Monumental City Research Articles

Large-scale Debris Flow Disasters: Hazard-Risk-Vulnerability Analysis Approach in Taiwan

Catastrophic disasters may cause irreversible damage to cultural heritage. This study identified the risk to cultural heritage sites in Taiwan posed by large-scale debris flow disasters. The cultural heritage sites that may be affected by debris flows were identified through risk identification and by using GIS. Subsequently, an on-site field survey was conducted to confirm the cultural heritage sites that are potentially vulnerable to debris flow disasters. The research findings are as follows: (a) the top three cultural heritage sites that are most affected by debris flows are municipal, county, and city monuments, historical buildings, and historical sites; (b) the number of cultural heritage sites affected is related to environmental exploitation; (c) the cultural heritage sites at high risk of being affected by disasters were primarily located in Taitung and Chiayi Counties.

(To the Question of the Tourist Potential of Natural City Monuments of Pyatigorsk)

Russian Abstract: Регион КМВ обладает огромным туристским потенциалом и может привлечь туристов со всех уголков России и зарубежья. Нигде в мире не встречается такое скопление природных памятников на относительно небольшой площади. Это 17 гор-диапиров, Перкальский питомник и многие другие. Однако, несмотря на огромное количество природных памятников, их туристский потенциал, к сожалению, реализуется не в полной мере.English Abstract: The region of Caucasus Mineralnye Vody region has huge tourist potential and can attract tourists from all corners of Russia and the abroad. Anywhere in the world such congestion of natural monuments on rather small square doesn't meet. These are 17 mountains diapirs, Perkalsky nursery and many others. However, despite a huge number of natural monuments, their tourist potential, unfortunately, it is realized not fully.

Documentation and Protection of the Quarries of Gerasa

The Roman quarries in the environs of Gerasa provide an interesting insight into how stone was extracted and shaped for the purpose of building the monumental city. Ancient quarries carry aesthetic, educational and scientific values that future generations deserve to enjoy. Despite this, little has been done to document or protect these quarries, and many of them are not even officially listed as archaeological sites. In this paper, we describe an effort to build a database for these quarries, and make a case for protecting some of them as examples of how quarrying was executed in order to emphasize the importance of this industry and the sophistication of its technology. One site (Thughrat ‘Usfūr) was chosen for detailed mapping, and it is herein proposed that this site be developed as a destination for visitors of the monumental city, offering the opportunity to understand stone extraction as well as the landscape in which the city grew.

An Irish Jerusalem in Franconia: the Abbey of the Holy Cross and Holy Sepulchre at Eichstätt

A combination of the crusades and the related upsurge in pilgrimages to the Holy Land led to western European interest in the city of Jerusalem reaching a high point during the twelfth century. This increased awareness of Jerusalem and its sacred sites found one expression in the foundation of a Benedictine monastery at Eichstätt in southern Germany, which was dedicated to the Holy Cross and Holy Sepulchre and whose church was modelled on the most famous of all the Holy City's monuments. Adding to the singularity of the Eichstätt establishment was the fact that the monks who peopled it were Irish, this being one of the so-called Schottenklöster, a group of Irish Benedictine monasteries founded in Germany and Austria between the late eleventh and early thirteenth centuries. This paper examines the circumstances surrounding the Irish monastery's foundation, gives a detailed account of its extraordinary architecture and considers the place of the latter within the wider context of the medieval architectural copy.

Outdoor sculpture in Baltimore: a historical guide to public art in the monumental city

Outdoor sculpture in Baltimore: a historical guide to public art in the monumental city

Rome: a living portrait of an ancient city

Stephen L. Dyson has spent a lifetime studying and teaching the history of ancient Rome. That unparalleled knowledge is reflected in his magisterial overview of the Eternal City. Rather than look only at the physical development of the city-its buildings, monuments, and urban spaces-Dyson also explores its social, economic, and cultural histories. This unique approach situates Rome against a background of comparative urban history and theory, allowing Dyson to examine the dynamic society that once thrived there. In his personal effort to reconstruct the city, Dyson populates its streets with the hurried politicians, hawking vendors, and animated students that once lived, worked, and studied there, bringing the ancient city to life for a new generation of students and tourists. Dyson follows Rome as it developed between the third century BC and the fourth century AD, dividing the great megalopolis into distinct neighborhoods and locales. He shows how these communities, each with its own unique customs and colorful inhabitants, eventually grew into the great imperial capital of the Italian Empire. Dyson integrates the full range of sources available-literary, artistic, epigraphic, and archaeological-to create a comprehensive history of the monumental city. In doing so, he offers a dramatic picture of a complex and changing urban center that, despite its flaws, flourished for centuries.

Disposable and Usable Pasts in Central European Cities

In Central European cities memories and material histories of socialist regimes remain particularly difficult to address and incorporate into the new democratic present. After 1989, city authorities in the region have chosen to emphasize some pasts and neglect others and, thus, (re)write their own versions of (urban) history and (re)shape their (urban) identities. In my paper I inquire into how post-1989 Central European urbanities are shaped by and communicated through various designations including signs and symbols on city streets, monuments, and buildings. Predictably, many material remnants of the socialist regimes have been destroyed or hidden from the public eye – my interest lies not only in which various designations on buildings and which monuments had to go, but also in why and how they disappeared. I discuss the most popular methods of hiding and/or effacing the remnants of socialism that range from subtle (surrounding of communist landmarks with tall buildings) through the obvious (renaming of streets, squares, metro stations; giving old communist buildings new names and functions) to the irreversible and, thus, most controversial (the razing of socialist architecture and monuments). The disappearance of the material capital of the socialist past has been accompanied by intense commemoration practices verging on memorial obsessions. New monuments, plaques, street names, and museums appeared almost as quickly as the old “disposable” ones were forced out from the urban landscape. The complexity of an urban identity as communicated through city streets, monuments, and buildings not only invites, but necessitates an interdisciplinary approach and, thus, my analysis includes elements from such diverse areas of knowledge as aesthetics, architecture, communication studies, comparative cultural studies, economics, history, and political science.

Beyond nationalism: modernity, governance and a new urban history for India

The long hold of the idea that ‘India is the land of villages’ on the imaginations of politicians, policy makers and scholars alike was a result not just of the numerical preponderance of the village, but because it represented the space of an organic, unsullied authenticity. Needless to say, in many accounts, well into the late twentieth century, the authenticity was only made possible by relinquishing a claim to the turbulence of history, and indeed on ‘modernity’ itself. The Indian city in the period of colonial rule, on the contrary, became a heaving, undisciplined monster, the site of a corrupting modernity, illegitimate and even unauthentic in its form. Apart from the monumental cities of Delhi or Lucknow, and some attention to ‘temple’ towns, most monographs on modern Indian cities written in the last 60 years remained without a legible past and were the work largely of geographers or sociologists. Those early pioneers who explored the history of the modern Indian city on its own terms, such as Narayani Gupta, Mariam Dossal or Veena Oldenburg, were lonely outcrops in a vast field of historical works that were largely rooted in the countryside. The peasant and the village, rather than the worker and the city, occupied centre-stage in the most important phases of post-independence Indian historiography. Since the history of Indian nationalism gripped the scholars of the immediate post-independence years, and economic history powered by Marxism informed the next phase of writing (both of which were enormously productive lines of enquiry), the Indian city was embedded in works that traced either the fate of anti-colonial nationalism or the broader trajectories of labour and capital. The innovative approaches of the Subaltern Studies collective from the early 1980s drew historiographic attention once more to the rebellious peasant and rural communities or mentalities.

Hybrid State Plane Coordinate System for Transforming a Citywide Survey Control Network to Surface Values: Case Study for Frisco, Texas

The city of Frisco, Tex., published state plane coordinates were “ground scaled” into surface coordinates for the purpose of establishing a hybrid coordinate system to be easily used by surveyors. Nineteen city monuments were found and collected by GPS observation using real-time kinematic (RTK) connected to the Texas RTK Cooperative Network. The network creates a virtual reference station near the GPS roving receiver, allowing the surveyor to use the rover unit by itself without the need for setting up a base station on the project site. Using a GPS manufacturer’s standard protocol, localizing ground-scaled GPS vectors to the city’s hybrid values yielded acceptable horizontal (H) and vertical (V) residuals over a 233 km2 network. Two out of 19 monuments observed explained maximum residual error ( H=0.029 m , V=0.082 m ) with no significant differences in the mean ΔN and ΔE between published grid, hybrid, and surface coordinates (P=0.77) . This paper will illustrate and discuss the procedures and results ...

Christine de Pizan's City of Ladies: A Monumental (Re)construction of, by, and for Women of All Time

C hristine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies, written over six centuries ago, is neither simple nor simplistic. As the first known history of women in Western civilization from a female point of view, it embraces all virtuous women even beyond those specifically mentioned. Fashioned as an allegorical city, it should be considered a potential textual buttress for contemporary feminist consciousness. Christine constructs her history as both an allegory and a city of ladies for several possible reasons. First, Christine can “speak” to readers by channeling her own persona into her main character. Further, the form of authorial conversation with allegorical figures was a popular didactic medieval convention, and this textual structure remains accessible today. When Judith L. Kellogg writes, “the space in which the city [of ladies] is built must be within each woman,” she bridges the six-hundred years since the writing of The Book of the City of Ladies with a few strokes of her pen. In other words, Christine urges individual women to take the first step toward realizing a feminist hereafter. By writing (as author) and creating (as heroine) a city of ladies, Christine emphasizes women’s spaces, self-defense, and memory as keys to the creation of women’s history and future. All three keys transcend time, just like her monumental city. Christine anticipated the feminist necessity of Virginia Woolf ’s “room of one’s own,” but she builds on a grand scale and follows medieval tradition in deliberately selecting a city, not a room. While giving voice to the unvoiced, thus presenting her public with provocative new material, she adheres to an established, respected historical model, St. Augustine’s City of God. This work’s religious, eternal city was described more than a millennium before The Book of the City of Ladies. Such a decision

Land Use, Political Complexity, and Urbanism in Mainland Southeast Asia

Debates about the development of political complexity and cities are typically focused on material cultural correlates and situated within the wider context of the emergence of states. Conventionally, state emergence is linked to agricultural surpluses and a new phase of agricultural intensification. However, this approach remains fundamentally reliant on the preservation of an appropriate and diverse suite of material cultural correlates. For mainland Southeast Asia, archaeological correlates of early political complexity are comparatively impoverished and are dominated by evidence from disparate burial contexts and architecture. In this paper, we employ an alternative approach based on a case study from north central Thailand that uses paleoenvironmental evidence of land use. These data are then related to historical urban development in the region. We suggest that large-scale patterns of agricultural expansion relate directly to increases in political complexity. Our results demonstrate that the long-term development of large-scale agricultural landscapes in this region predates the earliest evidence of monumental cities in central Thailand. We conclude that significant progress in better understanding the emergence of complex societies, both in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, is unlikely to be possible without more systematic integration of archaeological and paleoenvironmental approaches.

A CERAMIC TOOL FOR THE GLASS‐BLOWER

Summary. The existence of a local glass workshop is known at Sagalassos through archaeological and chemical analysis. In test soundings in the monumental city, an enigmatic ceramic cane was found attached to a chunk of green glass. This remarkable object is thought to be a pontil rod, more specifically a mandril. This study illustrates the use of ceramic tools in the glass craft as a readily available and cheap solution to the technical problems a glass‐worker encountered.

Visitors' Behavior in Heritage Cities: The Case of Girona

This article presents the results of the study of the behavior of visitors in the monumental city of Girona, Spain. The focus of this study has been the classification of clusters of visitors who show the same behavior. We wanted to define the visitors' hierarchical conglomerates (those internally homogeneous and externally different groups) that will help to appreciate the subtleties in the apparent uniformity of the approach taken to visiting heritage sites. The groups of visitors will show specific needs, ways of looking, and behaviors.

Art of the first cities: the third millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus

This illustrated work highlights one of the most important and creative periods in the history of art: a time marked by the appearance of the city states of the Sumerians, the citadel of Troy, the splendid royal tombs at Ur, and the monumental cities at Mohenjodaro and Harappa. The volume examines the cultural achievements of these first urban societies, placing them in a historical context. Topics covered include the emergence of the first city states, the birth of written language, and trade and cultural interconnections between the Ancient Near East and outlying areas. More than 500 works of art, including sculpture, jewellery, vessels, weapons, cylinder seals and tablets executed in a wide variety of materials such as stone, metal, clay, ivory and semiprecious stones, are included. The accompanying texts are written by leading scholars in the field. This is the catalogue for an exhibition to be held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from 8 May to 17 August 2003.

Pisidia Survey Project: Melli 2000

AbstractThe third survey campaign of the Pisidia Survey Project at Melli took place in September 2000. Work on the remains of the small, semi-circular theatre completed the study of the monumental city centre and allowed the suggestion of a roughly Severan construction date. In addition, the remains of the early Christian period in the ancient city and in its north necropolis area were recorded, proving that older pagan buildings were partially re-used to build them and that several basilicas had a number of construction phases. A continuation of the study of the remains in the domestic areas of the city allowed a reconstruction of their organisation and showed that richer and poorer houses occupied the same quarters. Finally, work on the monumental temple tombs in the north necropolis was also completed. In general, it has become clear that the city flourished from the Hellenistic period throughout Roman times and into the early Christian period.

Chinese urban history: four cheers

These four exciting books fill in what Sir Peter Hall's monumental Cities in Civilization left undone. To be sure, they do not tell the entire story of China's five (possibly six or more according to the latest archaeological findings) thousand years of uninterrupted urban experience, but together they are a flying start, especially from the perspective of one kind of elite or another.

Domestic Faunal Assemblages from the Classic Period Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico: A Perspective on the Subsistence and Craft Economies

During the Classic period (ad200–800), urban Monte Albán in the Valley of Oaxaca was one of the most monumental cities in Mesoamerica. Yet relatively little is known about the Classic-period economy that sustained this prehispanic centre. In this paper, we compare the faunal assemblages at two outlying Classic-period sites located in the central valleys of Oaxaca—Ejutla and El Palmillo. This analytical comparison provides a new empirical perspective on two important aspects of the ancient Oaxacan economy, subsistence strategies and household craft manufacture. Although Ejutla and El Palmillo have rather distinct environmental settings, the faunal component of the diet at the sites is found to be similar with some subtle differences. More marked distinctions between the sites are noted in the use of bone as a raw material for tools and ornaments. When the findings from the faunal comparison are situated within the context of other domestic remains from Classic-period Ejutla and El Palmillo, intraregional variation in household strategies of production and exchange is evidenced, providing a preliminary vantage on the complex economy that underlay this prehispanic polity.

The Theft of Carnaval: National Spectacle and Racial Politics in Rio de Janeiro

Rio de Janeiro, many Brazilians and foreigners agree, is a monumental city. The capital of until 1960, Rio has both an illustrious history and natural splendor. Steep granite hills, some of them populated by the city's poor, share space with modern high-rise buildings. The crescent-shaped beaches of the wealthy South Zone continue to draw tourists from as far away as Europe and the United States, despite international reports of violent street crime. When I arrived there in the last weeks of 1990, I felt a tingling sense of achievement. Even poor migrants, whose reasons for leaving the impoverished countryside are anything but abstract, are drawn to Rio partly by its glamour. The allure of Rio de Janeiro may be an effect produced less by its startling topography and breathtaking vistas than by what tourist brochures are apt to call its spirit. The magic of Rio is constructed, really, from a collectively imagined and ideologically managed enchantment. Accepted within everyday discourses throughout as something of a metonymic enactment of national culture and character, Rio is portrayed as exuberantly spontaneous, racially mixed, egalitarian in its ethos (if not in its objective structures), free spirited and casual, and, during certain days of the year especially, just a little bit shameless. As is the case with all such national showcases, the magic of Rio is simultaneously produced within and directed toward both local and transnational contexts. Rio's claim to represent the most appealing and uniquely Brazilian aspects of national culture is based largely on the city's performance of the pre-Lenten festival of carnaval. Brazilian anthropologist Roberto DaMatta captured the symbolic resonance and national significance of the festival when he wrote, was not that invented Caraval; on the contrary, it was Carnaval that invented Brazil (1984:245). The carioca, or Rio, carnaval is based on samba, a musical genre and dance style of remarkable tenacity and hegemonic reach. This article focuses on the historical development of, and contemporary discourses about, Rio's samba-driven caraval and its relationship to national representation and politics. With racial politics I do not refer to more explicit

Monumentality in Early Chinese Art and Architecture

Introduction 1. The age of ritual art 2. Temple, palace, and tomb 3. The monumental city Chang'an 4. Four voices of funerary monuments 5. The transparent stone: the end of an era Illustration credits Notes Works cited Character list Index.

Cyriacus of Ancona and the Revival of Two Forgotten Ancient Personifications in the Rector's Palace of Dubrovnik*

Despite the growing interest of modern scholars in early-Renaissance civic architecture as the bearer of meaning, the public buildings of Dubrovnik (It.Ragusa;Lat.Ragusium)have received less attention than their due. This is all the more regrettable because when some of the city's monuments are seen in their appropriate historical perspective, they turn out to be more important than many scholars would have expected.My case in point is Dubrovnik's principal government building, the so-called Rector's Palace(Palatium regiminis, Knežev dvor, or thePalazzo de'Rettori)When the fortress-like structure, which had been built in the fourteenth century, was severely damaged in 1435 by a gunpowder explosion in the armory, the authorities immediately decided to erect a new palace. Its construction was entrusted to the state engineer Onofrio di Giordano della Cava of Naples, under whose direction it was virtually completed by 1452 — only to be severely damaged by another explosion of ammunition in 1463.