Monumental Structures and Volcanic Activities: Excavating the Campana at San Andrés in the Zapotitán Valley, El Salvador

This article presents stratigraphic data and radiocarbon dates combined with Bayesian modeling from San Andrés in the Zapotitán Valley, El Salvador, focusing on the Campana Structure, the largest and longest-used monumental structure at the site. These data refine the regional chronology of the valley and provide insights into the emergence, development, and abandonment of this pivotal center in southeastern Mesoamerica and its potential links to three related volcanic eruptions: Ilopango, Loma Caldera, and El Boquerón. These distinct volcanic events had pronounced effects on local people who innovated new monumental construction projects and used new volcanic debris as construction material after major eruptions. It is suggested that these monumental public building projects played an important role in the post-disaster recovery of societies by helping foster a sense of corporate identity. The use of volcanic material in constructions at San Andrés and the building of these massive structures may also have helped keep these events alive in the communal memory.

PRESERVING SOUTH AFRICAN COMMUNITY ARCHIVES IN A CONTEXT OF UBUNTU

South Africa is rich in archival collections that contribute significantly to nation building and to sociocultural cohesion in the post-apartheid era. The archives bring the past to life and reveal threads of continuity in the historical development of communities. The present paper discusses personal and independent community archives in localities in Limpopo Province. The study considers villages in their entirety as living, evolving entities. From that perspective it looks at the prospects of personal and independent community archives which are in the custody of, respectively, private individuals and social groups striving sustainably to preserve archival material of interest to broader communities while simultaneously advancing the ubuntu principle (a person is a person through other persons). By conducting unstructured interviews with inhabitants involved in the creation of archives, and by applying the ubuntu principle as a theory that provides insight, it has become clear that personal and independent community archives function as tools that preserve communal memory for the interest of present communities and future generations. The study looks at personal and independent community archives in different localities and identifies ways to better manage such archives for the benefit of the community at large. In Limpopo Province archives of various types have not been meaningfully integrated into mainstream community archives. This has resulted in a gap separating individuals building personal archives from social groups that generate their own repositories. This separation hinders the profitable exchange of informative materials within communities. During interviews, community members have recommended practical steps to improve the preservation of their community archives and promote the ubuntu principle.

The Trajectories of the Daily Routine of Josvainiai Town in Online Periodicals

Based on the articles in online periodicals, the author aims to investigate and to find out if daily life can be examined in general through the method of analysis of online periodicals and if so, how these periodicals can be useful in carrying out field research. Research into the daily routine is relevant in Lithuania because it can help in revealing the modern life style of the country’s population that consists of the common fields of a person as a social unit and also indicates the trends in these fields. Understanding the daily routine of modern Lithuanian population is valuable in that it promotes a better understanding of current ethnic culture and traditions, evaluation of their change at the turn of the centuries, and defining the changing social and communal relations. Modern Lithuanian cities seem to be obliged to seek progress and increase the level of globalization, while towns are turning into certain ethno-cultural centres where the traditional lifestyle or its relicts are maintained longer. Modern daily life of Lithuanian towns is revealed as more unique and less affected by external influences. Not only can attempts at gaining information on the daily routine of a town by analysis of online periodicals assist in checking its usefulness and reliability; it also enables finding out how the media interacts with individual and communal memory of a town, and the understanding of how publicistic discourse creates and at the same time reflects the daily routine of a certain residential area that is usually invisible and unknown. Analysed in this paper are articles about Josvainiai, a small town in Kėdainiai district, and its daily routine from the period of 2016–2019 selected by specific keywords from www.rinkosaikste.lt, the news website of Kėdainiai district. The aim is to investigate if the daily routine as a research object can in general be knowable in such a platform. The gathered and analysed information shows that certain fields of daily life, such as specific geographic features, community gathering places, relationships of certain persons or groups, and individual aspects of daily life can be relatively accessible in online periodicals, but they cannot substitute the reliable and in-depth data gathered during field research. Since the primary aim of journalistic articles is to inform and to enlighten, they are not intended for a thorough understanding of a particular phenomenon. However, they can be useful as secondary sources supplementing the data about the town and the daily life of its community gathered during field research.