Shanghai Museum

Desiccation cracking and salt accumulation are major deterioration mechanisms in earthen sites within site museums, primarily caused by coupled moisture and salt migration under controlled environmental conditions. However, limited research on soil moisture–salt interactions has hindered the development of effective environmental control strategies. This study develops a moisture–salt migration model for the partition walls of Pit 1 at the Emperor Qin’s Mausoleum Site Museum, using the Richards equation and Fick’s law. The model was validated through soil column evaporation experiments and numerical simulations. Simulations over a six-year period under natural ventilation revealed that this condition was ineffective in preventing moisture loss and salt accumulation. While unsaturated humidity control provided short-term delay in deterioration, only saturated humidity (100% RH) effectively prevented long-term moisture loss and salt crystallization. These findings indicate that sustaining a saturated humidity environment is an effective strategy for the long-term preventive conservation of earthen sites.

The Țării Crișurilor Museum has had a long, rich and sometimes arduous journey starting from the middle of the 19th century. Throughout the years, there have been a few key moments in time that marked a turning point for the institution and its destiny. Such a moment was the centennial celebration organized in 1972, which attracted the attention of both local and national scholars. Over a span of a few days, historians from all around Romania gathered to participate in the festivities held in Oradea. New exhibitions were opened for the occasion; a conference was conducted to gather scientific results pertaining to all fields of interest and many more activities. To commemorate the event, a certain file (number 827) was donated to the museum in 1975 containing a wide arrangement of documents, letters, posters, all of which allow researchers to recreate the occasion. The aim of this article is to analyze thoroughly the contents of the file, to see what the documents offer in terms of information and whether it can be used in different projects.

El presente artículo da a conocer el contrato inédito entre el rector de Navarrés y beneficiado de la catedral valentina, Antoni Olzina, y el pintor Pere Nicolau (documentado entre 1390-1408), por un retablo para el altar, que poseía dicho beneficiado en la Catedral de Valencia bajo la advocación de santa Clara y santa Isabel. Por otro lado, se aclaran algunos datos sobre otros retablos que contrataron los canónigos y beneficiados de la Catedral de Valencia con este pintor, para la propia catedral u otras parroquias.

Environmental monitoring and assessment of environmental risk levels are of great significance for the preventive protection of cultural relics in museums. Conventional methods focus on univariate statistical analysis, ignoring the interaction among variables and the time-related characteristics in environmental sequences. In addition, the environmental data is mostly unlabeled. Due to the strict requirements of museums on the environment, the monitoring data is mostly in the normal state, and there exists a serious problem of class imbalance. It increases the difficulty of establishing a supervised classification model for evaluating environmental risk levels. To solve the above problems, this article proposes a hierarchical weighted long-short-term memory (HWLSTM) with a one-class classifier for the preventive protection of cultural heritage in museums. Compared with the conventional methods, the proposed HWLSTM pays attention to the interaction among key variables and extracts dynamic features from the multivariate environmental time series. It hierarchically extracts short-term and long-term dynamic features to overcome the long-term dependency caused by long sequences. A dynamic weighting strategy is proposed to highlight the cumulative impact of continuous abnormal states. Furthermore, to address the issue of lacking labeled data, an unsupervised one-class classifier is proposed based on the one-class support vector machine (OCSVM) to achieve environmental monitoring and assessment of risk levels only using unlabeled data. Instead of constructing different models for each task, it provides a unified framework for the preventive protection of cultural relics. In this article, the proposed method is verified with the paper cultural heritage in Shanghai Museum. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

As a catalyst for urban landscape transformation, the reuse of heritage sites plays a pivotal role in shaping contemporary urban spaces and influencing socio-economic development. However, this phenomenon is not without controversy, particularly regarding the quality of preservation and the potential risks associated with over-commodification. Consequently, there has been an increasing research focus on reconciling these conflicting aspects. This study employs a multi-value interpretation framework to delve into the reuse of heritage sites in the urban area of Xi’an within the broader context of China’s urbanization. Utilizing a comparative case study method, this research specifically examines the burgeoning phenomenon of heritage parks. This exploration sheds light on how the reuse of heritage intertwines with urbanization processes, by taking into account environmental, economic, social, and cultural values. The findings suggest that a multi-value interpretation framework is crucial to address the limitations of the current heritagization. Heritage sites in Xi’an have been integrated into the urban transformation process through heritage conservation and the production of new heritage spaces. However, the evolving multi-value evaluation of these heritage sites continues to influence the city’s interpretation of its significant and fading past in planning. This study highlights the dynamic nature of heritage sites in the urban context and underscores the need for nuanced approaches to balance heritage preservation with the evolving demands of contemporary urban development.

Despite the conventional association with sophisticated metallurgical technologies, the Iron Age has long fallen between the two academic poles of prehistoric and classical archaeology. The more recent invention of a self-consciously ambivalent terminology of ‘proto-historic’ and ‘proto-urban’ features represents an attempt by mostly European archaeologists to give the Iron Age socioeconomic substance in its own right, while at the same time also underscoring the ambiguity of the period. Moreover, as the Iron Age has since become synonymous with notions of state formation and urbanization, its deep evolutionist roots have only become more evident.

Societal Impact StatementAgrobiodiversity is central to sustainable farming worldwide. Cultivation, conservation and reintroduction of diverse plant species, including ‘forgotten’ and ‘underutilized’ crops, contribute to global agrobiodiversity, living ecosystems and sustainable food production. Such efforts benefit from traditional and historical knowledge of crop plants' evolutionary and cultural trajectories. This review is a first attempt at systematically gauging species representativeness in studies of archaeological plant remains. Results indicate that, in addition to discipline‐specific methodological sources of bias, modern agricultural biases may replicate themselves in crop history research and influence understandings of ‘forgotten crops’. Recognizing these biases is an initial stride towards rectifying them and promoting agrobiodiversity in both research and practical applications.SummarySo‐called ‘forgotten’ or ‘orphan’ crops are an important component of strategies aimed at preserving and promoting biodiversity. Knowledge of historical cultivation, usage, and geographic and evolutionary trajectories of plants, that is, crop history research, is important for the long‐term success of such efforts. However, research biases in the crops chosen for study may present hurdles. This review attempts to systematically identify patterns in crop species representativeness within archaeology‐based crop history research. A meta‐analysis and synthesis of archaeobotanical evidence (and lack thereof) is presented for 268 species known to have been cultivated for food prior to 1492 CE from the Mediterranean region to South Asia. We identified 39 genera with known crop plants in this geographical and historical context that are currently absent from its archaeobotanical record, constituting ‘orphan’ crops of archaeobotany. In addition, a worldwide synthesis of crop species studied using geometric morphometric, archaeogenetic and stable isotope analyses of archaeological plant remains is presented, and biases in the species represented in these disciplines are discussed. Both disciplinary methodological biases and economic agenda‐based biases affecting species representativeness in crop history research are apparent. This study also highlights the limited geographic diffusion of most crops and the potential for deeper historical perspectives on how crops become marginalized and ‘forgotten’.

From the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, the discovery of the Oracle Bones from the Yin Ruins, the Ancient Literature from Dunhuang, the Bamboo Slips of the Qin and the Han Dynasty, and the Ming and the Qing history archives of the Qing Palace Cabinet in China shocked the Chinese academic circle at that time, and with the development of the research on them, the disciplines of Studies of Oracle Bone Inscriptions, Dunhuang Studies, and the Study of Bamboo Slips were established one after another, and became known to the world's academic circle. However, compared with the first three kinds of cultural heritage, the archives of the Ming and Qing Dynasties did not form the "Study of Archives of the Ming and Qing Dynasties" (the "Study of Archives of the Ming and Qing Dynasties" did not form a famous study, in other words, it's also a potential discipline.), which undoubtedly caused us to think. To this end, we have made a preliminary compendium of the discovery of archives of the Ming and Qing Dynasties and the work and research done by Chinese academics around it. Through this research, we believe that there is room for the growth of the "Study of Archives of the Ming and Qing Dynasties". We have tried to illustrate the current state of the "Study of Archives of the Ming and Qing Dynasties" through some evidence and to make a discourse on the direction of its study and its objects of study.

Espaço Cultural Casa das Onze Janelas, em Belém do Pará, financiado pelo CNPq, analisamse os desafios presentes no macroambiente para a preservação e conservação do acervo de artes visuais deste museu de arte contemporânea, salvaguardado na Reserva Técnica Sistêmica de Artes Visuais e seu anexo de caráter provisório, localizado no Museu do Estado do Pará. A pesquisa qualitativa, teórico-empírica, baseia-se na análise dos espaços das reservas e a influência do ambiente externo nesta área. Apresentamos os dados preliminares das condições ambientais desses espaços e um diagnóstico de conservação preventiva a partir da pesquisa da Coleção Fundo Z.