Search Results (45)

This study presents a cross-cultural comparison of two fortified residences—Palazzo Farnese in Italy and Dong’s Fortified Compound in China—through a triadic analytical framework encompassing architectural form, symbolic ornamentation, and public perception. By combining field observation, iconographic interpretation, and digital ethnography, the research investigates how heritage meaning is constructed, encoded, and reinterpreted across distinct sociocultural contexts. Empirical materials include architectural documentation, decorative analysis, and a curated dataset of 4947 user-generated images and 1467 textual comments collected from Chinese and international platforms between 2020 and 2024. Methods such as CLIP-based visual clustering and BERTopic-enabled sentiment modelling were applied to extract patterns of perception and symbolic emphasis. The findings reveal contrasting representational logics: Palazzo Farnese encodes dynastic authority and Renaissance cosmology through geometric order and immersive frescoes, while Dong’s Compound conveys Confucian ethics and frontier identity via nested courtyards and traditional ornamentation. Digital responses diverge accordingly: international users highlight formal aesthetics and photogenic elements; Chinese users engage with symbolic motifs, family memory, and ritual significance. This study illustrates how historically fortified residences are reinterpreted through culturally specific digital practices, offering an interdisciplinary approach that bridges architectural history, symbolic analysis, and digital heritage studies. Full article

This article critically considers sample multigenerational oral traditions of Numic-speaking communities known as the Nüümü (Northern Paiute), Nuwu (Southern Paiute), and Newe (Western Shoshone), written down over the last 151 years. Utilizing the GOAT! phenomenological method to compare the onto-epistemologies of Numic peoples with a wide range of data from (G)eology, (O)ral traditions, (A)rchaeology and (A)nthropology, and (T)raditional knowledge, the author analyzed 824 multigenerational ancestral teachings. These descriptions encode multigenerational memories of potential geological, climatic, and ecological observations and interpretations of multiple locations and earth processes throughout the Numic Aboriginal homelands within California and the Great Basin. Through this layered and comparative analysis, the author identified potential convergences of oral traditions, ethnography, ethnohistory, rock art, and geological processes in the regions of California, the Great Basin, and the Colorado Plateau, indicative of large-scale earth changes, cognized by Numic Indigenous communities as earth birthing events, occurring during the Late Pleistocene/Early Holocene to Middle and Late Holocene, including the Late Dry Period, Medieval Climatic Anomaly, and Little Ice Age. Full article

Among the multiple zoomorphic and geometric images that dominate Upper Paleolithic decorated cave walls in Europe, some intriguing human hand stencils and finger flutings stand out. Dozens of these marks are attributed to toddlers and children aged 2–12. Accompanied by older group members, they entered these deep, oxygen-depleted and sensory-deprived spaces, climbing and crawling in dark, wet, difficult-to-navigate environments where one might easily get lost or separated from the group. So, why would anyone bring young children into such dangerous locations? Relevant archaeological and anthropological studies form the basis of our hypothesis that the journeys of Upper Paleolithic hunter-gatherers to the depths of deep caves along with their young children should be seen in the framework of active connection with the cosmos as practiced by many indigenous societies worldwide. Indigenous societies often view children as liminal agents with unique physical, cognitive, and mental qualities that allow them to return to the supernatural realm more easily than adults. This makes them especially adept mediators between the world of the living and that of the spirits. In this paper, we examine children’s contribution to the creation of Paleolithic cave art as active agents. Their presence in caves (liminal spaces in themselves) and their participation in the creation of rock art might thus reflect their unique role in early human cosmology and ontology. Full article

Votive offerings are one of the most common devotional practices in Hindu temples of Kerala and are today resorted to by an ever-growing number of worshippers seeking divine help in times of need. As this article will show, these offerings are deeply embedded in the logics of the hyper-personalized and unmediated devotion that characterizes popular Hinduism in this part of India. They are also markers of the recent opening of religion to individual contribution and intervention, as well as active tools for the intimate worshipper–deity relationship. Ritual arts conducted as votive offerings allow us to dive even deeper into these considerations and open up new alleys of analysis, for they connect public and private worlds in specific ways and introduce unique aesthetic and transactional dimensions. This article draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the south Indian state of Kerala, with particular focus on the ritual performing art muṭiyēṯṯu’, which is mainly conducted as a votive offering in high-caste temples devoted to the goddess Bhadrakāḷi. It pulls together anthropology, performance, and religious studies to analyze the current grassroot-level realities of lived popular religion through the prism of votive offerings in general and of ritual performing arts conducted as votive offerings in particular. Full article

What does it mean to decolonize or undiscipline the anthropology museum? What happens when the museum is confronted by Indigenous and descendant communities who demand an ethic of care rooted in relational ontologies and epistemologies? This article features Indigenous creativity as it has disrupted ‘business as usual’ in anthropology museums. This is primarily evidenced by Fork Peck Tribes who confronted the University of Montana to enact a long-overdue repatriation. Additional examples from The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard demonstrate diverse expressions of relationality among Indigenous and descendant communities. These interventions are analyzed through Critical Indigenous Theory to specify the ways in which Indigenous religious traditions refuse the narratives and norms of settler colonial knowledge production and undermine the imperial museological practices of preservation. Instead, relationality is prioritized in the caretaking of and connection with more-than-human entities and materials in the museum. This article emphasizes relationality and repatriation as religious acts that challenge assumptions embedded in imperial and settler colonial approaches to history and science. From various social locations and through multiple strategies, we see the active undisciplining of the museum by Indigenous and descendant communities. Full article

Often, artists of all time periods have unintentionally crystallized in their works the image of landscapes distant in time; of those landscapes, sometimes only faint traces remain, adding to the collection of so-called indirect sources. In many cases, a critical analysis carried out using the comparative method of those iconographic sources allows the inference of the relevant information regarding the layout of places, the structures housed there, and the practice of arts and crafts, or about customs and habits (e.g., dressing, eating, etc.); it is possible to recompose the so-called ‘buried landscapes’ by combining it with, and thanks to, the substantial contributions of other disciplines (such as history, archaeology, and anthropology). This contribution shows the first outcomes of research carried out within the Ghibertiana Project by CHMlab of DIDA (UNIFI), which aims to analyze the ‘landscape characterised by cultivated areas’ from the Florentine countryside in the early fifteenth century. In particular, it is maintained that Lorenzo Ghiberti (Pelago, 1378–Florence, 1455), just like other contemporary artists, depicted territories and architectures he had first experienced in some of the ten bronze panels of the Gates of Paradise of the Baptistery of Florence. He described in great detail the flora, fauna, and anthropic structures of the extra moenia territory. The focus of the early stage of analysis and this contribution is mainly on shelters: temporary structures functional to agricultural work. The encouraging results obtained may give rise to new research on other Florentine landscape elements artfully chiseled in Ghiberti’s workshop. Full article

Proportions and canons of the human body have always been an area of research mainly through art, architecture, or construction, and today, they have a significant application in product design. Research confirms that body height in most cases corresponds to the canon (head–body ratio) of 7.5 to 8 head lengths. This paper investigates the ratio of the head length (HL) to the total body height (BH, stature) of kindergarten and school-aged children, aiming to define the children’s canon inspired by the idea of the harmonic circle theory and the biomechanical model. The data were collected from 1307 children (male 676, female 631) aged 2 to 16 years in the cities of Zagreb (Croatia), Sofia (Bulgaria), and Skopje (North Macedonia). A generalized ESD test (alpha-level 0.10) and Turkey’s 1977 test were used in order to detect outliers in distributions of heights and in the distribution of ratios. Statistical significance was set at 0.05, all p values were two-sided, and the MedCalc statistical tool (version 20.110) was used. The results confirm that canonical changes follow the historical research of artists throughout the centuries, but that they change according to contemporary secular trends in children’s growth and cover HL/BH canons from 5.59 and 5.72 (2-year-old girls and boys) to 7.50 and 7.60 (15-year-old boys and girls) depending on age and gender. HL/BH ratio was significantly higher among female examinees in all age groups where difference was significant (Student’s t test, p < 0.02). In conclusion, such a calculation based on the canon is important for interdisciplinary professions. Creating an anthropological–biomechanical model based on canons, instead of time-consuming measurement, could significantly simplify the long-term collection of anthropometric data used for designing children’s products. Future detailed research is proposed. Full article

Reconstructing the face from the skull is important not only for forensic identification but also as a tool that can provide insight into the appearance of individuals from past populations. It requires a multidisciplinary approach that combines anthropological knowledge, advanced imaging methods, and artistic skills. In the present study, we demonstrate this process on the skull of an early medieval warrior from Croatia. The skeletal remains were prepared and scanned using multi-slice computed tomography (MSCT) and examined using standard anthropological and radiological methods. The analysis revealed that the remains belonged to a 35–45-year-old male individual who had suffered severe cranial trauma, probably causing his death. From MSCT images, we reconstructed a three-dimensional (3D) model of the skull, on which we digitally positioned cylinders demarking the soft tissue thickness and created the face with a realistic texture. A 3D model of the face was then optimized, printed, and used to produce a clay model. Sculpturing techniques added skin textures and facial features with scars and trauma manifestations. Finally, after constructing a plaster model, the model was painted and refined by adding fine details like eyes and hair, and it was prepared for presentation in the form of a sculpture. Full article

This study focuses on slope stability and geological hazard analyses at the Italian Paleolithic site of Grotta Paglicci. The site is characterized by a cave that contains rich archaeological and anthropological finds, spanning various Paleolithic periods, and includes faunal remains, lithic artifacts, human burials, ornaments, mobiliary art objects, and unique Paleolithic wall paintings. The study employs a multi-technique approach that includes topographic surveys carried out by the robotic total station and GNSS receivers, photogrammetric acquisitions with an unmanned aerial system, 3D SLAM-based LiDAR mapping, and an engineering geological survey. The collected data allowed for the creation of georeferenced 3D models that were utilized in rock slope stability analysis and modeling. The results of this comprehensive survey highlighted how the bedding and joint discontinuities influence rock stability in both the external and internal areas of the cave. The integrated use of SLAM-based LiDAR and photogrammetry has been proven to be an efficient and essential tool in the evaluation of the structural interactions between the external morphology and the cave, thus allowing the proposal of safety measures that will keep the site accessible for future activities. Full article

The First World War blurred the lines between “ordinary” and “literary” writing practices. Many sources corroborate this: necrologies written about poets who died in the act of writing not a poem but rather a letter, or introductions to poetry collections where bereaved families and friends admit they had no knowledge of their loved one’s writing practices until they found a journal full of poems after the author’s death, which they only published as a posthumous tribute. This article uses examples of French poetry of the Great War to explore this permeability between what is considered war poetry and what is considered war ephemera. The main question it addresses is what changes when we look at the war poems that were initially ephemera or ordinary writing. Whose stories get told when poetry is studied not as literature to be judged as accomplished or failed art but as a way of writing to make sense of the world? It argues that when we choose to read poems as ephemera and from the point of view of a larger anthropology of writing practices, diverse histories emerge and communities who write poetry not only as an artistic pursuit but also as a means of organizing experience and leaving traces behind reclaim ownership over their own narratives. This can challenge the false equivalence between the cultural history of warfare and an intellectual history of the elites at war and includes poetry within paradigmatic shifts that place objects at the centre of mediations of the experience of war. Full article

This essay takes advantage of the current context of superdiversity to define a form of hybrid heuristics between North American anthropology and research-creation “in” the arts. In an attempt to alleviate the epistemological disaster described by Gregory Bateson as the loss of the unity of the biosphere and humanity, I position myself within a nomothetic perspective of Boasian anthropology and a postqualitative approach to research-creation. My research-creation proposes clay as an epistemic object and develops a creative methodology in the form of an experimental system that borrows from the following two types of change observable in living organisms: static and schismatic changes. The artistic activities, presented as two heuristic cycles, seek to broaden the self-reflexivity inherent in the use of clay by human groups. They provoke decentring leading to a loss of control where a new identity has to be defined. This reveals itself in terms of system thinking as the reconstruction of a new reality that is defined neither entirely by my artistic practice nor entirely by my theoretical framework derived from anthropology. It is a “place of passage” between both. It is a new identity that can be defined by the “change of change” that I call “creative anthropology”. This transdisciplinary approach introduces a “second glance” into anthropological research and opens up breaches through research-creation. It works to develop new narratives and test posthumanism in the field of my artistic practice. Full article

The present work will try to delve into some emotional aspects expressed by the community of believers about a section of the Mosque of Córdoba: the maqsūra of al-Ḥakam II. It is important to observe this maqsūra from the point of view of the emotions that it generates during its use as an active sacred space. The maqṣūra of al-Ḥakam II is a space for communication between the political and religious powers within the religious community who attended the Prayer on Friday (Ṣalat al-Jumu’a). This article reviews and expands some hypotheses raised by Professor Ruiz Souza in 2001, where he pointed out the importance of the point of view of the community of worshippers to understand the main functions of the maqṣūra. The worshippers attended the ceremonial and could observe part of the maqṣūra from the shadows of the naves of the old mosque. What did they perceive from a space that was hidden from their gaze? What was this luminous place where the Prince of Believers was located, trying to make them feel? To answer these questions, new methodologies from the History of Art have been used, combined with Anthropology of Religion, the Archeology of Emotions, Color Symbology, Neuroscience and Psychology. Full article

This article examines the representation and significance of the Holy House of Mary as a metaphor for the domus Dei in the initial letters of a 13th-century Book of Hours (Brailes Hours BL MS Add. 49999) using hermeneutics, visual studies, and anthropology of art methodologies. The manuscript delves into the theological implications of the doctrine of the Incarnation and the virginal divine motherhood of Mary depicted in these images. Additionally, it explores the connection between these representations and the devotion to the Holy House of Nazareth and its replica in the sanctuary of Our Lady of Walsingham, recognized as a sacred pilgrimage site. To conduct this analysis, the article considers the figures of the Holy House depicted on pilgrim badges and religious jewels. Specifically, it focuses on the Hylle jewel, whose effectiveness, attributed to its form and materiality, symbolized the aurea palatium Dei. Full article

Using buttons and beads sewn on wool and calico, Northwest Coast First Nations women fashion the robes and aprons essential to ongoing expressions of inherited prerogatives and rights. Each piece of regalia is carefully crafted to include signifying materials and motifs, telling of the origins or relations of their owners. These creations exist as part of a holistic system that integrates material artworks within ceremony, including song, dance, and oratory, which in turn uphold the laws expressed through potlatching. Shifting scholarly focus from Northwest Coast carving traditions, this paper recenters textile arts within a holistic, culturally focused context while addressing issues of gender, the effects of colonial practices, and the damage wrought by salvage anthropology as it fragmented cultural information across archives. Women’s artistic productions embody long-held technical and aesthetic knowledge connected to oral histories and cultural practices. Restoring Indigenous perspectives connecting tangible and intangible cultural heritage counterbalances the aesthetic emphasis that has dominated Northwest Coast art history. Full article

Devotional artworks represent a valuable form of art, as they are evidence of religious worship and the demo-ethno-anthropological, as well as historical-artistic, heritage of a community, which is why they definitely belong to the cultural identity of a geographic area. The Madonna della Croce wall painting is an example of devotional art preserved today in the homonymous church in Triggiano (Bari, Italy). The presented study concerns the characterization of pigments used in the painting. The identification of pictorial materials had the aim of providing a contribution to knowledge about the painting, the history of restorations, and other historical events, and to increase the information about the Apulian painting to better reconstruct the social, cultural, and economic contexts of the region. Through a non-invasive and fast methodological approach, including portable digital microscopy, colorimetry, fibre optic reflectance spectroscopy (FORS), and X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF); 42 points considered on coloured areas were analysed in situ, and results on pigment identification were achieved. According to the local wall painting tradition, red and yellow ochres, green earth, vine black, massicot, and lead-tin yellow were found. Furthermore, both indigo-woad dye and a mixture of vine black and yellow ochre to obtain a blueish colour on the Virgin’s mantle were highlighted. Full article