THEODORE VACQUER AND THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF MODERNITY IN HAUSSMANN'S PARIS

2007 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 157-183 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin Jones

AbstractThéodore Vacquer (1824–99) was an archaeologist who excavated, directed excavations in and visited all archaeological sites in Paris between the 1840s and his death. In the latter part of his career, he served as assistant curator at what became the Musée Carnavalet, specialising in the Roman and early medieval history of the city. Taking advantage of the reconstruction of the city in the nineteenth century associated with the work of Paris prefect, Baron Haussmann, he was able to locate far more of Roman Paris than had been known before. His findings remained the basis of what was known about the Roman city until a new wave of archaeological excavations after 1950. Vacquer aimed to highlight his discoveries in a magnum opus on the history of Paris from earliest times to ad 1000, but he died with virtually nothing written. His extensive archive still exists, however, and provides the substance for this essay. The essay seeks to rescue Vacquer from the relative obscurity associated with his name. In addition, by setting his life and work in the context of the Haussmannian construction of Paris as the arch-city of modernity it aims to illuminate the history of archaeology, conservation and urban identity in nineteenth-century Paris.

Author(s):  
Orifhuja Odilovich Muminov

Kesh (Arabic, in its sources Kashsh, Kass, Kise) is a historical city and region. It occupies the north-eastern part of the present-day Kashkadarya region of Uzbekistan. Initially, it was located on the site of Kitab district, then in the 9th-10th centuries it moved to Shakhrisabz. Extensive research has been conducted in the Kesh oasis over the years, which has provided valuable information on the ancient and medieval history of the oasis. Important information about the ancient and medieval history of the oasis is given in the sources. These sources provide detailed information on the geographical location of the Kesh oasis, the lifestyle of the population of the oasis, the socio-economic life of the oasis, the structure of the city of Kesh. Historians such as Ibn Hawqal and Al-Muqaddas have provided such valuable information in their works. From the 20th century, archeological excavations began in the oasis. Preliminary research was conducted by orientalists in the oasis. In the oasis V.V.Bartold, V.A.Vyatkin, B.Denike conducted scientific research. In 1926, A.Yu.Yakubovsky was sent to Shakhrisabz to study historical topography. In the 1930s, the monuments of Shakhrisabz were studied by Y.G.Gulomov, T.M.Mirgiyosov, S.K.Kabanov, S.A.Sudakov and the artist N.S.Lojkin. Archaeological excavations in the oasis were also carried out by M.E. Masson in the 1940s. Archaeological excavations were carried out by S.K.Kabanov in 1946-1950. In 1955, V.D.Zhukov conducted excavations at the site of Kindiklitepa. The research conducted by N.I.Krasheninnikova in 1970-1980 is also important. Similar expeditions were carried out in later periods. Among them are R.H.Suleymanov, E.V.Rtveladze and A.S.Sagdullaev. The archeological researches and scientific researches of these scientists are served as an important basis in determining the age of the cities of the eastern (Kesh) and western (Karshi) oasis of Kashkadarya and their place in the urban culture of Central Asia.


Author(s):  
Joseph Ben Prestel

Between 1860 and 1910, Berlin and Cairo went through a period of dynamic transformation. During this period, a growing number of contemporaries in both places made corresponding arguments about how urban change affected city dwellers’ emotions. In newspaper articles, scientific treatises, and pamphlets, shifting practices, such as nighttime leisure, were depicted as affecting feelings like love and disgust. Looking at the ways in which different urban dwellers, from psychologists to revelers, framed recent changes in terms of emotions, this book reveals the striking parallels between the histories of Berlin and Cairo. In both cities, various authors associated changes in the city with such phenomena as a loss of control over feelings or the need for a reform of emotions. The parallels in these arguments belie the assumed dissimilarity between European and Middle Eastern cities during the nineteenth century. Drawing on similar debates about emotions in Berlin and Cairo, the book provides a new argument about the regional compartmentalization of urban history. It highlights how the circulation of scientific knowledge, the expansion of empires, and global capital flows led to similarities in the pasts of these two cities. By combining urban history and the history of emotions, this book proposes an innovative perspective on the emergence of different, yet comparable cities at the end of the nineteenth century.


Author(s):  
Rodney Harrison

The focus of this article is stone tools. The history of stone tool research is linked integrally to the history of archaeology and the study of the human past, and many of the early developments in archaeology were connected with the study of stone artefacts. The identification of stone tools as objects of prehistoric human manufacture was central to the development of nineteenth-century models of prehistoric change, and especially the Three Age system for Old World prehistory. This article draws on concepts derived from interdisciplinary material culture studies to consider the role of the artefact after being discarded. It suggests that it is impossible to understand the meaning or efficacy of stone tools without understanding their ‘afterlives’ following abandonment. This article aims to complement contemporary metrical studies of the identification of stone tools and the description of their production. A brief history of the stone tools is explained and this concludes the article.


Author(s):  
David Faflik

Urban Formalism radically reimagines what it meant to “read” a brave new urban world during the transformative middle decades of the nineteenth century. At a time when contemporaries in the twin capitals of modernity in the West, New York and Paris, were learning to make sense of unfamiliar surroundings, city peoples increasingly looked to the experiential patterns, or forms, from their everyday lives in an attempt to translate urban experience into something they could more easily comprehend. Urban Formalism interrogates both the risks and rewards of an interpretive practice that depended on the mutual relation between urbanism and formalism, at a moment when the subjective experience of the city had reached unprecedented levels of complexity. What did it mean to read a city sidewalk as if it were a literary form, like a poem? On what basis might the material form of a burning block of buildings be received as a pleasurable spectacle? How closely aligned were the ideology and choreography of the political form of a revolutionary street protest? And what were the implications of conceiving of the city’s exciting dynamism in the static visual form of a photographic composition? These are the questions that Urban Formalism asks and begins to answer, with the aim of proposing a revisionist semantics of the city. This book not only provides an original cultural history of forms. It posits a new form of urban history, comprised of the representative rituals of interpretation that have helped give meaningful shape to metropolitan life.


Author(s):  
Bill Jenkins

The penultimate chapter looks at the longer-term impact of the efflorescence of evolutionary speculation in early-nineteenth-century Edinburgh on later generations of natural historians. First it examines the evangelical reaction against progressive models of the history of life and its role in the eclipse of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians.’ Next it examines to the evolutionary theory proposed by Robert Chambers in his anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) to assess its possible debt to the Edinburgh transformists of the 1820s and 1830s. Finally it turns to the important question of the possible influence of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians’ on Charles Darwin during his time as a medical student in Edinburgh in the years 1825 to 1827, during which period he rubbed shoulders with many of the key proponents of evolutionary ideas in the city.


Author(s):  
Amber Brian

Don Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl (b. c. 1578–d. 1650) is a relatively unknown figure outside of specialist academic circles, yet he has been very influential in the development of the historiography of pre-Hispanic central Mexico, or Anahuac. Born in the last quarter of the 16th century, his family had roots in Anahuac and in Spain. His mother was descended from elite native rulers of the city of Tetzcoco, while his father was a Spanish settler who worked as a Nahuatl-Spanish interpreter in the courts of Mexico City. Alva Ixtlilxochitl also served as an interpreter and as a bureaucratic official in the colonial government. During his lifetime, Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s family’s wealth and status were tied to his mother’s and grandmother’s connections to the family’s cacicazgo (landed estate) in San Juan Teotihuacan. Yet it was his ancestors from Tetzcoco who were the primary object of study in his five historical works. In four historical accounts and his magnum opus, the History of the Chichimeca Nation (2019, cited under Manuscripts, Editions, Translations), Alva Ixtlilxochitl recounts the origins, deeds, and exploits of the leaders of Tetzcoco, including the renowned Nezahualcoyotl (r. 1429–1472) and Nezahualpilli (r. 1472–1515). For these histories he relied on native sources. As he says himself in the prefatory materials to the History of the Chichimeca Nation, these sources included “painted histories and annals and the songs with which they preserved them,” and to make sense of these materials he sought out “the elders of New Spain who were renowned for their knowledge and understanding of those stories” (History of the Chichimeca Nation, p. 29). The result of Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s research and writing has left an important legacy in studies of the history of ancient Mexico. Scholars from the 17th century onward drew on Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s representations of pre-Hispanic and conquest-era Mexico to such an extent that his depictions of Tetzcoco as a center of learning and culture and his depictions of Nezahualcoyotl as a revered poet-king became standard in both academic studies and popular culture. Burgeoning scholarly interest in mestizo historians in the 1990s brought renewed attention to Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s writings and to his position as a colonial subject and author, while the rediscovery of Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s original manuscripts in the 1980s provided new material sources with which to study the creation and impact of his works. Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s own projects and his legacy represent an important reminder of how, on occasion, the stories and storytelling of native peoples survived the brutalities of conquest and colonialism.


Author(s):  
S. F. Tataurov ◽  

The article considers the materials of the archaeological excavations of the city of Tara as a source on the history of the accession of Western Siberia to the Russian state in the end of XVI–XVIII centuries. The analysis of finds testifying to the role of the city in the military, commercial, economic and cultural aspects of this process is given.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer McKinnon ◽  
Daryl Wesley ◽  
Jason Raupp ◽  
Ian Moffat

This paper presents the results of a magnetometer survey and initial archaeological excavations of Macassan and Indigenous features conducted at the Anuru Bay Macassan trepang processing site. The archaeology of this area is complex, containing both material reflecting the Indigenous utilisation of coastal resources and the periodic visits of the Macassan trepangers from Indonesia. Despite a history of archaeological investigations on Macassan period sites (i.e. Clarke 1994; McKnight 1976; Mitchell 1994), geophysical survey has not previously been applied as part of these investigations. While Macassan sites may contain features amenable to conventional archaeological geophysics (such as iron trepang processing pots), additional potential exists for the application of magnetometry to locate features created through burning, as has been applied to Australian Indigenous sites (Bonhomme & Stanley 1985; Fanning et al. 2009; Moffat et al. 2008 & 2010; Stanley & Green 1976; Wallis et al. 2008) and international Indigenous sites (Abbot & Frederick 1990; Batt & Dockrill 1998; Jones & Munson 2005). The results of this study demonstrate that this approach is equally applicable to Macassan sites, opening up a new and potentially fruitful avenue for exploring the archaeology of this trade system.


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 648-663
Author(s):  
A. S. Savelieva ◽  
P. V. German ◽  
I. A. Plats ◽  
L. Yu. Bobrova

The article introduces some information about the expeditionary studies on the archaeological sites located on the banks of the Middle Kiya River valley. The authors believe that the Kiya is one of the main rivers for such important historical and cultural area of South Siberia as the Kiya – Chulym interfluve. The expeditionary studies have been conducted here since the late XIX century; however, professional archaeological studies began as late as in the 1950s. The paper describes the excavations conducted by A. I. Martynov, G. S. Martynova, I. I. Baukhnik, A. M. Kilemzin, A. V. Tsirkin, A. P. Okladnikov, V. I. Molodin, V. V. Bobrov, A. S. Vasyutin, V. N. Zharonkin, P. V. German, A. V. Fribus, and P. G. Sokolov. It focuses on the carefully planned excavations conducted on the banks of the middle forest-steppe part of the Kiya River valley. Seven expeditions discovered eighty previously unknown archaeological sites. While performing the historiographic mapping of archaeological sites, the authors took into account the type of artifact and the type of archaeological study. The authors analyzed the localization of the archeological sites near the villages of Shestakovo and Chumay and the city of Mariinsk published by A. M. Kulemzin and I. I. Baukhnik and compared them with the results of the mapping. They defined the territory as a single Middle-Kiya archaeological microdistrict that includes the archaeological complexes of Shestakovo, Chumay, and Archekas (Mariinsk). The article also includes some preliminary ideas about the types of archaeological studies, as well as typological and chronological description of the monuments.


Author(s):  
М. И. Кулакова

В статье представлен обзор основных направлений деятельности псковских археологов в 2016 году. Охарактеризованы основные аспекты работ, направленных на сохранение археологических памятников, расположенных на территории Пскова и Псковской области. Площадь археологических раскопок в городе Пскове составляла более 5000 кв. м (раскопки в Кремле, на Завеличье, в центре города, за пределами крепостных стен на посаде) и в Псковской области (археологические раскопки курганной группы Смоленка недалеко от города Остров, курганная группа на восточной окраине деревни Изборск (Усть-Смолка); археологическая разведка в Новосокольническом районе с целью фиксации поселения Х-Х1 в. Горожане, в Красногородском районе (определение границ могильника возле села Станкеево), в Гдовском районе; по трассе ВЛ-330 «Новосокольники - Талашкино» (Псковская и Смоленская области). Проведено определение границ территории объекта культурного наследия «Культурный слой города Великие Луки». Продолжилась разработка направления «военная археология». The article presents an overview of the main activities of Pskov archaeologists in 2016. The main aspects of the works aimed at preserving archaeological sites located on the territory of Pskov and Pskov region are characterized. The Area of archaeological excavations in the city of Pskov was more than 5000 sq. m. (the excavations in the Kremlin, on Zavelich’e, in the Middle Town, outside the fortress walls on the posad) and in the Pskov region (archaeological excavations of the barrow group Smolenka near the town Ostrov, the barrow group on the eastern edge of the village Izborsk (“Ust-Smolka”); archaeological search in Novosokol’nicheskiy district with the goal of the identification of the X-XIth c. Gopozhane settlement, in Krasnogorodsk district (identificaton of the boundaries of the ground burial near the village Stankeevo), in Gdov district; on the highway VL-330 “Novosokolniki - Talashkino” (Pskov and Smolensk regions territory). The definition of the boundaries of the territory of the object of cultural heritage “Cultural layer of the city of Velikie Luki” was performed. The research area of “military archaeology” was continued.


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