APM – Archeologia Postmedievale, 24, 2020

Description

This issue of the journal covers a wide range of themes and chronologies, to underline the liveliness of thearcheologia postmedievale, in its founding mission of giving a reference to heritage ethics even to the most recent centuries, in which the fate of archaeological documents is still too often left to a value judgment based on chronologies and not on the actual interest of the remains. Twelve essays dealing with underwater archeology and commerce, maritime and terrestrial Conflict archeology, funerary archeology, classical themes of British Post-Medieval Archeology, such as the archeology of smoking pipes, innovative themes such as the archeology of today's marginality, archeologia dell’architettura and the settlement. In addition, sixty files of excavations and territorial surveys, distributed over twelve regions, provide a good monitoring of the most recent research of archeologia postmedievale active in Italy. The central role played by investigations on submerged wrecks - for thearcheologia postmedievale in its long duration - it is progressively consolidating, also thanks to the combination of underwater investigations with targeted archival research that allow the precise identification of specific shipwrecks, with wide repercussions of knowledge also for terrestrial archeology. In this issue, underwater archeology is present both in the section concerning the archeology of commerce (two wrecks) and in that of Conflict Archeology, with two wrecks dated 1715 and 1918. From the mouths of the port of Venice, a lugger dating back to between the 1860th and mid-XNUMXth centuries, has an interesting load of bricks, while the wreck of San Nicoletto refers to the Prussian brig Hellmuth, who came from England with a load of carbon coke and was shipwrecked in the XNUMX at the entrance to the port of Venice. The Venetian ship "Croce Rossa" was a fighting liner and therefore of a public nature. Sunk in 1715 at the mouth of the port of Malamocco and initially known as the "wreck of the guns", it was the subject of a very accurate archival research, which made it possible to relate the initials engraved on the guns with the same, recorded in the minutes drawn up. in 1716. Furthermore, research on the imposing wreck of the Austro-Hungarian battleship Szent Istvan (Santo Stefano), sunk on 10 June 1918, touches a decisive episode for the final fate of the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the Great War. The volume discusses the archeology of ceramic pipes in Tuscany, numismatic finds in the territory of the Alban Hills, with an interpretative perspective of the economic and cultural processes that these finds represent. The Savoyard field fortifications of Val Maira highlight the excellent level of conservation of entire Alpine landscapes modeled in the XNUMXs in the form of real military machines, while the theme of social marginality and segregation in the ghettos of contemporary immigrant agricultural laborers del Tavoliere deals with an archeology of the present in close connection with sociology, anthropology, oral history and ethnography. The discovery and excavation of the Jewish cemetery (1393-1569) in Bologna allow to discuss the spatial organization of the cemetery, the arrangement of the burials, the finds, up to the relationship with the current Bolognese Jewish community. And again funerary archeology in the Ragusa area, with chapels, burials, funerary monuments, body treatment practices, a heritage compromised by the numerous earthquakes, in particular that of 1693, which in any case represents a caesura also for numerous settlements in south-eastern Sicily. , which were abandoned following this event. A fork of attention spanning five centuries, according to the line that has always been held by the journal regarding the rejection of a final chronological caesura that was dictated by a priori or academically identified fences, in favor instead of a condition identified in the use of the methodologies of archaeological research .