A Late Würmian and Holocene pollen profile from Tüttensee, Upper Bavaria, as evidence of 15 Millennia of landscape history in the Chiemsee glacier region

A late Würmian and Holocene pollen profile from Tüttensee near Chiemsee, Bavaria, covering 14 millennia of vegetation history, shows the late Würmian reforestation of the area, Holocene woodland development, and later the human impact on the landscape. In the early Holocene a distinct Ulmus phase preceded the Corylus and Quercus expansion. Afterwards, between 6000 and 4000 BCE, Picea was most common. The expansion of Fagus and Abies started at 4000 BCE, together with the decline of Ulmus. Fagus was more common than Abies. From 500 BCE Abies started to decline, Fagus has also declined from 1000 CE onwards. Before the modern times Picea/Pinus phase Quercus is prevailing. The prehistoric human impact is rather weak. A short reforestation phase at ~ 1 BCE – 1 CE hints at the rather complex migration history in this region with so called Celts, Germanic people and Romans involved. Strong human impact indicated by cereals, Plantago lanceolata, other human indicators and deforestation started at 900 CE.

Coins and Circulation in Addison’s Prose

In his Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705), Addison regularly draws on his deep knowledge of Latin poetry in order to ‘compare the natural face of the country with the Landskips that the Poets have given us of it’. Less conventionally, but just as regularly, he elucidates landscape, history, and antiquities through reference to ancient coins. Roughly contemporaneously, Addison wrote a defence of numismatics in the Dialogues Upon the Usefulness of Ancient Medals (published posthumously in 1721), in which one character, Philander, seeks to persuade Cynthio from his view that numismatists are mere ‘critics in Rust’ (Cynthio’s view closely resembling the attacks on Bentley and others by satirists such as William King). Addison, through Philander’s person, sees the poems and medals he juxtaposes as representing ‘the same design executed by different hands’; ‘A reverse often clears up the passages of an old poet, as the poet often serves to unriddle a reverse.’ But coins have, for Addison, a moral as well as an explanatory function, publicizing the characters and deeds of great men and women by keeping them in circulation. This chapter explores the relationship between the moral and the fiscal function of coins, drawing out connections between Addison’s views on ancient numismatics and his approach both to modern British coinage and to the circulation of texts and ideas.

Architettura nel farsi delle cose

When compared with the central-eastern ones, the Western Alps have experienced a growing marginality in the new century. After all, getting out of the heavy legacy left by twentieth-century modernisation – abandonment of territories and tourism – is not easy. Today, however, there seems to be some evidence of a radical change in sensitivity, characterised by an awareness of the potential and limits of the contemporary architecture in relation to local dimension. This is how environment, landscape, history, traditions, heritage are no longer just a “fetish” to be exhibited for the mountain users, but become the threads with which contemporaneity tries to mend the ties interrupted with the territories. Quality architecture no longer seems to be just a self-referential exercise of composition, but a conscious opportunity to translate the demands, imaginaries, expectations, identities of the territories, in physical projects. Projects that are within the processes and that necessarily respond to compromises, in which sometimes the aesthetic-formal aspect is only one among all that control the project, that become the result of extremely diversified and contrasting questions. This working condition, always at the edge of the processes, inevitably also affects the forms of architecture, in which the difficulties and precariousness of the operational context become a prerequisite for the characterisation of the figurative and architectural aspects.