This book is based on years of anthropological fieldwork expertise both on the ground and through digital anthropological approaches. It offers a detailed account of the local complexities of the Houthi conflict and its historical background and underscores the absolute imperative of understanding the local, personal, and non-ideological nature of internal conflict in Yemen. The Houthi conflict is multifaceted and complex, and its local narrative as recorded in this volume constitutes only one manifold ways of approaching and explaining the conflict. The many other narratives of the Houthi conflict sometimes compete: the sectarian narrative, the domestic political narrative, the boundary narrative, the proxy war narrative. The Yemeni government has its own version. Foreign nations have their different claims. This book research objective is to explore the local dynamics of the Houthi conflictthus required spanning a broad period, from 1960 to the present time. 107 JINNEALOGY: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi by Anand Vivek Tasnneja. California, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2017, 312 pages. The author discover that in the ruins of a medieval palace in Delhi, a unique phenomenon occurs: Indians of all castes and creeds meet to socialize and ask the spirits for help. The spirits they entreat are Islamic jinns, and they w In the ruins of a medieval palace in Delhi, a unique phenomenon occurs: Indians of all castes and rite out requests...

Medieval Ireland and the Shannon Hydro-Electric Scheme: reconstructing the past in independent Ireland

This essay considers the position of Irish medieval buildings in the early years of the twentieth century. Focusing on the treatment of the oratory of St. Lua at Killaloe, it examines the ways in which the ruins of the medieval past were used to signify a range of political, religious and cultural ideas and attitudes. The rising water levels following the Shannon Scheme works (begun in 1925) meant that this stone oratory was moved from its original position on Friar’s Island to the grounds of St. Flannan’s Roman Catholic Church in 1929. The resulting paper trail reflects the complex processes of decision-making within a civil service in transition as the new Irish Free State calibrated its position with regard to the past and the treatment of medieval ruins throughout the countryside. The case study of St. Lua’s oratory is considered here in the context of the nineteenth-century tradition of scholarship on medieval buildings, the development of the idea of a national Irish architecture during this period, and the impact of this tradition on subsequent engagement with the buildings of the medieval past.

The Reinforcement, Reconstruction and the Conservation of Historical Masonry Walls - Case Study

In this article, the authors presented two examples of the reconstruction of medieval masonry ramparts in Nowogrodziec and Gryfów Śląski (Lower-Silesia, Poland). The authors elaborated a schedule for the reinforcement and the reconstruction of permanent medieval monastery ruins in Nowogrodziec and a way to reinforce the medieval city walls in Gryfów. [1, 2]. The authors have also proposed the reinforcement by using "Reticolatus" system. The "Reticolatus" system, developed in Italy for strengthening 3-layer walls against seismic influence, could be used separately or in addition to other techniques of reinforcement, especially in irregular masonry structures. The proposed technique allows for increasing compressive and shear strength. This method also allows for using the original material of the building with preservation and protection of historical, monumental and architectural character of the reinforcement construction.

The Roman Baths in Târgșoru Vechi

Started as an archaeological investigation of the medieval ruins from Targșoru Vechi, the research began gathering more and more data about the Roman epoch. At the end of the ‘70s of the 20th century, the excavation revealed a building placed at about 50m from the Roman fort limits: the Roman baths, which remained unpublished. A recent project aiming to highlight the medieval and Roman monuments from Targșoru Vechi was the reason for resuming the research in the years 2014-2015, results which are the subject of this contribution. The authors present a description of the baths observing the degradation of the monument during the 40 years that passed from the moment of discovery. Besides portraying their architectural characteristics, the authors formulate several hypotheses regarding the aspect and function of the baths’ compartments and a new building is identified, older than the baths, dating from Roman times as well.

Archaeology and in situ Preservation in Canton Thurgau, Switzerland

Canton Thurgau (approximately 1000 km2) is situated in the north-east of Switzerland. Its diverse landscape is notable for its hills, the Thur Valley, and Lake Constance. The Archaeology Department of Canton Thurgau is responsible for its archaeology. The archaeological map is quite complete and has over one thousand sites, ranging from the Palaeolithic to post-medieval periods. Particularly remarkable are the prehistoric lakeside dwellings (among them, four UNESCO World Heritage Sites) and the Roman sites, some of which have extraordinarily good conditions for preservation. The vicus Tasgetium (Eschenz) has produced one of the largest collections of Roman wooden objects and features found anywhere in the world. The Archaeology Department of Canton Thurgau conducts field surveys, excavations and scientific research. Its collections and archive are also of great importance. A major goal is to preserve the numerous sites of the canton in situ. In sensitive shore areas, where erosion (wave action, shipping etc.) threatens the exposed prehistoric cultural layers of the pile dwellings, measures are being taken to cover the areas and keep destruction at bay. These interventions are accompanied by monitoring. But numerous Roman and medieval ruins have also been restored according to the latest standards and thus prevented from gradual destruction. Thanks to zoning plans and a close working relationship with the local authorities, timely intervention can take place when sites are threatened. The results of the archaeological research are conveyed to the public and professional circles through the Museum for Archaeology and by way of popular and subject-specific publications.