BOB2025MIOT
Collection Contents
4 results
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Turning the Page
show More to view fulltext, buy and share links for:Turning the Page show Less to hide fulltext, buy and share links for: Turning the PageThroughout the nineteenth, and for much of the twentieth century, archives were considered to be containers of knowledge, holding material that was deemed to be objective and unbiased. In more recent years, however, as scholars have begun to engage more with archival material, this perception has changed, and archives have increasingly been recognized as sites of contention, holding curated historical documents — a re-evaluation that, in turn, has led to a new understanding of the role and significance of both archives and archiving practices, as well as to revived interest in their contents.
Taking renewed scholarly interest in archives as its starting point, this volume highlights the importance of archival material both as a source of study, and as a way of unleashing hitherto ‘lost’ knowledge. The chapters gathered here present previously unpublished material for the first time, as well as offer new insights into archival and curatorial practices. Through this approach, the authors not only reveal unknown aspects and histories of both past and ongoing excavations, but also shed light on the creation processes of an archive, an element that is typically lost by the time the material is designated as an archive by those who study it. The result is a volume that can shape best archival practices and approaches for the future.
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Touring Belgium
show More to view fulltext, buy and share links for:Touring Belgium show Less to hide fulltext, buy and share links for: Touring BelgiumTouring Belgium presents a wide range of printed media – from travel guides and collected letters to albums, from picture postcards to bibliographies and war-time propaganda – to explore how the print culture developing in the wake of travel and tourism helped to establish a national architectural heritage. Covering material from the period of Belgian independence through the aftermath of World War I, eight historians of art and architecture each situate one main publication against a dazzling background of nineteenth and early twentieth-century cultural discourses, revolutions in image reproduction, and emerging heritage management.
Reproductions in the middle part of the book present the core publications as material objects. These printed artifacts bring into view a nascent heritage that ranges from gothic town halls and dead cities to modern factories and railroad infrastructure; often there is little distinction between what threatens or enshrines the national patrimony. Writers like Schnaase and Hugo, museum conservators like Schayes and Kervyn de Lettenhove, symbolist painters like Hannotiau, innovative lithographers like Simonau, and publishers like Géruzet or the Touring-club de Belgique all bring their concerns to bear on what they see as Belgian heritage. Their preoccupations with patrimony help to craft Belgium as a nation with a history at the crossroads of Europe – historic architecture becomes a reality embedded in the territory as much as an imagery fabricated in print.
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Travelling Matters across the Mediterranean
show More to view fulltext, buy and share links for:Travelling Matters across the Mediterranean show Less to hide fulltext, buy and share links for: Travelling Matters across the MediterraneanIn the last two decades, objects have become increasingly relevant to historical studies as the primary focus of research discussing cross-cultural relations. Objects are produced, used, modified, preserved, and destroyed according to historically specific political and cultural settings, thus providing researchers with information and insights about their original background. However, they can also throw light on a large array of cross-cultural encounters when their mobility is put to the fore. Objects can move by being bought, gifted, bartered, and sold, borrowed or stolen, collected and dispersed, just as they can be modified, repaired, reshaped, repurposed, and destroyed in the process.
The Mediterranean, as a barrier and as a meeting place for different polities and communities, and as the setting of conflicted experiences of cultural, political, economic, and social transformation, easily lends itself to this kind of historical analysis. Featuring articles on Byzantine imperial silks and bronze doors from southern Italy, eastern luxuries in Istanbul and African bolsas from the Canary Islands, Arabic geographies and Hebrew religious texts travelling from shore to shore and from manuscript to the press, and the ‘dead’ bodies of holy women and men, this volume intends to tackle objects as sources and subjects of the history of cross-cultural encounters in innovative ways: focusing on the ‘second-handedness’ of displaced objects across the Mediterranean, the volume intersects different chronologies — from antiquity to the present-day — and varying scales, from the individual objects to the much larger one of the histories of their reinterpretation and repurposing.
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Trends in Archive Archaeology
show More to view fulltext, buy and share links for:Trends in Archive Archaeology show Less to hide fulltext, buy and share links for: Trends in Archive ArchaeologyArchive archaeology has, in recent years, become increasingly acknowledged as an important component of archaeological research. However, the vast amounts of empirical data contained in such archives — among them fieldwork diaries, working notebooks, finds sheets, and photographs — together with a sense that the field is often skewed towards ‘one’s own data’, have made it difficult to develop a clear methodological approach that fits all eventualities. The result is that archive archaeology is still not always recognized for what it can bring to the discipline of archaeology, as a field of study that focuses on the contexts within which humanity developed.
This volume draws together contributions from scholars who work with archives in a variety of capacities: as fieldwork directors of decades-long excavations; as archivists interested in the history of collections; as specialists focusing on certain object groups or regions; and as researchers broadly interested in what archival material brings to the table in terms of new knowledge about archaeological situations. In showcasing contributions of work in progress, the chapters published here bring to the fore knowledge about archives that has long been overlooked, and examine how archival archaeology should be shaped in the future so that it can become more firmly integrated within archaeological practice.
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