Artículos de revistas sobre el tema "German House decoration"

"Friedrich Balthes was a young master of the national architectural style of the Transylvanian Saxons. Being a victim of the First World War (he died at the age of only 32, on the Serbian front, in 1914), he was almost completely forgotten during the century. Only the architectural monuments created at the beginning of the 20th century, of a remarkable modernity, are left behind by Balthes. These works are part of the German architectural movement, which was the forerunner of modern and also traditionalist architecture of the 20s of last century. Balthes designed many buildings in the national style of the Transylvanian Saxons: a style brought from Germany, and adapted to the Transylvanian cultural landscape. He was a multi-talented personality, also writing various studies and essays on the architectural art, on the cityscape, the culture of housing, interior art, folk art, the maintenance of rural art, the color in architecture and the decoration of the streets with plants, about the old frescoes of the evangelical chirch in Cisnădie and on many other subjects. As a self-confident Transylvanian Saxon intellectual, Balthes published his articles with the purpose to educate his nation for the new cultural ideas of his time. The following study aims to present a sketch of the multidisciplinary legacy of this remarcable artist, by showing some examples of his work. One of Balthes´ many architectural creations we presented herewith the evangelical school and parish house in Bruiu (built between 1912 and 1914), wich is a good example of the architects idea of a new style, whitch overrcomes art nouveau. It was a Transylvanian Saxon national architecture, very modern for that period. It was a harmonious combination of the Transylvanian Saxon vernacular motives, with elements inspired by the German Reformarchitektur, promoted by architect and architecture theorist Hermann Muthesius. Keywords: Art History, Architecture History, Transylvanian Saxons, Reform 1900‒1914, History 1900‒1914"

The research is based on the analysis of the 1821 detailed description of the premises of the apartment of the Moscow University professor Heim, who had just passed away. From 1781 Heim, who maintained ties with Germany, rose to professor and then to rector of the Moscow University. His home environment provides material for reconstruction of the life of a “Russian German”, a representative of academic culture (with its academic everyday life). According to the inventory, the rector’s apartment near Mokhovaya Street contains four living rooms, a kitchen and a stable (on the lower floor). The room-by-room description of furniture, clothing, utensils and other household items, and information on the composition of the home library embody the anthropological characteristics of the professor’s subculture. The author of the article views a home item as a tangle of cultural practices, and the structure of the home and its contents as an embodiment of the professor’s way of life. The list of numerous kitchen utensils, a carriage, a droshky and several sets of harness in the stable indicate the complete autonomy of existence, and a large number of chairs and dining utensils allows us to speak about a certain degree of the publicity of the space. A set of clothes (casual and ceremonial), orders, letters of loan and idle money indicate a relatively high material and social status of Heim, demonstrate prosperity, the desire for domestic convenience of a “private man”. But the restrained style of apartment decoration, lots of desks, books, measuring instruments and stationery (attributes of routine academic writing) speak of the priority of the professor’s intellectual pursuits at home. The material of the inventory, considered against historical and cultural background, allows us to expand our views on understudied subculture of university professors as a specific layer of “middle-class people”, Russian intellectual elite of the late 18th and the early 19th centuries.

Կոստանդնուպոլսում 1705 թ. հրատարակվում է հայատառ երկրորդ տպագիր «Աստվածաշունչ» մատյանը: Տպագրիչն էր Ոսկան Երևանցու աշակերտ Պետրոս Լատինացին: Վերջինիս ջանքերով էլ հավանաբար Ոսկանյան տպարանի գույքը տեղափոխվել էր Կոստանդնուպոլիս: Լատինացու հրատարակությունները սակավ են, որոնց մեջ իր կարևորությամբ և գեղարվեստական հարդարանքով առանձնանում է 1705 թ. պատկերազարդ Աստվածաշունչը: Այն բաղկացած է Հին և Նոր Կտակարաններից և բնագրային առումով Ոսկանյան Աստվածաշնչի կրկնությունն է: Լատինացու Աստվածաշնչի գեղարվեստական ձևավորումը բաղկացած է փորագիր զարդանախշերից, ինչպես նաև թեմատիկ, բնագրի հետ համադրված փորագրապատկերներից: Զարդանախշերի կապը ձեռագրարվեստի զարդարուն տարրերի հետ տակավին սերտ է, սակայն այդ ամենի հետ կան նաև այնպիսիք, որոնք բնորոշ են միայն եվրոպական գրքարվեստի սկզբունքներին: Ինչ վերաբերում է թեմատիկ փորագրա-պատկերներին, ապա դրանց ստեղծման համար հիմք են ծառայել Ոսկան Երևանցու Աստվածաշնչում զետեղված Հին և Նոր Կտակարանների փորագրապատկերների տպատախտակները, որոնց հեղինակն է ծագումով գերմանացի, Հոլանդիայում իր գործունեությունը ծավալած փորագրիչ-նկարիչ Քրիստոֆել վան Զիխեմը: Պետրոս Լատինացու Աստվածաշունչը թեև մեծավ մասամբ Ոսկանյան Աստվածաշնչի կրկնությունն էր թե՛ բնագրային, թե՛ գեղարվեստական հարդարանքի տեսանկյունից, այնուամենայնիվ, կարևոր քայլ էր հայ գրատպության զարգացման գործում: В 1705 г. в Константинополе учеником Воскана Ереванци Петросом Латинаци была издана вторая армяноязычная «Библия». Вероятно, именно благодаря усилиям Петроса Латинаци весь инвентарь типографии Восканян был перевезен в Константинополь. Издания, осуществленные Петросом Латинаци, немногочисленны, среди них по своей важности и художественному оформлению можно выделить вышеупомянутую красочно иллюстрированную Библию с Ветхим и Новым Заветом, являвшую собой переиздание Библии Восканян. Художественное оформление Библии Латинаци включает в себя гравированные декоративные элементы, равно как и соответствующие оригиналу тематические гравюры. Очевидна связь между орнаментальными элементами издания и элементами декора, которые присутствуют в рукописном искусстве, но вместе с тем есть и такие орнаментальные узоры, которые характерны лишь для европейского книжного искусства. Что же касается тематических гравюр, то основой для их создания послужили печатные платы Библии Воскана Ереванци, автором кото-рых является немецкий гравировщик – художник Кристоффель ван Зихем, развернувший деятельность в Голландии. Хотя это издание в целом является переизданием изданной Восканом Ереванци Библии как с точки зрения ориги-нального текста, так и художественного оформления, но в то же время оно явилось важным шагом в развитии армянского книгопечатания. The second Armenian printed Bible was published by Petros Latinatsi, Voskan Yere-vantsi’s pupil in 1705 in Constantinople. Due to the latter's efforts, the property of the Voskanian printing house was probably moved to Constantinople. The editions of Latinatsi are scarce, among which the illustrated Bible published in 1705 stands out with its richness and artistic decoration. It consists of the Old and New Testaments and is a replica of the original Voskanian Bible. The artistic decoration of the Latinatsi՛s Bible consists of engraved ornaments, and thematic engravings combined with the original. The connection of ornaments with the decorative elements of manuscript art is still close, but with all that there are those which are characteristic only of the principles of European book art. As for the thematic engravings, the basis for their creation was the printing boards of the Old and New Testament engravings in the Bible of Voskan Yerevantsi, which were created by Chris-topher van Sichem the Younger, a German-born engraver and painter based in the Netherlands. Although Latinatsi’s edition was largely a duplication of the Voskanian Bible, both in terms of original and artistic decoration, it was nevertheless an important step in the development of Armenian typography.

During the Renaissance and Mannerist periods, in most European countries the fashion for decorating walls with sgraffiti covered a large part of continent, from Portugal to Romania, and from Central Italy to the German countries and Poland. Its popularity in the middle part of Europe peaked in the 16th and 17th centuries. In many regions, sgraffito was the dominant method of decorating buildings. Sgraffito styles were differentiated by design, artistic level, local conditions and investor preferences. In many regions north of the Alps, sgraffito decorations were, on the one hand, a frequently used method of modernizing medieval buildings, and, on the other, a form of expressing views, often religious ones. Everywhere, however, they expressed supranational belonging to the world of a post-medieval, revival community. It was no different in Silesia, where the sgraffiti madness arrived, thanks to artists who came from the northern regions of Italy around 1540 and settled down until the middle of the next century. The research carried out by the author has proven that, for Silesia, sgraffito was an iconic sign of the architecture of that period. In this region, then belonging to the Habsburg Monarchy, sgraffito decorations covered a wide variety of architectural objects, from barns, walls, and gates to tenement houses, manors, castles, and churches. In the case of the latter, research has shown that temples in Gothic style are heavily decorated with sgraffiti, which should be considered a distinctive feature when compared to other regions. At the same time, it was found that the vast majority of them appeared in forms and themes known to us from other countries covered by the sgraffito fashion. The frame composition made in this technique and, most probably modeled directly on the template by S. Serlia (Tutte L’opere d’Architettura et Prospettiva) from 1619, should be considered as the Silesian contribution to the sgraffito heritage as well as oval bossages. While studying Silesian sgraffito, some local technological differences were also noticed. With the advent of the Baroque period, a large part of the sgraffito decoration was covered (and thus preserved) with a new, baroque decorative costume. We still discover them in the present while carrying out conservation works (sometimes multiple) on historic buildings. Many others, those constantly on display, have been restored to preserve their original shape, or have been reconstructed. Various and simultaneously modernized methods are used to implement these works. Their correct selection depends on in-depth knowledge of sgraffito (historical, artistic, technological and technical) and their regional specificity. It also depends on the constant exchange of experiences between all those dealing with sgraffito heritage.

The Former German Governor’s Residence in Qingdao was by far the most spectacular building in residential architectures on the German Colonial period. This article studied architectural art of the Former German Governor’s Residence from architectural plan layout, building facades decorating, building structures and materials, and made these three respects compare with the Chinese traditional residential architecture. The architectural plan layout was in common about separate house on the German Colonial period, it inherited the German romantic style of the traditional residential buildings since the 16th century; its facades kept different and changeful; but primary and secondary clear, gorgeous, lively and dignified. The architectural structure was brick stone and wood hybrid construction. In this eclectic style of the building could be seen Germany was one of the birthplaces of the Modern Movement, and it had begun to explore using modern materials and new technologies, but its architectural forms was still the old form.

Kelmscott Manor, the country home of William Morris, houses a remarkable collection of ceramics bearing a singular relationship to one of the most influential figures in Victorian cultural history. This study of Kelmscott’s collection of German stoneware reveals new interpretations of its production history and fascinating insights into its significance for the cultural context of Morris’s work. Based on a complete catalogue, the paper examines the ensemble of approximately thirty pieces of eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Westerwald stoneware, or grès de Flandres, as it was known to Morris and his contemporaries. The Kelmscott group is the largest collection of this material known from an English historic house and has a composite and well-documented provenance. Supplementary material provided as an online appendix contains a fully illustrated, descriptive catalogue.Westerwald pottery of the seventeenth century and earlier has been extensively studied, but its ceramics of the late eighteenth to nineteenth centuries have received little attention. Most accounts stress the simplification of vessel forms and ‘degeneration’ of decorative designs during this period, leading towards mass-production c 1900. This paper re-assesses later Westerwald output, drawing attention to a vernacular pottery tradition of significant interest in its own right. This paper suggests that it was this continuing tradition of vernacular production and its naturalistic, decorative schemes that attracted the interest of Morris throughout his adult life, from the Red House experiment to the heyday of Morris & Co. Examining his writing on creativity, the minor arts and labour, the paper interprets grès de Flandres as an expression of Morris’s idealisation of the relationship between labour and craft production.

The paper “From Ruins to the Decorative and Applied Arts Museum” reflects the complicated path passed by the outstanding monument, a pseudo-gothic style - mezzanine - “New Cavalry House”- designed by the architect of German origin - Albert Zaltzmann. Based on scientific research, the work presents content and functional loading possibilities for the new Decorative Applied Arts Museum building and its outer space. One of the main goals is to replace the Russian narrative with European content. The European-style architecture Museum, located in the centre of the popular Georgian Spa resort Borjomi, with displayed decorative and applied arts collections belonging to the royal family, will be interesting for all visitors. Accordingly, it will be in demand and profitable. It has been noted that the museum is of an extraordinary, unusual nature, and it stands out from the rest of the similar museum institutions in Georgia thanks to the peculiar architecture, content, and collections displayed here. The paper describes the mission of the future museum, its content, and the vital role it has to play in the context of educational and economic development, promoting the region and the whole country.

Among the decorative binding papers of the 18th century, brocade papers, so called because of their resemblance to expensive gold woven fabrics, can be recognized as particularly spectacular. The rich relief pattern, the combination of gold and silver lustre with a multi-coloured paper backing was the secret of their popularity in European countries for a whole century.The technique of paper gilding and embossing originated in the early 18th century in Augsburg. Subsequently, brocade papers were produced in various cities in Germany and mainly spread throughout Europe from there. Although brocade papers were also used by Russian masters, there are no special works about this binding material in the Russian historiography.The article is devoted to the description of the collection of brocade papers preserved as covers and forzats in Russian civil books of the 18th century in the collection of the Book Museum of the Russian State Library (RSL). The questions of terminology, production technology and systematization of brocade papers are considered. The main types of domestic publications characterized by the use of this material are calendars, published annually at the Academy of Sciences printing house in St. Petersburg, and descriptions of various celebrations, speeches “on occasion”, odes, “instructive words” and “reasonings”, produced by different printing houses and usually small in volume.The collection provides rich material for a more accurate understanding of the role of the printing house and the aesthetic preferences of the reading public in the external design of books in the period of the birth of bookbinding in Russia. Decorative binding papers are valuable not only for the researcher of old-printed books, librarian, collector or restorer, but also for the cultural historian in a broad sense, as content, stylistically and technologically they reflect general trends in the production of wallpapers, fabrics, furniture and trade packaging. On the basis of the description of the quantitative and qualitative composition of the collection of the RSL Book Museum a methodology of working with brocade papers is proposed, which can be applied to the collections of other fund holders as well.

The house which Immanuel Kant bought in Königsberg in 1783 has not survived, having been pulled down in the late nineteenth century. Likewise, hardly any of the great philosopher’s personal belongings have survived. Many pieces of furniture and household utensils were auctioned off after his death. So the Kant museum had few original exhibits from the Königsberg thinker’s house, and almost all these artefacts were lost during the Second World War. Today, digital technologies make it possible to present a virtual picture of the various rooms, reconstruct the decorations and furniture characteristic of a Prussian urban dwelling in late eighteenth — early nineteenth centuries. With the help of 3D modelling and historical sources a realistic model of Kant’s house has been created, showing both the exterior and the interior. In addition to the paucity of sources, the task was complicated by technical problems due to the need to recreate several rooms at one location simultaneously. Reconstruction draws on several gen­uine objects from Kant’s house, now kept at museums in Germany. Also available are written and visual sources showing the exterior of the house and mentioning some furniture items located in the living room and elsewhere in the structure. Now 3D reconstructions have been made of the house’s exterior and the urban environment, the anterooms on the ground and first floors, the lecture hall, kitchen, study, drawing room, bedroom, library and dining room.

The article concerns the final architectural and design activity of Hector Guimar (1867–1942), when he was forced to withdraw from his unique Guimar style. During this period, the sociopolitical and cultural life of Europe underwent fundamental changes. Bourgeois modernism was replaced by more laconic democratic styles (functionalism, constructivism, etc.). Not wanting to lose the professional orders, the French architect created projects with-out the former plastics and warmth. It is noted that before the World War II, he was mainly engaged in the design of multistorey residential buildings, occasionally, in decorative design of their facades and interiors, elements of technical equipment. His architectural projects of that period are residential complexes on Rue Jean de la Fontaine and Rue Agar (1910–1912), House Tremois on Rue François Millet (1909–1910), synagogue building Agoudas Hakehilos on Rue Pavee (1913–1914). Briefly considered the vicissitudes of his life after his departure to the United States (1938).

Tessenow é noto in Italia per la pubblicazione in italiano di Osservazioni elementari sul costruire. Un lavoro accurato e necessario di curatela e ricostruzione critica aggiorna ora la nostra conoscenza dell’architetto tedesco ed è stato condotto da Martin Boesch per l’Accademia di Architettura della Svizzera italiana. Heinrich Tessenow é considerato uno dei più significativi architetti tedeschi dei primi decenni del novecento ed é usualmente associati a progetti per piccole case operaie, per gli artigiani e per la piccola borghesia che, grazie alle loro forme semplici e squadrate, all’assenza di decorazioni e alle proporzioni discretamente controllate, segnano il paesaggio per la loro discreta eppure marcata presenza. Tessenow is known in Italy for the Italian version of Hausbau und dergleichen. An accurate and necessary work of editing and critical reconstruction which has updated our knowledge of the German architect was conducted by Martin Boesch for the Academy of Architecture of the University of Italian Switzerland. Heinrich Tessenow is considered one of the most significant German architects of the early decades of the 20th century and is usually associated with designs of small houses for workers, artisans, and the petite bourgeoisie which, through their simple, square forms, lack of decoration, and carefully controlled proportions, mark the landscape with their discreet yet distinctive presence.

Forming one of the most important branches of our culture and traditional arts, embroidery was born by sewing in a decorative way and it is worth mentioning that it is as early as humanity. Embroidered clothing on the sculptures excavated and the narration that the daughter of Noah in Hebrew history wears an embroidered belt shows that this branch of art goes back to earlier times. Hand embroidery, which is the products of intelligence, skill and subtle wit, has reached the current time by preserving its value. Out of a great many embroidery techniques reaching large public masses, a technique called ‘German Embroidery’ was encountered in the researches carried out in the city of Kahramanmaras and its towns in the years 2013–2014. According to the information obtained from the source people in the research carried out in the city of Kahramanmaras, German Embroidery dating back to earlier times is not produced today; however, we are likely to find pillows, clothes and dresses embroidered with German Embroidery in houses. In the current paper, embroidery samples were determined in order to unveil this technique that was embroidered on any kind of cloth with a plain surface and it was aimed to make the embroidery alive and to promote it by analysing the way of embroidering. Keywords: Embroidery, ornament, technique, traditional.

Abstract In the later Middle Ages, traveling to sacred places and foreign courts promised honor, not least to residents of cities keen to advance their status within and beyond urban society. But the symbolic capital promised by travel had to be rendered recognizable. To this end, the inhabitants of German-speaking cities also relied on coats of arms and badges of chivalric orders, as this essay will show by looking at travel accounts, visual sources, and material remains. Analogous to noble customs, these signs were meant to record the presence of townsmen abroad and to commemorate their achievements as travelers once back in their hometowns. From town houses and church decorations to conspicuous dress, the urban space was filled with visual reminders of spatial mobility displayed for the purpose of social mobility. As it becomes clear that contemporaries were acutely aware of travelers’ ambitions, the heraldic and para-heraldic communication of travel emerges as a prominent and at times contested element of urban visual and material culture.

Most of the homes in the Budzhak region are interesting historical and architectural sites and deserve attention. Considering their current state, one can see the manifestation of a number of architectural features: well-established national traditions, authorship of folk craftsmen, the influence of academic art, historical architectural styles (Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Classicism, Modernist), as well as the features of serial time. The unifying factor is, on the one hand, the similarity of ideological and creative thoughts and the desire of folk craftsmen to give a compositional and stylistic integrity to the whole object-space environment of the manor (in particular, in the exterior and interior of a dwelling house), on the other-ethnic identity manifests itself perfectly recognizable through ornamental motifs and forms by elements of certain national symbols. The article deals with the national features of the traditional residential architecture of Budzhak Ukrainians, Russians, Bulgarians, Romanians, Moldavians, Gagauzians, Germans, selected for research as the most numerous in the national composition of Budzhak (southern Bessarabia) according to the population censuses from 1822 to 2001. Budzhak's national composition is presented in pie charts. The national identity of the compositional features and decorative and artistic means of expressing the dwellings of Budzhak, in particular its central regions (Saratov and Tatarbunar regions of Odessa region) of the given ethnic groups of the population is revealed. In general, the main large volumes and forms of traditional residential buildings are the construction of walls and roofs. Picturesque volumetric compositions acquire buildings with a combined type of roof that is used to cover the intersecting several volumes of the building, the kind with roofs with artistically decorated attic windows, located both in the plane of the roof slope and on the pediment of the main front. The subjects of detailed consideration and research are: ornamental-plastic decor made of cement, brick, lime, metal. Artistic carving -on wood and metal. Artistic forging, as a rule, has common compositional features with the architecture of the home and the estate as a whole. The entrance to the apartment house is decidedly representative and colorful enough. Borrowing and imitating natural counterparts (prototypes), folk craftsmen have created unique works that clearly reflect interethnic and religious-everyday contacts, professional borrowings, family traditions and the achievements of modern times.Photographic examples of dwellings typical of nationality (the second half of the XIX –the second half of the twentieth century) are given. The collected photos are dated 2015, 2017, 2018. Numerous photo materials of the respective states were considered by the author for the identification of houses by nationality: Ukraine, Russia, Moldavia, ATO Gagauzia, Romania, Germany, Bulgaria. The resulting comparative tables and schemes of ethnic influences are quite large in volume and can therefore be illustrated and analyzed in the next article by the author. However, the features noted briefly atthis stage made it possible to draw some conclusions, which made it possible to distinguish the typical residential homes of the studied national groups from the vast number of mixed types characteristic of the South of Ukraine as a historical and ethnographic region as a whole. The distinctive features of the dwellings of Budzhak Ukrainians, Russians, Bulgarians, Romanians, Moldavians, Gagauzians, Germans are considered and detailed, places of decorative and color accents in the general composition of estates are revealed. Tradition is a form of translation of social experience in the philosophical sense. This or that type of stage borrowing of any object that evolves, including culture, is possible provided that the old goes into the new and works in it productively. Tradition acquires the features of stability when it becomes flexible, dynamic, able to absorb the best qualities of artistic cultures of other nations and groups, and also as a result of self-development. A comprehensive study of the featuresof traditional residential architecture provides the basis for the scientific substantiation of restoration works and the unveiling of the tourist potential of Budzhak. Taking into account the multifaceted architectural forms of residential objects, both geographical and sociocultural, it is possible to identify not only the visual and morphological features of traditional residential buildings of different ethnic groups, but also the semantic structure of the image of traditional architecture, which meansto develop certain techniques for the use of ethnic styles. houses for the future. The obtained factual material of this scientific article can be implemented in a wide range of architectural and design activities, as well as cultural, ethno-cultural and art-science practices.

Tile production in the Danish Middle Ages and RenaissanceEveryday life in the Renaissance and Early Modern times has long been a neglected area in archaeology and much evidence has been lost. When the Department of Medieval Archaeology at the University of Aarhus, Moesgård added Renaissance Studies to the teaching curriculum in 2005, this provided an opportunity, together with new Danish museum legislation, to redress this situation.In the Renaissance, fundamental changes took place in housing, due in part to the introduction of the tile stove as a “bilægger”, i.e. a stove fed from an adjacent room. This provided an opportunity for the creation of a private, comfortable living room. In rural areas, however, the tile stove was also seen in direct association with a bread oven or as a smoke oven. Among the upper echelons of society – royalty, the Church and the aristocracy, with their strong links to European culture south of the Baltic – the tile stove became known as early as the 13th century. The earliest evidence of this is from the Cistercian Monastery at Sorø. Here, sherds have been found ofhandmoulded deep beaker-shaped vessel tiles. The outer surfaces of these were decorated with wavy lines and encircling grooves, as seen on typical 13th century Baltic-ware pottery from Zealand (fig. 1). When built into an oven, the decoration would not have been visible (fig. 2). From the episcopal/royal castles of Søborg and Gurre there are thrown, glazed beaker-shaped vessel tiles from the 14th century (fig. 3). The handmade, unglazed vessel tiles with a square rim from the royal castle ofVordingborg are broader and shallower (fig. 4); on some the base is rounded. Similar tiles were manufactured as late as the 19th century as “jydepotter”, i.e. black pots from Jutland (fig. 5). In the houses of wealthier citizens, such as Kragsnap’s House in Nykøbing Falster and Branda Huset in Helsingborg in Scania, there were stoves constructed of Late Gothic deep vessel tiles with specially formed openings (fig. 6). At the beginning of the 16th century, these developed into a green glazed, relatively shallow turned vessel tile with a reinforced rim, often with a flower or several concentric circles at the base. This type continued up into the 17th century (fig. 7). In terms of the skill needed in their firing and glazing, all these various vessel tiles were consistent with the abilities of a local potter and they are probably all of domestic origin, modelled on foreign examples.From Late Medieval times, there are imported concave panel and niche tiles, such as Den grønne sten fra Nielstrup and archaeological examples from Vridsløsemagle, Ribe and Gurre. Most of them carry a religious, Catholic message. However, two fragments of matrixes for concave panel tiles, dated to around 1500 and found in Aalborg, bear witness to an early production of moulded stove tiles in Denmark (fig. 8).With the Reformation, relations to Protestant Germany via Kings Christian III and Frederik II were strengthened. Danish students in Wittenberg and Greifswald and itinerant German craftsmen brought with them new furnishing traditions to Denmark. The tile stove became commonplace. The heyday of these stoves began around 1550 when domestic production became profitable. German potters settled in Denmark, bringing with them their moulds and their expertise, also as stove fitters. Production began of concave, quadrangular and rectangular panel tiles bearing images with a religious or political message. On the reverse they had a rumpe, a shallow funnel-shaped protrusion, which had an important function when fitting the tiles to form the stove.From around 1600, the tile stove was gradually replaced by the iron stove, although the latter did retain for some time an upper tower-like section clad in rectangular tiles. Initially, iron stoves were imported from Germany, but with the introduction of a Danish protectionist policy in the 1640s, production was started in Norway.Despite local production in the 16th century, imports of stove tiles and matrixes increased. Sometimes the origin of these can be determined on the basis of the ware; greyish-white Halle clay, for example, indicating Central Germany. Some polychrome stove tiles can be identified as imports from the Upper Weser area. No workshops producing polychrome stove tiles have been demonstrated in Denmark. Even though a workshop in Næstved was familiar with tin glaze and metallic-oxide colours, only polychrome floor tiles were produced there.Often the date of the stove tiles, or more correctly of the patrixes, can be determined on the basis of the motif and the graphic source on which it is modelled.For instance, the patrix for a matrix found in Copenhagen bearing the picture of HERSI HANS must have been carved after 1547, when he lost his title as Elector of Saxony, and prior to his death in 1554. On a stove tile modelled on a medal struck on his appointment in 1532 and attributed to Matthes Gebel, he is referred to as Johann Friedrich Kurfürst. Patrixes, and probably also most matrixes, were imported, but the origin of a patrix for the Fortuna stove tile from Næstved from 1585, attributed to Abel Schroder the Elder, is perhaps open to discussion (fig. 9). A patrix for a medallion tile from about 1550-80 from Århus (fig. 15), and patrix frames and a mould for patrix frames for arcade tiles from about 1600 from Flensburg (fig. 19), are the only definite indications we have oflocal production. Re-working of newly-made matrixes, pirate copies and potters’ botching also occurred (figs. 16, 17 and 21). On the basis of this, and inspired by Der Hafner from Jost Ammen’s Ständebuch (fig. 12), the author has experimented with the production of matrixes and stove tiles (figs. 10 and 11). Accounts are then given of seven localities where traces of stove-tile production have been found. Potters’ kilns have been excavated in Lund and Aalborg, (figs. 13 and 14). In Århus, there were layers containing rejects, kiln shelves and matrixes (fig. 15). In Næstved, deposits have been excavated containing rejects which include tiles bearing Fortuna and the West Zealand version of Judith (figs. 18.4 and 16). Clay pits backfilled with rejects from the workshop have also been discovered there. In Slagelse, an area has been excavated containing workshop refuse in the form of old or broken matrixes, reject stove tiles, kiln shelves and tools (figs. l7 and 18). In Flensburg, a potter’s workshop was excavated, revealing a great number of tiles, a few patrix frames and more than 90 matrixes, of which several are clear evidence of potters’ botching (figs. 19, 20 and 21). Impressions of matrixes from this workshop were used by the bell-caster Michel Bibler as ornamentation on bronze fonts for churches in Flensburg and Eckernförde (fig. 22). In Holbæk, layers containing rejects and matrixes from a potter’s workshop in the neighbourhood have been located. A rectangular stowe tile from 1611, showing the upper body of a lute-playing prince, was produced in a matrix trixwith a two-piece picture area. The upper part of this was used for a stove tile in Slagelse, but in a different frame (fig. 18.6). All the workshops investigated proved to belong to the second half of the 16th century, with the main weight of activity around 1600. From Køge, however, there are matrixes bearing the inscription 1662MB on the reverse. These indicate an active workshop there in the late 17th century, (fig. 23). Several of the workshops were located in association with a demolished ecclesiastical institution where the immediate area had apparently been assigned to workshops carrying out hazardous activities using fire, such as potteries and bell-casters. Finally, research results obtained over several years are presented and there is a discussion of the possibility of more detailed examination and recording to demonstrate the regionality of the individual stove-tile types and perhaps locate individual workshops. More recent scientific methods for the identification of clay types might make it possible to determine their provenance, which would be of crucial importance. Formal collaboration with countries south of and around the Baltic would probably be able to demonstrate trade routes and cultural links and the origin and distribution of stove tiles and matrixes. Closer collaboration between scientists, historians and archaeologists is strongly recommended.Ole KristiansenSlagelse

The paper examines the painting by K. Petrov-Vodkin “Bathing of the Red Horse”, its reflection and artistic refraction in poetic texts. The study opens with describing the artistic image of the horse in world mythology, religions, folklore, art, world and domestic literature. The horse is one of the most mythologized animals: it is the sun-horse, the fire-horse, a symbol of death and resurrection, a symbol of male power, the embodiment of a connection with the supernatural world. The cult of the horse underlies various amulets, for example, in the decoration of a Russian hut, crowned with a horse, in amulets with the image of a horse's head, in relation to a horseshoe as a symbol of happiness in home, etc. The painting “Bathing the Red Horse” was exhibited in 1912. Until now, the meaning of this canvas is not completely clear, so that the picture has many readings and interpretations. The horse`s red color specifically caused various disputes. After the revolution of 1917, this powerful red horse was perceived as a symbol of revolution, a symbol of change. In this sense, the picture is truly prophetic: very soon the whole world will turn red with the First World War, the revolution, fascism in Germany, and the Second World War. Four horsemen of the Apocalypse raced hard through the 20th century. The horse is a symbol of nature, of the huge world surrounding man, unpredictable, elemental, scary and strong in its own way. Red horse — The Sun Horse, a symbol of male strength, hybrid of a horse and a bird gives rise to the hope that he will not throw a teenage boy to the ground and crush him, but on the contrary, with all his strength, endurance, patience, will help him and carry the boy to the bright side of life. It became a kind of response to the mood of decadence and hopelessness among the Russian intelligentsia of the early twentieth century. As the paper shows, in poetic texts one may also come across a different understanding of the picture (personification of a happy childhood, modern Russia, symbol of a better time to come, etc.).

Zgierz, a town located in the central part of the Łódź Province, has a unique urban complex in the form of a craftsmen’s town built from scratch in the first half of the 19th century. This was a result of a settlement operation carried out in Congress Poland to boost the economy of the newly created state. The settlers were mostly cloth makers of Polish and German descent, primarily from the territory of the Prussian Partition. Regular arrangement, with symmetrical streets and a market square in the middle, on a high river bank, went hand in hand with aesthetic and functional late classical architecture, which is why this centre can be called a Biedermeier town. Even though durable materials were preferred, most houses that have survived are made of wood, and yet decorative elements can still be seen on many of them. Today, the houses, divided into numerous flats and inhabited by qualifying occupiers, are used contrary to their original purpose and inappropriately for their status. So far, two attempts to revitalise the area in question have been made. In consequence, the Town of Weavers Culture Park was established, seven of the houses were renovated, and fragments of two streets were restored to their former appearance. The paper presents the past and present situation of the historic development of the New Town considering its social context, and attempts to summarise the revitalisation activities performed to date.

AbstractIn 1623 the Lutherans formed a community in Gouda. They appointed a minister, Clemens Bijleveld from Essen, and held their services in private houses at first. In 1640 'Dc Drie Tafelkaarsen', a house on the Lage Gouwe, was converted into a permanent church for them. Thanks to the Groot Protocol, in which the minutes of the church administration were recorded from this donation until the end of the eighteenth century, it is possible to reconstruct the history of the community. The manuscript also documents important gifts of works of art and church furnishings. In 1642 and 1643 seven large paintings were donated. As we know, Luther did not object to depictions which served to illustrate the Word of God as preached in the sermon. The Dutch Lutheran churches, although more austerely furnished than, say, their German or Norwegian counterparts, were certainly more richly decorated than they are today. The Lutheran church in Leiden houses the most intact ensemble of works of art. Of the seven aforementioned paintings in Gouda, one was donat ed by the preacher himself. It is by the Gouda painter Jan Duif, who depicted Bijleveld as a shepherd (fin. I). The iconography and the biblical captions show that he was presenting himself as a follower of Christ in his quality of a teacher. Two figures in the background, likewise gowned, might be Bijleveld's successors: his nephew (minister from 1655 to 1693) and his nephew's son, both of whom were called Clemens Bijleveld. They were probably added to the panel after the latter's premature death in 1694. The other six paintings were donated bv members of the community and churchwardens. In some of them the donors can be identified with characters in the illustrated episodes from the bible. From the spinsters of the parish came a work depicting the parable of the wise and foolish virgins; the churchwardens, evidently seeing themselves in the guise of the apostles, gave a pedilavium. The widow Hester Claes van Hamborg donated a painting of Simon in the Temple (in which the widow Anna figures prominently), and Catharina Gerdss Rijneveld, probably also widowed, gave Elijah and the widow of Zarephath. The unmarried men of the community presented a painting with a more general subject, the Last Judgment, perhaps intended to be hung above the pulpit. The wealthy Maria Tams gave a work described as 'cen taeffereel of bort van de christ. kercke' la scene or panel of the Christian church]. Exactly what it depicted is unclear. The same Maria Tams was a generous donor of church furniture. She presented a brass chandelier, two brass lecterns (fig. 4), a bible with silver fittings and a clock to remind the preacher of the limited time allotted to his sermon. Important gifts of ecclesiastical silver were made from 1655 on. The most striking items are an octagonal font of 1657 (fig. 5) and a Communion cup of 1661 (fig. 6), both paid for by the proceeds of a collection held among the unmarried men and women of the parish. The decorations on the font include a depiction of Christ as the Good Shepherd. There is also shepherd on the lid of the Communion cup. This element (in view, too, of the indication of the shepherd 'als 't wapen van de kerk' [the church arms] in the Groot Protocol) came to occupy a special place in the imagery of the Lutheran community. More space was required for the growing congregation, In 1680 there was an opportunity to purchase from the municipal council St. Joostenkapel, a mediaeval chapel used as a storeroom at the time. The building, situated on the river Gouwe which flows through the old town centre, was ready for the inaugural service in 1682. It was given ten staincd-glass windows, the work of the Gouda glass painter Willem Tomberg. The glass (along with six of the seven paintings) was sold during the course of renovations in 1838, but thanks to the later secretary of the community, D.J. van Vreumingen, who madc drawings of them and copied the inscriptions, we have an approximate idea of how they looked. Their original positions can also be reconstructed (fig. 13). The windows were largely executed in grisaille, except for the second and eighth, which were more colourful. The seven side-windows with scenes from the life of Christ and the Passion (figs. 8-11) were presented by the minister, his wife and other leading members of the community. The inscriptions on these windows referred to the bible passages they illustrated and to the names of the donors. The three windows at the front were donated by the Gouda municipal council (window 10, fig. 12) and the sympathetic Lutheran communities of Leiden and Essen (windows 8 and 9, figs. 11 and 12). The depiction on the window from Leiden was a popular Lutheran theme: John's vision on Patmos. The candle-stick featuring in this vision was a symbol (as in a print of 1637, for instance) for the Augsburg Confession, on which the Lutheran church was founded. In the eighteenth century occasional additions were made to the inventory, but the nineteenth century was a period of growing austerity. However, the Groot Protocol and Van Vreumingen's notes facilitate the reconstruction of the seventeenth-century interior to a large extent. The iconography of the works of art collected in the course of the years underlined the community's endeavour, in following the teachings of its earthly shepherd, to live according to the Holy Word.

Бременская улица Бондарей (Бёттхерштрассе, нем. Böttcherstraße) - уникальный пример обновления средневековой улицы, превращенной в яркое архитектурно-художественное произведение 1920-1930-х гг., воплотившее буквально все приемы «средового» подхода к реконструкции городской застройки, который сформировался в 1970-е гг. Все здания улицы воспроизводят застройку средневекового ганзейского города и дополнены произведениями декоративно-прикладного искусства или скульптуры, несущими не только эстетическую, но и символическую нагрузку, обусловленную общим замыслом бременского торговца кофе Людвига Розелиуса, который предполагал создать в городе новую культурную достопримечательность. Над проектами и постройками по его заказу работали архитекторы А. Рунге и Э. Скотланд, создавшие стилизованные дома, органично вписанные в старый город, а также выдающийся скульптор и архитектор Бернгардт Хётгер (1874-1949). Его постройки в начале и в конце улицы, ключевые для замысла Розелиуса, - музей художницы П. Модерзон-Беккер и дом «Атлантис» - совершенно современные и оригинальные по символике и форме. Со стороны Рыночной площади начало улицы обозначал полный динамики позолоченный барельеф Хётгера «Тот, кто приносит свет». Большинство скульптур на улице и в прилегающих двориках также принадлежит ему. Все постройки выполнены в кирпиче, причем кирпичные поверхности стен построек Хётгера превращены в абстрактные рельефы, придающие им оригинальность и очевидную современность, близкую к эстетике немецкого экспрессионизма и ар-деко. В новых и перестроенных домах XVI в. расположились три музея, лавки, рестораны, галерея, казино и театр.Восстановление улицы после бомбардировок союзников во время Второй мировой войны закончилось в 1954 г. Фасады и интерьеры некоторых зданий (в том числе дома «Атлантис») были модернизированы. Сегодня улица Бондарей представляет собой поучительный пример модернизации исторической городской застройки. The Cooperstreet (Böttcherstraße) in Bremen is a unique example of updating the medieval streets to transform them into a vivid architectural work of art in the 1920-1930s, that anticipated literally all methods of “environ-mental” approach of the reconstruction of urban development, carried out in the 1970s. All the street buildings reproduce the buildings of the medieval Hanseatic city and are complemented by works of decorative and applied art or sculpture, carrying not only aesthetic but also a symbolic load, due to the General idea, owned by the Bremen coffee merchant Ludwig Roselius, who intended to create a new cultural attraction in the city. The architects A. Runge and E. Scotland worked on the projects and buildings on Roselius’order, creating stylized houses, organically inscribed in the old city. So did the outstanding sculptor and architect Bernhard Hoetger (1874-1949). His buildings at the beginning and at the end of the street (the key ones according to Roselius’ plan) - the Museum of the artist P. Moderzon-Becker and Atlantis house - are completely modern and original in symbolism and form. On the side of the Market square, the street was marked by a dynamic gilded bas-relief of Hoetger’s “The one who brings light”. Most of the sculptures on the street and in the surrounding courtyards also belong to him. All the buildings are made of brick, and the brick surfaces of the walls of Hoetger’s buildings are turned into abstract reliefs, giving them originality and obvious modernity, close to the aesthetics of German expressionism and Art Deco. There are three museums, shops, restaurants, a gallery, a casino and a theater located in the new and rebuilt houses of the 16th century. The revitalization of the street after the Alied bombing of Bremen during World War II was completed in 1954. The facades and interiors of some buildings (including Atlantis house) have been modernized. Today, the Cooperstreet (Böttcherstraße) is an instructive example of the modernization of historical urban development.

The impression of the city is formed on the basis of its public spaces, which are also formed on the coastal zones. The expressive, beautiful and convenient public space of the coastal zone is the face of the city, its presentation. Professionally organized embankments for residents' promenades with bicycle routes, parks, boat gardens, zones for active and quiet recreation are the decoration of the city fabric. The possibility of access to water for all citizens, the prohibition of the construction of transit highways and industrial enterprises, the prohibition of landfills, the organization of fixed landscaped coastal protective strips are necessary components of the public development zone of the coastal areas of the city. Today, only 15% of the Dnipro shoreline within Kyiv can be considered generally accessible with an appropriate level of comfort. The transformation of the Dnieper embankment of the capital into a center of elite housing and a transport corridor is an impoverishment of the urban fabric, the loss of an important public space of Kyiv. River embankments in Kharkiv (Lopan, Kharkiv) are not architecturally organized public spaces, because unlike the Western European formation of embankments with parade facades, in Kharkiv, the backyards of warehouse and industrial zones traditionally extended onto the coastal areas. Primorsky Odessa is «faceless»: Primorsky Boulevard is narrow (the length of the boulevard is several hundred meters), the famous Potemkin Stairs lead «to nowhere» (they do not have direct access to the sea, but lead to the Maritime Station), the majestic building of the Opera House «turned away» from seas, adjacent water areas are occupied by port harbors. The experience of the urban planning organization of the coastal zones of Budapest, Bratislava, the Danube cities of Germany and the Slavic Embankment of Venice is a worthy example of coastal zones where ancient traditions and modernity are combined - from ancient buildings and historical monuments to modern art and hip festivals, active recreation in nature with cognitive cultural - historical and gastronomic tourism. Cities of Ukraine lack urban development of coastal zones as public spaces. The world experience of revitalization of urban coastal zones, its transformation into an active urban public space is an example of modern urban planning trends.

This article presents a new relative chronology for the Linearbandkeramik (LBK) of the Meuse basin. Divided into six main phases, the sequence is based on analysis of decorated ceramics from sixteen sites in Belgium and two sites in Holland. Eleven of the Belgian sites are located in Hesbaye, the province with the densest LBK settlement. The other five sites form an outlying group in Hainaut, a little over 100 km to the west. The two Dutch sites are located in southern Limburg, about 50 km north-east of Hesbaye. Fine-ware ceramics were coded for rim, main and intermediate decoration motifs, employing a classification system previously developed in work on the LBK in Lorraine, with particular attention paid to the various techniques used for impressed decoration. The new Meuse basin sequence was established using 165 assemblages containing at least eight decoration motifs, representing a total of 5 101 coded motifs. In a majority of cases, these assemblages were formed by grouping ceramics from lateral pits of houses. Correspondence analysis and hierarchical clustering were used to seriate the assemblages and to define phases and sub-phases. By comparing quantitative trends in decoration motifs, the new Meuse chronology can be synchronized with the Langweiler (Aldenhoven plateau), Lorraine and Seine basin LBK sequences, not only enabling a finer characterization of each regional style but also enhancing the view of interactions between the different groups in the study zone. During the early LBK, the period that sees the first settlements in Hesbaye and north Lorraine, the Flomborn style prevails throughout the Rhine basin. When this cultural entity breaks down, decoration evolves in each region in a different manner. In the middle LBK, the Langweiler area, Dutch Limburg and Belgium form a coherent complex, termed the Rhine-Meuse style, characterized by bands delimited by incised lines and filled with rows of point impressions, which is the majority decoration. In the Moselle basin, as in southern Hessia, the Main style prevails, predominately with bands filled with transverse, crossed or longitudinal incised lines, while in the Seine basin the Champagne region is closely linked in stylistic terms to southern Alsace. The late LBK sees further regional differences, notably with the appearance of the Leihgestern style on the upper course of the Lahn, in central Hessia, and the emergence of the Cologne style in the lower Rhine. The Belgian LBK remains relatively unaffected by these processes and maintains its originality by developing the excessively broad curvilinear motifs, composed of bands filled with incised lines or with multiple-tooth (three or more teeth) comb impressions. These motifs characterize the Omalian style. In north Lorraine, the Main style remains important but the region is now split into two, with on the right bank of the Moselle a strong presence of the Oberrhein-Pfalz style, whose epicentre lies in the Palatinate, and on the left bank a predominance of Omalian influences. These favoured stylistic relations are also reflected by the circulation of lithic raw materials : on the middle and lower course of the Moselle, most of the flint tool-kit is made from blades in Maastrichtian and Campanian flint, imported from the Meuse basin as semi-finished products. In return, one finds in Hainaut, on the site of Blicquy “ Petite Rosière”, Moselle-type motifs in noticeably higher numbers than attested elsewhere in Belgium. In the same period, on the upper course of the Moselle, the LBK of south Lorraine is linked to northern Alsace, while the Champagne LBK maintains its preferential relations with southern Alsace. Throughout the late LBK, there is only limited interaction and exchange between these two groups and the Meuse, lower Rhine and middle Moselle. In the final LBK, the situation is more difficult to assess because the documentation varies in quality from one region to another. At this time, the Langweiler area is apparently abandoned by the LBK, while the Omalian-style LBK still flourishes in Hesbaye and to a lesser extent in Hainaut. On the middle course of the Rhine, new cultural entities appear, with the emergence of the Hinkelstein group on the Neckar and in the northern Palatinate, and the development of the Plaidt style on the lower course of the Moselle, from the Rhine confluence up to Luxembourg. A particular style appears in north Lorraine, derived from the Oberrhein-Pfalz style, while in south Lorraine another original style develops, combining elements from southern and northern Alsace as well as from north Lorraine. In the Seine basin, the LBK spreads northwards and westwards out of Champagne, settling the middle and lower courses of the Aisne and Yonne. Here again, one sees the formation of an original style, characterized by T motifs and predominant use of two-or threetoothed combs, at a time when combs with four or more teeth are more frequently used on the Meuse. At this stage, there is virtually no exchange between the Meuse and the Seine, while the middle Moselle distances itself stylistically from the Omalian but still imports large numbers of blades in Campanian flint from Hesbaye. The preferential relations maintained between Belgium and north Lorraine during the LBK apparently cease in the terminal LBK stage. At this time, the Blicquy-Villeneuve-Saint-Germain (BVSG) culture appears in the Seine basin and in Belgium, possibly slightly earlier in Hainaut than in Hesbaye. The emergence and subsequent development of this new stylistic entity represents a significant change, because there is relatively little evidence for contacts between Belgium and the Seine basin during the previous LBK phases. In the terminal LBK, the Moselle basin finds a new supply of raw material in the Secondary and Tertiary flint of Champagne. The early BVSG site of Reims-Tinqueux shows that this “ economic” exchange is also accompanied by some stylistic interaction.

Ringkøbing in the Middle Ages The last 25 years have seen frequent archaeological excavations in the medieval market town of Ringkøbing. In this paper, the author presents the results and weighs them against the written and cartographic sources in order to gain an overall picture of the emergence and development of the town during the Middle Ages (Fig. 1). Over the years, several local historians have dealt with the history of Ringkøbing. They based their investigations exclusively on the few medieval sources referring to the town, however, and the main issues they concentrated on were the reason for the town being situated exactly there, the origin of its name, its age, and whether it had grown out of an earlier settlement or had been a planned construction. In the first known reference to Ringkøbing, the town is called “rennumkøpingh,” or “the town at Rindum” (Fig. 2). Rindum, or “rennum,” was the rural parish, which had transferred some of its land to the town. A town prospect from around 1677 depicts the small town as seen from the north, with ships anchored on the fjord (Fig. 3). It gives a good impression of the number of streets and their directions. Nevertheless, the first reliable survey of the market town is from the early 19th century (Fig. 4).Ringkøbing is situated on the northern coast of Ringkøbing Fjord, on the edge of a moraine hill, well protected against floods. From the early days, Ringkøbing’s existence was inextricably linked with the navigation conditions on the fjord. Geologists have pointed out that during the Middle Ages the present islands in the tidal area south of Blåvandshuk continued further north, to Bovbjerg. This row of islands is visible on a chart from the mid-16th century (Fig. 5). On the chart, one of the islands is called “Numit,” which is interpreted as “Nyminde,” or “the new mouth.” Huge floods during the 17th century started a major process of drifting of material from the north along the coast, and the channels between the islands sanded up. Just one channel remained navigable, but it moved southward and eventually closed up completely (Fig. 6), which was a disastrous development for Ringkøbing. Nevertheless, during the Middle Ages, ships could still pass unhindered from the sea into the fjord and to Ringkøbing, where they could trade and take in supplies and water.Ringkøbing is situated in an area which has been inhabited since the last Ice Age, and which was especially rich during the Iron Age. By the mid-13th century the area was divided into districts and parishes, and the market town sprouted up in the middle of a well functioning agricultural region. The first actual excavation took place in Ringkøbing in 1978, when the property of Vester Strandgade 14 was investigated by Ringkøbing Museum. An area measuring 44 square metres was examined, and the excavation revealed part of the medieval town (Fig. 7). At the bottom of the excavated area, several furrows observed in a 15 to 20-cm thick humus layer indicated that the area had been farmed right up until the beginning of the activities there in the medieval period. Of the two ditches registered in the area, the earlier one had been dug into the ploughed field, whereas the later ditch was situated approximately in the middle of the medieval culture layer (Fig. 8). Twenty-three post-holes were found, but unfortunately their relationships to each other could not be determined. An extensive layer with a 3.4-metre diameter turned out to be the remains of a well, the shaft of which had been built from granite boulders (Fig. 9). A small bronze buckle was found at the bottom of the well (Fig. 10), and several sherds of imported pottery from around 1300 were found in the filling around the well shaft.The layer sequence was visible in the walls, with the yellow-brown moraine gravel at the bottom, then the above-mentioned humus layer with furrows, and then the homogeneous, grey, medieval culture layer. Above this an earthen floor from the 17th century was visible in several places. The upper layer, with a thickness of c.60 cm, was modern.The medieval layer contained large amounts of pottery sherds, mainly from locally produced grey-brown globular vessels. The rim sherds were from two main pottery types, A and B. Type A, which constitutes the largest group, has the classical, almost S-shaped rim (Fig. 12), whereas type B is characterized by an outward-folded edge creating a flat inner rim (Fig. 13). Both types exist concurrently throughout the medieval culture layer.The glazed pottery sherds represent two types, locally produced earthenware (Fig. 14), and imported pottery. Both types were present in the Vester Strandgade excavation. Of the imported sherds, 39 are from green-glazed jugs with a “raspberry” decoration (Fig. 15). These jugs were produced in the Netherlands around 1300. Sherds from German stoneware found in the medieval layer date from the same time (Fig. 16).The Vester Strandgade excavation was followed by several large and small investigations in the town centre (Fig. 17). “Dyekjærs Have” contained several traces of medieval structures, for instance a large number of post-holes, some of which were from a small building. The pottery material was abundant and consisted mainly of sherds from greyish-brown globular vessels (Fig. 18), but there were also sherds from imported and locally manufactured jugs. Other important town excavations include that of Marens Maw’, where the numerous traces of medieval structure included a row of post-holes interpreted as the outer wall of a house, and the excavation of Øster Strandgade 4, which revealed a late medieval turf-built well (Fig. 19). The excavation of Bojsens Gård also gave interesting results. It was very close to the street, and in this area the medieval culture layer had a depth of up to 60 cm. A ditch dug into the ploughed medieval field represented the earliest activity on this spot. Several structural traces reflected a continuous settlement going back to the early days of the town. Here, too, sherds from globular vessels dominated, but glazed ceramics and stoneware were also represented. The written sources from the Middle Ages reveal nothing about the medieval appearance of the town. The archaeological excavations, on the other hand, have shown that the settlement consisted of houses made from posts dug into the ground, probably half-timbered constructions with wattle-and-daub outer walls, earthen floors, and thatched roofs. The archaeological excavations have also revealed that Ringkøbing sprang up on a ploughed field during the second half of the 13th century. There are no signs of any settlement prior to this, and it is most likely that the town was laid out all at once according to a fixed town plan. No building traces were found in the streets, on Torvet (the market square), on Kirkepladsen (the church square), or on Havnepladsen (the harbour square), and so these squares must have been planned as such from the beginning. The numerous grooves and ditches are interpreted as boundary markers made when the plots were first established. The earliest ones are dug into the ploughed field, and so they must indicate the very first land-registration of the town.In order to found the new market town, an oblong part of Rindum parish had to be confiscated, and the town was marked out in the western part of this as an area measuring approximately 550 by 250 metres (Fig. 20). The streets were laid out in the still existing regular network. There was no harbour, and the ships would anchor in the shallow water off the town. Goods were transported by barge or horse-drawn carriage.In the town centre the market square was laid out, and behind it the square by the church. Ringkøbing’s church is a small Gothic brick building from around 1400. The townsmen probably used the parish church in Rindum during the first 150 years.At the time when Ringkøbing was founded, the Crown was establishing several small coastal towns throughout the kingdom. There was a notable lack of towns along the west coast of Jutland, and the founding of Ringkøbing probably represents a wish to fill this vacuum. At the same time, it was a friendly gesture directed towards the merchants from Northwest Europe whose large merchant ships sailed along the west coast on their way to and from the major markets in the Baltic. It was in the king’s interest to control the trade in the country, as it enabled him to levy taxes and to oppose the Hanseatic League’s attempt to monopolise foreign trade.Life in medieval Ringkøbing was based on trade and crafts, and the king controlled both through his assignment of privileges. The first preserved trade licence concerning medieval Ringkøbing is from 1443, but that document is in fact a confirmation of a privilege previously granted.The archaeological excavations and the written sources have informed us that the town’s trade interests lay across the North Sea. The town’s own merchants travelled overseas, and foreign merchants passed through. Foreign goods such as glazed jugs, stoneware jugs, and woollen cloth were imported from the Netherlands, Flanders, and Germany. The sources also indicate that a hinterland reaching far into Jutland used Ringkøbing for disembarkation. After the Middle Ages, the sources describe Ringkøbing as a small town, at times rather poor, which often had to ask permission to postpone the tax payments for which it was liable. The earliest depictions and maps also give the impression of a small town taking up less space than it did during the Middle Ages (Fig. 21).It will be interesting to learn whether future excavations in Ringkøbing will radically change the picture of the town presented here.Helle HenningsenRingkøbing Museum Translated by Annette Lerche Trolle

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Kirkemosegård – a votive site with ornaments from the Early Germanic Iron AgeThe Kirkemosegård ornaments were recovered following a metal detector survey and subsequent archaeological investigations of the find site in a cultivated field with wet hollows at Spentrup, north of Randers (fig. 2). The archaeological investigations showed that the finds probably represent a votive deposit on the margin of a wetland area referred to on historical maps as Kirkemose (figs. 3‑4).The offering comprises a button-bow fibula, six scutiform and four circular pendants, all of gold (fig. 1). All the objects had been ploughed up and lay in the plough soil. The precise location where the gold objects had originally been buried could not be identified during the excavation, but careful recording of their distribution in the plough soil makes it possible to narrow down the area of their deposition. There is a concentration of finds roughly in the middle of the excavation trench, around which the other objects are distributed. It must be within this area that the ornaments were originally deposited (fig. 3).This article includes a detailed description of the individual ornaments. In general terms, the fibula can be described as a hollow construction of sheet gold with a stabilising clay core (fig. 10). The upper surface is decorated with filigree consisting of very small rings of miniature beaded wire soldered on to and covering the entire surface (figs. 5 and 11). Along the edges, slightly heavier beaded wire has been used as a frame. The fibula measures c. 8 cm in length.Gemstones and glass were mounted in cloisonné, in which the cells were formed of smooth gold bands. Some of the settings contain red stones, probably garnets, while others hold a yellowish-green fragmented mass, presumably degraded glass (figs. 6, 8, 9, 12). On the foot of the fibula there is a stylised fish-like bird and two stylised bird’s heads with curved beaks (fig. 13). The catch consisted of a silver pin construction (fig. 7).The four circular gold pendants have diameters of 1.19‑1.32 cm and a weight of c. 1.2‑2.1 g (fig. 14). They are constructed in openwork with three rings of smooth or beaded filigree wire forming an edge. The suspension loops consist of ribbed gold band. Three of the pendants have the same pretzel-shaped motif at their centre – a kind of scutiform figure. Two of the pendants have two of these figures and the third has three. Soldering traces indicate that there were also originally motifs at the centre of the fourth pendant.The six scutiform pendants can be divided up into two types, based on their size, method of manufacture and decoration. They do, however, possess common features. They all have a band-like ribbed suspension loop and are edged with beaded filigree wire. Moreover, at their sides, at the transition to the side-pieces, there are rings of filigree wire with bosses, two punched concentric circles or granulation spheres at their centre. This is interpreted as depicting the eye of an animal seen in profile. They probably represent bird’s heads, where the side-pieces represent a curved beak. The round eye and the hooked beak are typical of the early animal style of the Early Germanic Iron Age. They constitute mirror images about a vertical axis and there is thereby symmetry in their decoration.The three small crescent-shaped pendants measure 1.21‑1.23 cm at their broadest point and have a height of 1.18‑1.23 cm from the top of the suspension loop to the base. They weigh 0.65‑0.74 g. They were stamped using the same die and are decorated with filigree (figs. 15‑16).The three large crescent-shaped pendants have a width of 1.59‑1.65 cm at their broadest point, a height of c. 1.5 cm and a weight of 1.12‑1.82 g (fig. 17). They are individually decorated from the front with stamped circular patterns consisting of two concentric circles, pretzel-shapes – small representations of the form of these ornaments – and figures of eight in filigree as well as granulation in the form of individual gold beads.The pendants show obvious traces of use wear, evident in that the outer surface of the beaded wire has been worn smooth along the edge. The beaded relief is more distinct inside the suspension loops (fig. 18). Greater wear is also evident on each side of these loops than further down the sides. This wear was possibly caused by spacers in the form of beads or knots intended to hold the pendants apart (fig. 18). Several of the pendants have visible wear to the suspension loops, interpreted as being due to suspension on a string, plaited leather thong or chain.The Kirkemosegård ornaments were not found in a datable context and their age and origin has therefore been ascertained on the basis of a description and discussion of parallel finds.There are not many gold filigree fibulas of Kirkemosegård type, but examples are known from Skodborg in southern Jutland, Elsehoved in southeast Funen and Kitnæs near Roskilde Fjord. There are also fragments from Rytterbakken on Bornholm (fig. 19), Adslev near Aarhus and Nørre Tranders in Aalborg. On the basis of these parallels, the Kirkemosegård fibula is dated to the early 6th century AD. Filigree fibulas are only known from southern Scandinavia.There are several known examples of circular pendants resembling those from Kirkemosegård. This ornament type can take various forms, but basically consists of a garland of smooth or beaded ring with a beaded wire running around the inside and outside. In most cases there are three rings, but examples exist with two or four rings. The centre of the pendant can be open or decorated with two or three pretzel-shaped motifs, various forms of crosses and spiral motifs (figs. 20‑22). Apart from Denmark, this ornament type is also known from England, Norway, Sweden and southwest Germany. The circular pendants from Denmark are generally dated to the Early Germanic Iron Age.Scutiform pendants are considered to be of Roman origin and are known from the late 2nd century AD. Their occurrence extends over a longer period of time and in many respects they represent a very heterogeneous group of finds that, in addition to pendants, also includes hanging ornamental plates on hair pins, jingle-plates on horse harness and tack and belt ornaments. The scutiform pendants show contacts towards the southeast to the Black Sea area – links that extend at least as far back as for example the Brangstrup hoard found in southeast Funen that includes examples thought to have been manufactured in the 4th century AD in the Black Sea area. Scutiform pendants have a wide geographic distribution and long period of use, as there are also records from the 7th century in England.The execution of the ornaments, and motifs employed, show that they were probably manufactured in southern Scandinavia. Comparisons with the various parallel finds indicate that the Kirkemosegård ornaments should be dated to the early 6th century AD. These are ornaments that clearly are worn, showing that they were either heavily used by their owner or of considerable age when offered.On their own, these finds give only a very fragmentary picture of the local cultural landscape in the Iron Age. Settlement traces and graves (fig. 23) that have been investigated demonstrate that the area was populated at this time, but they provide no indication of the immediate presence of the social elite of which the Kirkemosegård hoard is a clear expression (fig. 24).Benita ClemmensenMuseum Østjylland

We’ll have trouble now!The Archaeological Society of Jutland was founded on Sunday, 11 March 1951. As with most projects with which P.V Glob was involved, this did not pass off without drama. Museum people and amateur archaeologists in large numbers appeared at the Museum of Natural History in Aarhus, which had placed rooms at our disposal. The notable dentist Holger Friis, the uncrowned king of Hjørring, was present, as was Dr Balslev from Aidt, Mr and Mrs Overgaard from Holstebro Museum, and the temperamental leader of Aalborg Historical Museum, Peter Riismøller, with a number of his disciples. The staff of the newly-founded Prehistoric Museum functioned as the hosts, except that one of them was missing: the instigator of the whole enterprise, Mr Glob. As the time for the meeting approached, a cold sweat broke out on the foreheads of the people present. Finally, just one minute before the meeting was to start, he arrived and mounted the platform. Everything then went as expected. An executive committee was elected after some discussion, laws were passed, and then suddenly Glob vanished again, only to materialise later in the museum, where he confided to us that his family, which included four children, had been enlarged by a daughter.That’s how the society was founded, and there is not much to add about this. However, a few words concerning the background of the society and its place in a larger context may be appropriate. A small piece of museum history is about to be unfolded.The story begins at the National Museum in the years immediately after World War II, at a time when the German occupation and its incidents were still terribly fresh in everyone’s memory. Therkel Mathiassen was managing what was then called the First Department, which covered the prehistoric periods.Although not sparkling with humour, he was a reliable and benevolent person. Number two in the order of precedence was Hans Christian Broholm, a more colourful personality – awesome as he walked down the corridors, with his massive proportions and a voice that sounded like thunder when nothing seemed to be going his way, as quite often seemed to be the case. Glob, a relatively new museum keeper, was also quite loud at times – his hot-blooded artist’s nature manifested itself in peculiar ways, but his straight forward appearance made him popular with both the older and the younger generations. His somewhat younger colleague C.J. Becker was a scholar to his fingertips, and he sometimes acted as a welcome counterbalance to Glob. At the bottom of the hierarchy was the student group, to which I belonged. The older students handled various tasks, including periodic excavations. This was paid work, and although the salary was by no means princely, it did keep us alive. Student grants were non-existent at the time. Four of us made up a team: Olfert Voss, Mogens Ørsnes, Georg Kunwald and myself. Like young people in general, we were highly discontented with the way our profession was being run by its ”ruling” members, and we were full of ideas for improvement, some of which have later been – or are being – introduced.At the top of our wish list was a central register, of which Voss was the strongest advocate. During the well over one hundred years that archaeology had existed as a professional discipline, the number of artefacts had grown to enormous amounts. The picture was even worse if the collections of the provincial museums were taken into consideration. We imagined how it all could be registered in a card index and categorised according to groups to facilitate access to references in any particular situation. Electronic data processing was still unheard of in those days, but since the introduction of computers, such a comprehensive record has become more feasible.We were also sceptical of the excavation techniques used at the time – they were basically adequate, but they badly needed tightening up. As I mentioned before, we were often working in the field, and not just doing minor jobs but also more important tasks, so we had every opportunity to try out our ideas. Kunwald was the driving force in this respect, working with details, using sections – then a novelty – and proceeding as he did with a thoroughness that even his fellow students found a bit exaggerated at times, although we agreed with his principles. Therkel Mathiassen moaned that we youngsters were too expensive, but he put up with our excesses and so must have found us somewhat valuable. Very valuable indeed to everyon e was Ejnar Dyggve’s excavation of the Jelling mounds in the early 1940s. From a Danish point of view, it was way ahead of its time.Therkel Mathiassen justly complained about the economic situation of the National Museum. Following the German occupation, the country was impoverished and very little money was available for archaeological research: the total sum available for the year 1949 was 20,000 DKK, which corresponded to the annual income of a wealthy man, and was of course absolutely inadequate. Of course our small debating society wanted this sum to be increased, and for once we didn’t leave it at the theoretical level.Voss was lucky enough to know a member of the Folketing (parliament), and a party leader at that. He was brought into the picture, and between us we came up with a plan. An article was written – ”Preserve your heritage” (a quotation from Johannes V. Jensen’s Denmark Song) – which was sent to the newspaper Information. It was published, and with a little help on our part the rest of the media, including radio, picked up the story.We informed our superiors only at the last minute, when everything was arranged. They were taken by surprise but played their parts well, as expected, and everything went according to plan. The result was a considerable increase in excavation funds the following year.It should be added that our reform plans included the conduct of exhibitions. We found the traditional way of presenting the artefacts lined up in rows and series dull and outdated. However, we were not able to experiment within this field.Our visions expressed the natural collision with the established ways that comes with every new generation – almost as a law of nature, but most strongly when the time is ripe. And this was just after the war, when communication with foreign colleagues, having been discontinued for some years, was slowly picking up again. The Archaeological Society of Jutland was also a part of all this, so let us turn to what Hans Christian Andersen somewhat provocatively calls the ”main country”.Until 1949, only the University of Copenhagen provided a degree in prehistoric archaeology. However, in this year, the University of Aarhus founded a chair of archaeology, mainly at the instigation of the Lord Mayor, Svend Unmack Larsen, who was very in terested in archaeology. Glob applied for the position and obtained it, which encompassed responsibility for the old Aarhus Museum or, as it was to be renamed, the Prehistoric Museum (now Moesgaard Museum).These were landmark events to Glob – and to me, as it turned out. We had been working together for a number of years on the excavation of Galgebakken (”Callows Hill”) near Slots Bjergby, Glob as the excavation leader, and I as his assistant. He now offered me the job of museum curator at his new institution. This was somewhat surprising as I had not yet finished my education. The idea was that I was to finish my studies in remote Jutland – a plan that had to be given up rather quickly, though, for reasons which I will describe in the following. At the same time, Gunner Lange-Kornbak – also hand-picked from the National Museum – took up his office as a conservation officer.The three of us made up the permanent museum staff, quickly supplemented by Geoffrey Bibby, who turned out to be an invaluable colleague. He was English and had been stationed in the Faeroe Islands during the war, where he learned to speak Danish. After 1945 he worked for some years for an oil company in the Gulf of Persia, but after marrying Vibeke, he settled in her home town of Aarhus. As his academic background had involved prehistoric cultures he wanted to collaborate with the museum, which Glob readily permitted.This small initial flock governed by Glob was not permitted to indulge inidleness. Glob was a dynamic character, full of good and not so good ideas, but also possessing a good grasp of what was actually practicable. The boring but necessary daily work on the home front was not very interesting to him, so he willingly handed it over to others. He hardly noticed the lack of administrative machinery, a prerequisite for any scholarly museum. It was not easy to follow him on his flights of fancy and still build up the necessary support base. However, the fact that he in no way spared himself had an appeasing effect.Provincial museums at that time were of a mixed nature. A few had trained management, and the rest were run by interested locals. This was often excellently done, as in Esbjerg, where the master joiner Niels Thomsen and a staff of volunteers carried out excavations that were as good as professional investigations, and published them in well-written articles. Regrettably, there were also examples of the opposite. A museum curator in Jutland informed me that his predecessor had been an eager excavator but very rarely left any written documentation of his actions. The excavated items were left without labels in the museum store, often wrapped in newspapers. However, these gave a clue as to the time of unearthing, and with a bit of luck a look in the newspaper archive would then reveal where the excavation had taken place. Although somewhat exceptional, this is not the only such case.The Museum of Aarhus definitely belonged among the better ones in this respect. Founded in 1861, it was at first located at the then town hall, together with the local art collection. The rooms here soon became too cramped, and both collections were moved to a new building in the ”Mølleparken” park. There were skilful people here working as managers and assistants, such as Vilhelm Boye, who had received his archaeological training at the National Museum, and later the partners A. Reeh, a barrister, and G.V. Smith, a captain, who shared the honour of a number of skilfully performed excavations. Glob’s predecessor as curator was the librarian Ejler Haugsted, also a competent man of fine achievements. We did not, thus, take over a museum on its last legs. On the other hand, it did not meet the requirements of a modern scholarly museum. We were given the task of turning it into such a museum, as implied by the name change.The goal was to create a museum similar to the National Museum, but without the faults and shortcomings that that museum had developed over a period of time. In this respect our nightly conversations during our years in Copenhagen turned out to be useful, as our talk had focused on these imperfections and how to eradicate them.We now had the opportunity to put our theories into practice. We may not have succeeded in doing so, but two areas were essentially improved:The numerous independent numbering systems, which were familiar to us from the National Museum, were permeating archaeological excavation s not only in the field but also during later work at the museum. As far as possible this was boiled down to a single system, and a new type of report was born. (In this context, a ”report” is the paper following a field investigation, comprising drawings, photos etc. and describing the progress of the work and the observations made.) The instructions then followed by the National Museum staff regarding the conduct of excavations and report writing went back to a 19th-century protocol by the employee G.V. Blom. Although clear and rational – and a vast improvement at the time – this had become outdated. For instance, the excavation of a burial mound now involved not only the middle of the mound, containing the central grave and its surrounding artefacts, but the complete structure. A large number of details that no one had previously paid attention to thus had to be included in the report. It had become a comprehensive and time-consuming work to sum up the desultory notebook records in a clear and understandable description.The instructions resulting from the new approach determined a special records system that made it possible to transcribe the notebook almost directly into a report following the excavation. The transcription thus contained all the relevant information concerning the in vestigation, and included both relics and soil layers, the excavation method and practical matters, although in a random order. The report proper could then bereduced to a short account containing references to the numbers in the transcribed notebook, which gave more detailed information.As can be imagined, the work of reform was not a continuous process. On the contrary, it had to be done in our spare hours, which were few and far between with an employer like Glob. The assignments crowded in, and the large Jutland map that we had purchased was as studded with pins as a hedge hog’s spines. Each pin represented an inuninent survey, and many of these grew into small or large excavations. Glob himself had his lecture duties to perform, and although he by no means exaggerated his concern for the students, he rarely made it further than to the surveys. Bibby and I had to deal with the hard fieldwork. And the society, once it was established, did not make our lives any easier. Kuml demanded articles written at lightning speed. A perusal of my then diary has given me a vivid recollection of this hectic period, in which I had to make use of the evening and night hours, when the museum was quiet and I had a chance to collect my thoughts. Sometimes our faithful supporter, the Lord Mayor, popped in after an evening meeting. He was extremely interested in our problems, which were then solved according to our abilities over a cup of instant coffee.A large archaeological association already existed in Denmark. How ever, Glob found it necessary to establish another one which would be less oppressed by tradition. Det kongelige nordiske Oldsskriftselskab had been funded in 1825 and was still influenced by different peculiarities from back then. Membership was not open to everyone, as applications were subject to recommendation from two existing members and approval by a vote at one of the monthly lecture meetings. Most candidates were of course accepted, but unpopular persons were sometimes rejected. In addition, only men were admitted – women were banned – but after the war a proposal was brought forward to change this absurdity. It was rejected at first, so there was a considerable excitement at the January meeting in 1951, when the proposal was once again placed on the agenda. The poor lecturer (myself) did his best, although he was aware of the fact that just this once it was the present and not the past which was the focus of attention. The result of the voting was not very courteous as there were still many opponents, but the ladies were allowed in, even if they didn’t get the warmest welcome.In Glob’s society there were no such restrictions – everyone was welcome regardless of sex or age. If there was a model for the society, it was the younger and more progressive Norwegian Archaeological Society rather than the Danish one. The main purpose of both societies was to produce an annual publication, and from the start Glob’s Kuml had a closer resemblance to the Norwegian Viking than to the Danish Aarbøger for nordisk Oldkyndighed og Historie. The name of the publication caused careful consideration. For a long time I kept a slip of paper with different proposals, one of which was Kuml, which won after having been approved by the linguist Peter Skautrup.The name alone, however, was not enough, so now the task became to find so mething to fill Kuml with. To this end the finds came in handy, and as for those, Glob must have allied him self with the higher powers, since fortune smiled at him to a considerable extent. Just after entering upon his duties in Aarhus, an archaeological sensation landed at his feet. This happened in May 1950 when I was still living in the capital. A few of us had planned a trip to Aarhus, partly to look at the relics of th e past, and partly to visit our friend, the professor. He greeted us warmly and told us the exciting news that ten iron swords had been found during drainage work in the valley of lllerup Aadal north of the nearby town of Skanderborg. We took the news calmly as Glob rarely understated his affairs, but our scepticism was misplaced. When we visited the meadow the following day and carefully examined the dug-up soil, another sword appeared, as well as several spear and lance heads, and other iron artefacts. What the drainage trench diggers had found was nothing less than a place of sacrifice for war booty, like the four large finds from the 1800s. When I took up my post in Aarhus in September of that year I was granted responsibility for the lllerup excavation, which I worked on during the autumn and the following six summers. Some of my best memories are associated with this job – an interesting and happy time, with cheerful comradeship with a mixed bunch of helpers, who were mainly archaeology students. When we finished in 1956, it was not because the site had been fully investigated, but because the new owner of the bog plot had an aversion to archaeologists and their activities. Nineteen years later, in 1975, the work was resumed, this time under the leadership of Jørgen Ilkjær, and a large amount of weaponry was uncovered. The report from the find is presently being published.At short intervals, the year 1952 brought two finds of great importance: in Februar y the huge vessel from Braa near Horsens, and in April the Grauballe Man. The large Celtic bronze bowl with the bulls’ heads was found disassembled, buried in a hill and covered by a couple of large stones. Thanks to the finder, the farmer Søren Paaske, work was stopped early enough to leave areas untouched for the subsequent examination.The saga of the Grauballe Man, or the part of it that we know, began as a rumour on the 26th of April: a skeleton had been found in a bog near Silkeborg. On the following day, which happened to be a Sunday, Glob went off to have a look at the find. I had other business, but I arrived at the museum in the evening with an acquaintance. In my diary I wrote: ”When we came in we had a slight shock. On the floor was a peat block with a corpse – a proper, well-preserved bog body. Glob brought it. ”We’ll be in trouble now.” And so we were, and Glob was in high spirits. The find created a sensation, which was also thanks to the quick presentation that we mounted. I had purchased a tape recorder, which cost me a packet – not a small handy one like the ones you get nowadays, but a large monstrosity with a steel tape (it was, after all, early days for this device) – and assisted by several experts, we taped a number of short lectures for the benefit of the visitors. People flocked in; the queue meandered from the exhibition room, through the museum halls, and a long way down the street. It took a long wait to get there, but the visitors seemed to enjoy the experience. The bog man lay in his hastily – procured exhibition case, which people circled around while the talking machine repeatedly expressed its words of wisdom – unfortunately with quite a few interruptions as the tape broke and had to be assembled by hand. Luckily, the tape recorders now often used for exhibitions are more dependable than mine.When the waves had died down and the exhibition ended, the experts examined the bog man. He was x-rayed at several points, cut open, given a tooth inspection, even had his fingerprints taken. During the autopsy there was a small mishap, which we kept to ourselves. However, after almost fifty years I must be able to reveal it: Among the organs removed for investigation was the liver, which was supposedly suitable for a C-14 dating – which at the time was a new dating method, introduced to Denmark after the war. The liver was sent to the laboratory in Copenhagen, and from here we received a telephone call a few days later. What had been sent in for examination was not the liver, but the stomach. The unfortunate (and in all other respects highly competent) Aarhus doctor who had performed the dissection was cal1ed in again. During another visit to the bogman’s inner parts he brought out what he believed to be the real liver. None of us were capable of deciding th is question. It was sent to Copenhagen at great speed, and a while later the dating arrived: Roman Iron Age. This result was later revised as the dating method was improved. The Grauballe Man is now thought to have lived before the birth of Christ.The preservation of the Grauballe Man was to be conservation officer Kornbak’s masterpiece. There were no earlier cases available for reference, so he invented a new method, which was very successful. In the first volumes of Kuml, society members read about the exiting history of the bog body and of the glimpses of prehistoric sacrificial customs that this find gave. They also read about the Bahrain expeditions, which Glob initiated and which became the apple of his eye. Bibby played a central role in this, as it was he who – at an evening gathering at Glob’s and Harriet’s home in Risskov – described his stay on the Persian Gulf island and the numerous burial mounds there. Glob made a quick decision (one of his special abilities was to see possibilities that noone else did, and to carry them out successfully to everyone’s surprise) and in December 1952 he and Bibby left for the Gulf, unaware of the fact that they were thereby beginning a series of expeditions which would continue for decades. Again it was Glob’s special genius that was the decisive factor. He very quickly got on friendly terms with the rulers of the small sheikhdoms and interested them in their past. As everyone knows, oil is flowing plentifully in those parts. The rulers were thus financially powerful and some of this wealth was quickly diverted to the expeditions, which probably would not have survived for so long without this assistance. To those of us who took part in them from time to time, the Gulf expeditions were an unforgettable experience, not just because of the interesting work, but even more because of the contact with the local population, which gave us an insight into local manners and customs that helped to explain parts of our own country’s past which might otherwise be difficult to understand. For Glob and the rest of us did not just get close to the elite: in spite of language problems, our Arab workers became our good friends. Things livened up when we occasionally turned up in their palm huts.Still, co-operating with Glob was not always an easy task – the sparks sometimes flew. His talent of initiating things is of course undisputed, as are the lasting results. He was, however, most attractive when he was in luck. Attention normally focused on this magnificent person whose anecdotes were not taken too seriously, but if something went wrong or failed to work out, he could be grossly unreasonable and a little too willing to abdicate responsibility, even when it was in fact his. This might lead to violent arguments, but peace was always restored. In 1954, another museum curator was attached to the museum: Poul Kjærum, who was immediately given the important task of investigating the dolmen settlement near Tustrup on Northern Djursland. This gave important results, such as the discovery of a cult house, which was a new and hitherto unknown Stone Age feature.A task which had long been on our mind s was finally carried out in 1955: constructing a new display of the museum collections. The old exhibitio n type consisted of numerous artefacts lined up in cases, accompaied ony by a brief note of the place where it was found and the type – which was the standard then. This type of exhibition did not give much idea of life in prehistoric times.We wanted to allow the finds to speak for themselves via the way that they were arranged, and with the aid of models, photos and drawings. We couldn’t do without texts, but these could be short, as people would understand more by just looking at the exhibits. Glob was in the Gulf at the time, so Kjærum and I performed the task with little money but with competent practical help from conservator Kornbak. We shared the work, but in fairness I must add that my part, which included the new lllerup find, was more suitable for an untraditional display. In order to illustrate the confusion of the sacrificial site, the numerous bent swords and other weapons were scattered a.long the back wall of the exhibition hall, above a bog land scape painted by Emil Gregersen. A peat column with inlaid slides illustrated the gradual change from prehistoric lake to bog, while a free-standing exhibition case held a horse’s skeleton with a broken skull, accompanied by sacrificial offerings. A model of the Nydam boat with all its oars sticking out hung from the ceiling, as did the fine copy of the Gundestrup vessel, as the Braa vessel had not yet been preserved. The rich pictorial decoration of the vessel’s inner plates was exhibited in its own case underneath. This was an exhibition form that differed considerably from all other Danish exhibitions of the time, and it quickly set a fashion. We awaited Glob’s homecoming with anticipation – if it wasn’t his exhibition it was still made in his spirit. We hoped that he would be surprised – and he was.The museum was thus taking shape. Its few employees included Jytte Ræbild, who held a key position as a secretary, and a growing number of archaeology students who took part in the work in various ways during these first years. Later, the number of employees grew to include the aforementioned excavation pioneer Georg Kunwald, and Hellmuth Andersen and Hans Jørgen Madsen, whose research into the past of Aarhus, and later into Danevirke is known to many, and also the ethnographer Klaus Ferdinand. And now Moesgaard appeared on the horizon. It was of course Glob’s idea to move everything to a manor near Aarhus – he had been fantasising about this from his first Aarhus days, and no one had raised any objections. Now there was a chance of fulfilling the dream, although the actual realisation was still a difficult task.During all this, the Jutland Archaeological Society thrived and attracted more members than expected. Local branches were founded in several towns, summer trips were arranged and a ”Worsaae Medal” was occasionally donated to persons who had deserved it from an archaeological perspective. Kuml came out regularly with contributions from museum people and the like-minded. The publication had a form that appealed to an inner circle of people interested in archaeology. This was the intention, and this is how it should be. But in my opinion this was not quite enough. We also needed a publication that would cater to a wider public and that followed the same basic ideas as the new exhibition.I imagined a booklet, which – without over-popularsing – would address not only the professional and amateur archaeologist but also anyone else interested in the past. The result was Skalk, which (being a branch of the society) published its fir t issue in the spring of 1957. It was a somewhat daring venture, as the financial base was weak and I had no knowledge of how to run a magazine. However, both finances and experience grew with the number of subscribers – and faster than expected, too. Skalk must have met an unsatisfied need, and this we exploited to the best of our ability with various cheap advertisements. The original idea was to deal only with prehistoric and medieval archaeology, but the historians also wanted to contribute, and not just the digging kind. They were given permission, and so the topic of the magazine ended up being Denmark’s past from the time of its first inhabitant s until the times remembered by the oldest of us – with the odd sideways leap to other subjects. It would be impossible to claim that Skalk was at the top of Glob’s wish list, but he liked it and supported the idea in every way. The keeper of national antiquities, Johannes Brøndsted, did the same, and no doubt his unreserved approval of the magazine contributed to its quick growth. Not all authors found it easy to give up technical language and express themselves in everyday Danish, but the new style was quickly accepted. Ofcourse the obligations of the magazine work were also sometimes annoying. One example from the diary: ”S. had promised to write an article, but it was overdue. We agreed to a final deadline and when that was overdue I phoned again and was told that the author had gone to Switzerland. My hair turned grey overnight.” These things happened, but in this particular case there was a happy ending. Another academic promised me three pages about an excavation, but delivered ten. As it happened, I only shortened his production by a third.The 1960s brought great changes. After careful consideration, Glob left us to become the keeper of national antiquities. One important reason for his hesitation was of course Moesgaard, which he missed out on – the transfer was almost settled. This was a great loss to the Aarhus museum and perhaps to Glob, too, as life granted him much greater opportunities for development.” I am not the type to regret things,” he later stated, and hopefully this was true. And I had to choose between the museum and Skalk – the work with the magazine had become too timeconsuming for the two jobs to be combined. Skalk won, and I can truthfully say that I have never looked back. The magazine grew quickly, and happy years followed. My resignation from the museum also meant that Skalk was disengaged from the Jutland Archaeological Society, but a close connection remained with both the museum and the society.What has been described here all happened when the museum world was at the parting of the ways. It was a time of innovation, and it is my opinion that we at the Prehistoric Museum contributed to that change in various ways.The new Museum Act of 1958 gave impetus to the study of the past. The number of archaeology students in creased tremendously, and new techniques brought new possibilities that the discussion club of the 1940s had not even dreamt of, but which have helped to make some of the visions from back then come true. Public in terest in archaeology and history is still avid, although to my regret, the ahistorical 1960s and 1970s did put a damper on it.Glob is greatly missed; not many of his kind are born nowadays. He had, so to say, great virtues and great fault s, but could we have done without either? It is due to him that we have the Jutland Archaeological Society, which has no w existed for half a century. Congr tulat ion s to the Society, from your offspring Skalk.Harald AndersenSkalk MagazineTranslated by Annette Lerche Trolle

THE 34th KARLOVY VARY INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL One film can make a festival unforgettable. That film at the 34th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (2-11 July 1999) was G.W. Pabst's Der Schatz (The Treasure, Germany, 1923), a restored print of a previously declared lost classic presented in the restored Divadlo (Czech for "theatre") opera house - a splendid decorative edifice dating from 1886, when it opened with Mozart's "Marriage of Figaro" and now reopened after a 10-year reconstruction effort. Not only was Pabst's first feature film pieced together by the Prague Film Archive in collaboration with the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin and the Cinematheque Royale in Brussels, but Max Deutsch's original score for the film's premiere in Dresden on 26 February 1923 was also found in the archive of the Frankfurt Film Museum. Another stroke of good fortune, for Deutsch's score is historically recognized as the first complete...

“At the Universal Exhibition in Paris in 1900, Switzerland presented itself to the world by exhibiting an imaginary synthetic village, making the conflicting features of the various Cantons – which for a few decades gathered under the flag of the Confederation – the founding elements of its national identity. These features were based on the cultural core of the “idem Alpine feeling” defined by the primitive cantons of Alemannic language, Catholic religion, and mountain economy. Not being able to express an authentic image by drawing on the nation’s historicized heritage, the focus is on popular architecture. The Alpine House has built and nurtured a resilient narrated “myth” which, in its architectural form of “chalet” typical of the Bernese Oberland, has helped feed a generalist image of considerable pro-motional and commercial success for Switzerland and its industry. In the twentieth century, during the industrial growth of the nation, campaigns of survey and inventory of the rural and bourgeois “heritage” tried to scientifically systematize the heterogeneous disciplinary approaches that had undertaken the interpretation of the Alpine house in the previous century. Social, economic, and cultural functions are the raison d’être of the vernacular construction and are expressed in the lexicon of typological, constructive, and decorative elements. The specific linguistic and cultural affiliations translate not only into different materials, techniques, and forms of construction but also into different settlement models in the territory. An unwavering mythology has been built and, paradoxically, the national identity has been modelled on the assumption that Germans are “assemblers” of logs, and Latins are “builders” who use stone.”

Previously limited and somewhat neglected as a focus of academic scrutiny, interest in home and domesticity is now growing apace across the humanities and social sciences (Mallett; Blunt, “Cultural Geographies of Home”; Blunt and Dowling). This is evidenced in the recent publication of a range of books on home from various disciplines (Chapman and Hockey; Cieraad; Miller; Chapman; Pink; Blunt and Dowling), the advent in 2004 of a new journal, Home Cultures, focused specifically on the subject of home and domesticity, as well as similar recent special issues in several other journals, including Antipode, Cultural Geographies, Signs and Housing, Theory and Society. This increased interest in the home as a site of social and cultural inquiry reflects a renewed fascination with home and domesticity in the media, popular culture and everyday life. Domestic life is explicitly central to the plot and setting of many popular and/or critically-acclaimed television programs, especially suburban dramas like Neighbours [Australia], Coronation Street [UK], Desperate Housewives [US] and The Secret Life of Us [Australia]. The deeply-held value of home – as a place that must be saved or found – is also keenly represented in films such as The Castle [Australia], Floating Life [Australia], Rabbit-Proof Fence [Australia], House of Sand and Fog [US], My Life as a House [US] and Under the Tuscan Sun [US]. But the prominence of home in popular media imaginaries of Australia and other Western societies runs deeper than as a mere backdrop for entertainment. Perhaps most telling of all is the rise and ratings success of a range of reality and/or lifestyle television programs which provide their audiences with key information on buying, building, renovating, designing and decorating home. In Australia, these include Backyard Blitz , Renovation Rescue, The Block, Changing Rooms, DIY Rescue, Location, Location and Our House. Likewise, popular magazines like Better Homes and Gardens and Australian Vogue Living tell us how to make our homes more beautiful and functional. Other reality programs, meanwhile, focus on how we might secure the borders of our suburban homes (Crimewatch [UK]) and our homeland (Border Security [Australia]). Home is also a strong theme in other media forms and debates, including life writing, novels, art and public dialogue about immigration and national values (see Blunt and Dowling). Indeed, notions of home increasingly frame ‘real world’ experiences, “especially for the historically unprecedented number of people migrating across countries”, where movement and resettlement are often configured through processes of leaving and establishing home (Blunt and Dowling 2). In this issue of M/C Journal we contribute to these critical voices and popular debates, seeking to further untangle the intricate and multi-layered connections between home and everyday life in the contemporary world. Before introducing the articles comprising this issue, we want to extend some of the key themes that weave through academic and popular discussions of home and domesticity, and which are taken up and extended here by the subsequent articles. Home is powerful, emotive and multi-faceted. As a basic desire for many, home is saturated with the meanings, memories, emotions, experiences and relationships of everyday life. The idea and place of home is perhaps typically configured through a positive sense of attachment, as a place of belonging, intimacy, security, relationship and selfhood. Indeed, many reinforce their sense of self, their identity, through an investment in their home, whether as house, hometown or homeland. But at the same time, home is not always a well-spring of succour and goodness; others experience alienation, rejection, hostility, danger and fear ‘at home’. Home can be a site of domestic violence or ‘house arrest’; young gay men and lesbians may feel alienated in the family home; asylum seekers are banished from their homelands; indigenous peoples are often dispossessed of their homelands; refugees might be isolated from a sense of belonging in their new home(land)s. But while this may seriously mitigate the affirmative experience of home, many still yearn for places, both figurative and material, to call ‘home’ – places of support, nourishment and belonging. The experience of violence, loss, marginalisation or dispossession can trigger, in Michael Brown’s words, “the search for a new place to call home”: “it means having to relocate oneself, to leave home and reconfigure it elsewhere” (50). Home, in this sense, understood as an ambiguous site of both belonging and alienation, is not a fixed and static location which ‘grounds’ an essential and unchanging sense of self. Rather, home is a process. If home enfolds and carries some sense of desire for positive feelings of attachment – and the papers in this special issue certainly suggest so, most quite explicitly – then equally this is a relationship that requires ongoing maintenance. Blunt and Dowling call these processes ‘homemaking practices’, and point to how home must be understood as a lived space which is “continually created and recreated through everyday practices” (23). In this way, home is posited as relational – the ever-changing outcome of the ongoing and mediated interaction between self, others and place. What stands out in much of the above discussion is the deep inter-connection between home, identity and self. Across the humanities and social sciences, home has been keenly explored as a crucial site “for the construction and reconstruction of one’s self” (Young 153). Indeed, Blunt and Dowling contend that “home as a place and an imaginary constitutes identities – people’s sense of themselves are related to and produced through lived and imaginative experiences of home” (24). Thus, through various homemaking practices, individuals generate a sense of self (and social groups produce a sense of collective identity) while they create a place called home. Moreover, as a relational entity, neither home nor identity are fixed, but mutually and ongoingly co-constituted. Homemaking enables changing and cumulative identities to be materialised in and supported by the home (Blunt and Dowling). Unfolding identities are progressively embedded and reflected in the home through both everyday practices and routines (Wise; Young), and accumulating and arranging personally meaningful objects (Marcoux; Noble, “Accumulating Being”). Consequently, as one ‘makes home’, one accumulates a sense of self. Given these intimate material and affective links between home, self and identity, it is perhaps not surprising that writing about a place called home has often been approached autobiographically (Blunt and Dowling). Emphasising the importance of autobiographical accounts for understanding home, Blunt argues that “through their accounts of personal memories and everyday experiences, life stories provide a particularly rich source for studying home and identity” (“Home and Identity”, 73). We draw attention to the importance of autobiographical accounts of home because this approach is prominent across the papers comprising this issue of M/C Journal. The authors have used autobiographical reflections to consider the meanings of home and processes of homemaking operating at various scales. Three papers – by Brett Mills, Lisa Slater and Nahid Kabir – are explicitly autobiographical, weaving scholarly arguments through deeply personal experiences, and thus providing evocative first-hand accounts of the power of home in the contemporary world. At the same time, several other authors – including Melissa Gregg, Gilbert Caluya and Jennifer Gamble – use personal experiences about home, belonging and exclusion to introduce or illustrate their scholarly contentions about home, self and identity. As this discussion suggests, home is relational in another way, too: it is the outcome of a relationship between material and imaginative qualities. Home is somewhere – it is situated, located, emplaced. But it is also much more than a location – as suggested by the saying, ‘A house is not a home’. Rather, a house becomes a home when it is imbued with a range of meanings, feelings and experiences by its occupants. Home, thus, is a fusion of the imaginative and affective – what we envision and desire home to be – intertwined with the material and physical – an actual location which can embody and realise our need for belonging, affirmation and sustenance. Blunt and Dowling capture this relationship between emplacement and emotion – the material and the imaginative – with their powerful assertion of home as a spatial imaginary, where “home is neither the dwelling nor the feeling, but the relation between the two” (22). Moreover, they demonstrate that this conceptualisation also detaches ‘home’ from ‘dwelling’ per se, and invokes the creation of home – as a space and feeling of belonging – at sites and scales beyond the domestic house. Instead, as a spatial imaginary, home takes form as “a set of intersecting and variable ideas and feelings, which are related to context, and which construct places, extend across spaces and scales, and connects places” (Blunt and Dowling 2). The concept of home, then, entails complex scalarity: indeed, it is a multi-scalar spatial imaginary. Put quite simply, scale is a geographical concept which draws attention to the layered arenas of everyday life – body, house, neighbourhood, city, region, nation and globe, for instance – and this terminology can help extend our understanding of home. Certainly, for many, house and home are conflated, so that a sense of home is coterminous with a physical dwelling structure (e.g. Dupuis and Thorns). For others, however, home is signified by intimate familial or community relationships which extend beyond the residence and stretch across a neighbourhood (e.g. Moss). And moreover, without contradiction, we can speak of hometowns and homelands, so that home can be felt at the scale of the town, city, region or nation (e.g. Blunt, Domicile and Diaspora). For others – international migrants and refugees, global workers, communities of mixed descent – home can be stretched into transnational belongings (e.g. Blunt, “Cultural Geographies of Home”). But this notion of home as a multi-scalar spatial imaginary is yet more complicated. While the above arenas (house, neighbourhood, nation, globe, etc.) are often simply posited as discrete territories, they also intersect and interact in complex ways (Massey; Marston). Extending this perspective, we can grasp the possibility of personal and collective homemaking processes operating across multiple scales simultaneously. For instance, making a house into a home invariably involves generating a sense of home and familiarity in a wider neighbourhood or nation-state. Indeed, Greg Noble points out that homemaking at the scale of the dwelling can be inflected by broader social and national values which are reflected materially in the house, in “the furniture of everyday life” (“Comfortable and Relaxed”, 55) – landscape paintings and national flags and ornaments, for example. He demonstrates that “homes articulate domestic spaces to national experience” (54). For others – those moving internationally between nation-states – domestic practices in dwelling structures are informed by cultural values and social ideals which extend well beyond the nation of settlement. Everyday domestic practices from one’s ‘land of origin’ are integral for ‘making home’ in a new house, neighbourhood and country at the same time (Hage). Many of the papers in this issue reflect upon the multi-scalarity of homemaking processes, showing how home must be generated across the multiple intersecting arenas of everyday life simultaneously. Indeed, given this prominence across the papers, we have chosen to use the scale of home as our organising principle for this issue. We begin with the links between the body – the geography closest to our skin (McDowell) – the home, and other scales, and then wind our way out through evocations of home at the intersecting scales of the house, the neighbourhood, the city, the nation and the diasporic. The rhetoric of home and belonging not only suggests which types of places can be posited as home (e.g. houses, neighbourhoods, nations), but also valorises some social relations and embodied identities as homely and others as unhomely (Blunt and Dowling; Gorman-Murray). The dominant ideology of home in the Anglophonic West revolves around the imaginary ‘ideal’ of white, middle-class, heterosexual nuclear family households in suburban dwellings (Blunt and Dowling). In our lead paper, Melissa Gregg explores how the ongoing normalisation of this particular conception of home in Australian politico-cultural discourse affects two marginalised social groups – sexual minorities and indigenous Australians. Her analysis is timely, responding to recent political attention to the domestic lives of both groups. Scrutinising the disciplinary power of ‘normal homes’, Gregg explores how unhomely (queer and indigenous) subjects and relationships unsettle the links between homely bodies, ideal household forms and national belonging in politico-cultural rhetoric. Importantly, she draws attention to the common experiences of these marginalised groups, urging “queer and black activists to join forces against wider tendencies that affect both communities”. Our first few papers then continue to investigate intersections between bodies, houses and neighbourhoods. Moving to the American context – but quite recognisable in Australia – Lisa Roney examines the connection between bodies and houses on the US lifestyle program, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, in which families with disabled members are over-represented as subjects in need of home renovations. Like Gregg, Roney demonstrates that the rhetoric of home is haunted by the issue of ‘normalisation’ – in this case, EMHE ‘corrects’ and normalises disabled bodies through providing ‘ideal’ houses. In doing so, there is often a disjuncture between the homely ideal and what would be most helpful for the everyday domestic lives of these subjects. From an architectural perspective, Marian Macken also considers the disjuncture between bodily practices, inhabitation and ideal houses. While traditional documentation of house designs in working drawings capture “the house at an ideal moment in time”, Macken argues for post factum documentation of the house, a more dynamic form of architectural recording produced ‘after-the-event’ which interprets ‘the existing’ rather than the ideal. This type of documentation responds to the needs of the body in the inhabited space of domestic architecture, representing the flurry of occupancy, “the changes and traces the inhabitants make upon” the space of the house. Gilbert Caluya also explores the links between bodies and ideal houses, but from a different viewpoint – that of the perceived need for heightened home security in contemporary suburban Australia. With the rise of electronic home security systems, our houses have become extensions of our bodies – ‘architectural nervous systems’ which extend our eyes, ears and senses through modern security technologies. The desire for home security is predicated on controlling the interplay between the house and wider scales – the need to create a private and secure defensible space in hostile suburbia. But at the same time, heightened home security measures ironically connect the mediated home into a global network of electronic grids and military technologies. Thus, new forms of electronic home security stretch home from the body to the globe. Irmi Karl also considers the connections between technologies and subjectivities in domestic space. Her UK-based ethnographic analysis of lesbians’ techo-practices at home also considers, like Gregg, tactics of resistance to the normalisation of the heterosexual nuclear family home. Karl focuses on the TV set as a ‘straightening device’ – both through its presence as a key marker of ‘family homes’ and through the heteronormative content of programming – while at the same time investigating how her lesbian respondents renegotiated the domestic through practices which resisted the hetero-regulation of the TV – through watching certain videos, for instance, or even hiding the TV set away. Susan Thompson employs a similar ethnographic approach to understanding domestic practices which challenge normative meanings of home, but her subject is quite different. In an Australian-based study, Thompson explores meanings of home in the wake of relationship breakdown of heterosexual couples. For her respondents, their houses embodied their relationships in profoundly symbolic and physical ways. The deterioration and end of their relationships was mirrored in the material state of the house. The end of a relationship also affected homely, familiar connections to the wider neighbourhood. But there was also hope: new houses became sources of empowerment for former partners, and new meanings of home were created in the transition to a new life. Brett Mills also explores meanings of home at different scales – the house, neighbourhood and city – but returns to the focus on television and media technologies. His is a personal, but scholarly, response to seeing his own home on the television program Torchwood, filmed in Cardiff, UK. Mills thus puts a new twist on autobiographical narratives of home and identity: he uses this approach to examine the link between home and media portrayals, and how personal reactions to “seeing your home on television” change everyday perceptions of home at the scales of the house, neighbourhood and city. His reflection on “what happens when your home is on television” is solidly but unobtrusively interwoven with scholarly work on home and media, and speaks to the productive tension of home as material and imaginative. As the above suggests, especially with Mills’s paper, we have begun to move from the homely connections between bodies and houses to focus on those between houses, neighbourhoods and beyond. The next few papers extend these wider connections. Peter Pugsley provides a critical analysis of the meaning of domestic settings in three highly-successful Singaporean sitcoms. He argues that the domestic setting in these sitcoms has a crucial function in the Singaporean nation-state, linking the domestic home and national homeland: it is “a valuable site for national identities to be played out” in terms of the dominant modes of culture and language. Thus, in these domestic spaces, national values are normalised and disseminated – including the valorisation of multiculturalism, the dominance of Chinese cultural norms, benign patriarchy, and ‘proper’ educated English. Donna Lee Brien, Leonie Rutherford and Rosemary Williamson also demonstrate the interplay between ‘private’ and ‘public’ spaces and values in their case studies of the domestic sphere in cyberspace, examining three online communities which revolve around normatively domestic activities – pet-keeping, crafting and cooking. Their compelling case studies provide new ways to understand the space of the home. Home can be ‘stretched’ across public and private, virtual and physical spaces, so that “online communities can be seen to be domesticated, but, equally … the activities and relationships that have traditionally defined the home are not limited to the physical space of the house”. Furthermore, as they contend in their conclusion, these extra-domestic networks “can significantly modify practices and routines in the physical home”. Jennifer Gamble also considers the interplay of the virtual and the physical, and how home is not confined to the physical house. Indeed, the domestic is almost completely absent from the new configurations of home she offers: she conceptualises home as a ‘holding environment’ which services our needs and provides care, support and ontological security. Gamble speculates on the possibility of a holding environment which spans the real and virtual worlds, encompassing email, chatrooms and digital social networks. Importantly, she also considers what happens when there are ruptures and breaks in the holding environment, and how physical or virtual dimensions can compensate for these instances. Also rescaling home beyond the domestic, Alexandra Ludewig investigates concepts of home at the scale of the nation-state or ‘homeland’. She focuses on the example of Germany since World War II, and especially since re-unification, and provides an engaging discussion of the articulation between home and the German concept of ‘Heimat’. She shows how Heimat is ambivalent – it is hard to grasp the sense of longing for homeland until it is gone. Thus, Heimat is something that must be constantly reconfigured and maintained. Taken up in a critical manner, it also attains positive values, and Ludewig suggests how Heimat can be employed to address the Australian context of homeland (in)security and questions of indigenous belonging in the contemporary nation-state. Indeed, the next couple of papers focus on the vexed issue of building a sense home and belonging at the scale of the nation-state for non-indigenous Australians. Lisa Slater’s powerful autobiographical reflection considers how non-indigenous Australians might find a sense of home and belonging while recognising prior indigenous ownership of the land. She critically reflects upon “how non-indigenous subjects are positioned in relation to the original owners not through migrancy but through possession”. Slater urges us to “know our place” – we need not despair, but use such remorse in a productive manner to remake our sense of home in Australia – a sense of home sensitive to and respectful of indigenous rights. Nahid Kabir also provides an evocative and powerful autobiographical narrative about finding a sense of home and belonging in Australia for another group ‘beyond the pale’ – Muslim Australians. Hers is a first-hand account of learning to ‘feel at home’ in Australia. She asks some tough questions of both Muslim and non-Muslim Australians about how to accommodate difference in this country. Moreover, her account shows the homing processes of diasporic subjects – transnational homemaking practices which span several countries, and which enable individuals and social groups to generate senses of belonging which cross multiple borders simultaneously. Our final paper also contemplates the homing desires of diasporic subjects and the call of homelands – at the same time bringing our attention back to home at the scales of the house, neighbourhood, city and nation. As such, Wendy Varney’s paper brings us full circle, lucidly invoking home as a multi-scalar spatial imaginary by exploring the diverse and complex themes of home in popular music. Given the prevalence of yearnings about home in music, it is surprising so little work has explored the powerful conceptions of home disseminated in and through this widespread and highly mobile media form. Varney’s analysis thus makes an important contribution to our understandings of home presented in media discourses in the contemporary world, and its multi-scalar range is a fitting way to bring this issue to a close. Finally, we want to draw attention to the cover art by Rohan Tate that opens our issue. A Sydney-based photographer, Tate is interested in the design of house, home and the domestic form, both in terms of exteriors and interiors. This image from suburban Sydney captures the shifting styles of home in suburban Australia, giving us a crisp juxtaposition between modern and (re-valued) traditional housing forms. Bringing this issue together has been quite a task. We received 60 high quality submissions, and selecting the final 14 papers was a difficult process. Due to limits on the size of the issue, several good papers were left out. We thank the reviewers for taking the time to provide such thorough and useful reports, and encourage those authors who did not make it into this issue to keep seeking outlets for their work. The number of excellent submissions shows that home continues to be a growing and engaging theme in social and cultural inquiry. As editors, we hope that this issue of M/C Journal will make a vital contribution to this important range of scholarship, bringing together 14 new and innovative perspectives on the experience, location, creation and meaning of home in the contemporary world. References Blunt, Alison. “Home and Identity: Life Stories in Text and in Person.” Cultural Geography in Practice. Eds. Alison Blunt, Pyrs Gruffudd, Jon May, Miles Ogborn, and David Pinder. London: Arnold, 2003. 71-87. ———. Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home. Malden: Blackwell, 2005. ———. “Cultural Geographies of Home.” Progress in Human Geography 29.4 (2005): 505-515. ———, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London: Routledge, 2006. Brown, Michael. Closet Space: Geographies of Metaphor from the Body to the Globe. London: Routledge, 2000. Chapman, Tony. Gender and Domestic Life: Changing Practices in Families and Households. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. ———, and Jenny Hockey, eds. Ideal Homes? Social Change and Domestic Life. London: Routledge, 1999. Cieraad, Irene, ed. At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999. Dupuis, Ann, and David Thorns. “Home, Home Ownership and the Search for Ontological Security.” The Sociological Review 46.1 (1998): 24-47. Gorman-Murray, Andrew. “Homeboys: Uses of Home by Gay Australian Men.” Social and Cultural Geography 7.1 (2006): 53-69. Hage, Ghassan. “At Home in the Entrails of the West: Multiculturalism, Ethnic Food and Migrant Home-Building.” Home/world: Space, Community and Marginality in Sydney’s West. Eds. Helen Grace, Ghassan Hage, Lesley Johnson, Julie Langsworth and Michael Symonds. Annandale: Pluto, 1997. 99-153. Mallett, Shelley. “Understanding Home: A Critical Review of the Literature.” The Sociological Review 52.1 (2004): 62-88. Marcoux, Jean-Sébastien. “The Refurbishment of Memory.” Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors. Ed. Daniel Miller. Oxford: Berg, 2001. 69-86. Marston, Sally. “A Long Way From Home: Domesticating the Social Production of Scale.” Scale and Geographic Inquiry: Nature, Society and Method. Eds. Eric Sheppard and Robert McMaster. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. 170-191. Massey, Doreen. “A Place Called Home.” New Formations 17 (1992): 3-15. McDowell, Linda. Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies. Cambridge: Polity, 1999. Miller, Daniel, ed. Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors. Oxford: Berg, 2001. Moss, Pamela. “Negotiating Space in Home Environments: Older Women Living with Arthritis.” Social Science and Medicine 45.1 (1997): 23-33. Noble, Greg. “Comfortable and Relaxed: Furnishing the Home and Nation.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 16.1 (2002): 53-66. ———. “Accumulating Being.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 7.2 (2004): 233-256. Pink, Sarah. Home Truths: Gender, Domestic Objects and Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg, 2004. Wise, J. Macgregor. “Home: Territory and Identity.” Cultural Studies 14.2 (2000): 295-310. Young, Iris Marion. “House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme.” On Female Body Experience: ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ and Other Essays. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 123-154. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Gorman-Murray, Andrew, and Robyn Dowling. "Home." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/01-editorial.php>. APA Style Gorman-Murray, A., and R. Dowling. (Aug. 2007) "Home," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/01-editorial.php>.

AbstractIn 1688 two sculptural fragments, a head of bearded man and a head of an unbearded youth, arrived in Copenhagen, sent from Athens as a gift to King Christian 5. They were placed in the Royal Kunstkammer, their provenance given as the Temple of Artemis in Ephesos, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Almost a hundred and fifty years later, in the early 1820’s they were noticed and studied by two scholars independently visiting the Kunstkammer. However, both concluded that the two heads belonged to one of the metopes decorating the south side of the Parthenon temple on the Acropolis in Athens, showing fighting between Greeks and the mythical Centaurs, part man and part horse. In the 1830’s another sculptural fragment, a horse’s hoof, obtained through the German archaeologist and state antiquary of Greece, Ludwig Ross, reached Copenhagen. It was forwarded by the Danish consul to Athens, C.T. Falbe, as a gift to King Christian 8. The inventory reads: ‘… was found on the Acropolis near the Parthenon temple and is supposed to belong to one the Centaurs on the metopes.’ The present paper focuses solely on the head of the Centaur.A brown stain was noticed on the Parthenon marbles as early as 1830 by the British Museum and has ever since eluded a deeper understanding of its genesis despite many investigations and attempts of analyses. A quite similar brown stain can be observed on the Centaur’s head in Copenhagen as well.The present study reports analyses by LA-ICP-MS, SEM–EDX, µXRD, GC–MS, and LC–MS-MS, as well as optical microscopy of five small samples sequestered in 1999 from the Centaur head curated by the National Museum of Denmark. Our analyses show that the brown stain consists of two consecutively added surficial layers of the calcium oxalate minerals whewellite and weddellite. Despite a thorough search using proteomics, we have found no viable organic precursor material for the oxalates. Our results do not solve the mystery of the formation of the brown stain, but they do further qualify the structure and characterization of the brown stain.

In the late 2010s, I owned and operated a bespoke drum-building company, and during that time, I was commissioned to build a frame drum by the partner of a musician who was also a magic practitioner. The commission was fitting despite my business not being related to magic or Paganism directly. I have been working with drum construction in all of my research projects during my academic career, a touring percussionist for decades, and the company focussed on making drums inspired by Lovecraftian narratives and Lovecraftian Futurist music. Due to the nature of Lovecraftian horror and science fiction being potentially supernatural-related, and given my performance experience and ethnomusicological background, I understood the details of the request and planned my construction in accordance with their interests. The decisions made regarding materials, style, and decorations with respect to the expected functionality, performance techniques, and desired aesthetics outlined a distinct relationship between the magical and musical qualities desired in the final product. These decisions were informed by the values upheld by the commissioner of the drum – values that parallel those of the performers, makers, and audience that make up the joint musical and magical community. The ways in which these decisions were informed, then, regulate the interactions not only with the music involved but also with the musical instruments and their construction. Perhaps this is less evident in a situation where an instrument is mass-manufactured, but taking as an example the set of decisions associated with this bespoke commission, informed by values based on a belief system and the practices associated with that belief system, a network of maker, player, and expectations of the instrument’s function can be highlighted. In turn, this raises interesting considerations about the relationship between building instruments and magic-related practices. Fig. 1: Commissioned drum that houses magical associations along with performative expectations. (Photo: Lisa Courtney) Most of the discussion herein pertains to building frame drums and my client’s interest in Wicca and Paganism, but neither magic, nor this discussion in general, need to be restricted to Wiccan, Occult, or Pagan practices exclusively. Magic in the broad context of how it can influence and inspire creative, ritual, or sonically functional practices can fall under the umbrella of Shamanism, Satanism, Spiritualism, Theosophy, Voodoo/Vodun, Taoism, Shintoism, Druidism, or any area of perceived magic (even fictional or self-constructed belief systems). Magic in the context of being a highly valued concept and concern makes magic (using any definition) relevant and a vehicle for better understanding the complex relationships between creative production and cultural, religious, and/or social values and belief systems. Drums and magic (using this broad definition) simply form an excellent, clear example of this dialectic network. Music and magic are inexorably linked together (Godwin; Connor, Sound and Musical). There are numerous accounts, both folkloric and academic, of how sonic qualities such as tempo, timbre, and pitch work in conjunction with hermetic powers, spiritual happenings, and theosophical practices through harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic means (Sharpe). Broad considerations of music and cosmology arise in Blavatsky’s esoteric instructions, functional use of music appears in the heterophonic improvisation supporting shamanic practices of Korean musok (Koudela and Yoo 94), and even the scientific explanations of Kepler link music to astronomy attempting to show the intertwined nature of music, spirituality, and the human soul. Lewis, in Witchcraft Today, cites multiple instances of music in relation to magic practice, from accompanying incantations to ritual dancing, to a long list of contemporary popular and folk music artists performing magic-related and -inspired material. The human body is sometimes used to produce this sonic enhancement or connections (Eason), but musical instruments are also used for a variety of reasons. Drums are often one of those instruments, incorporating the textures, pulses, or simply the sheer volume they can provide. Drumming is an essential part of engaging with Zangbeto, the vodun guardians of Benin (Okunola and Ojo 204); playing damaru (sometimes made from human skulls: Cupchik 34) is a highly valued musical element of Tibetan Chöd magic practices (Cupchik 34); Druidic land healing ceremonies rely on frame drums to open magic channels between the practitioner and the Earth (O’Driscoll); the original function of Czech vozembouchy was to ward off dark energies and provide protection during rituals (Connor, Constructing the Sounds 25); Korean Mudang use drums (and music/noise) to allow deities and spirits to speak through them at Gut ceremonies (Wróblewski); similarly, Tlingit Ixt (shamans) employ frame drums to both represent and conjure the ancestors about whom they are singing (Olsen 212). It probably cannot be said which came first – the intention to use percussion instruments for magical practices, then constructing them accordingly; or making percussion, then deciding these instruments are useful for magical purposes. However, recognising the influence that magic has on drum-making contemporaneously can be informative, unravelling how performance in magic-related contexts and the construction of percussive instruments designed to be used for such purposes, or those selected for their musical or magical properties, highlight a dialectic between drum-making and magic. Musical instruments are made, generally speaking, with a few common intentions in mind (Connor, Constructing Musical), then designed and built with specific performance expectations and functionalities informing the final construction (Connor, Constructing Musical). Frame drums follow this model; therefore, the commissioned drum mentioned above, where the magical element was considered a primary concern for the patron, can assist with outlining the design/maker-player-inspiration/beliefs/practice network that links them together. When starting the dialogue between maker and patron to realise the drum being commissioned, which wood should be used was the initial consideration. They wanted something “powerful” and “meaningful” but did not know what was available or would exactly match their practice interests, so I suggested some wood I had recently been given that thought might suit: a neighbour had a black walnut tree on their property which had been struck by lightning and was no longer considered safe and it was chopped down due to compromised structural integrity. Pieces of it were given to me. After describing this wood, even though all they knew about the properties of the tree was that it had been struck by lightning, the choice to use it was made instantly, citing simply the fact that it was special, had potentially absorbed the element of electricity into the element of wood, and hinting at the notion that “it was meant to be” as the reasons for incorporating the black walnut into the drum. Fig. 2: Black walnut wood from the tree struck by lightning. (Photo: author) Next was the number of sides for the drum. Most frame drums are circles or something similar, so that would count as either one-sided (not a moebius strip, but rather a simple circle) or infinite-sided (if taken as a number of infinitesimally small mini sides). As a maker, I also offered various other ‘barrel-style’ frames including 5-, 7-, 8-, 11-, and 13-sided models, each with their own Lovecraftian or related association (many of these are prime numbers, but in this case, that is irrelevant). The patron chose the 13-sided version of the barrel frame construction. The skin for the drum was not discussed, simply for the reason that options other than goat skin were more difficult to obtain and there was a time frame placed on the order, as the drum was a gift for the patron’s partner. Once the basic elements were set, we chatted about how the drum would be played, given that the performance style and playing technique would heavily inform some of the construction decisions. We also briefly mulled over the desired tone/timbral qualities, and finally the decorative aspects that would wrap up the construction decisions being made, allowing me to move forward and realise the project in accordance with the commission parameters. Each of these aspects held multiple considerations, akin to architectural design (Vitruvius; Pelletier), based on a triad of materials to be used, functionality expected, and aesthetics valued by the maker, player, and (in this case) the commissioner. The decisions made are consequential to the final design holistically and are therefore important, but of greater concern for this discussion is what informed these decisions and why. Effectively, only six decisions were made; each one was or would have been influenced by magic, affecting almost all aspects of the construction in some manner. With regards to the first decision on wood type, the black walnut was chosen, but not for its density which would have slightly increased the drum’s sustain, its availability (abundant), or discouraged for the fact that black walnut is heavy, and therefore, depending on the primary performance technique expected, the wood may have repercussions due to its sheer weight. Instead, the decision was made based on the one fact that it was struck by lightning. This gave the now-owners a sense of magical injection into the wood, and therefore drum itself. The feeling expressed was that there existed a (great) possibility that the wood, being a primary magical element that represents a connection to the Earth, stability, and the specific properties of the black walnut (Teague), was enhanced by the lightning. Various wand makers suggest that a wood type may have powers it possesses or resonates (Maclir) or links to the magical lore associated with the wood (Beggetta, Gross, and Miller; Theodore). Here, the wood was merged with or infused with another magical element, lightning, sometimes considered representative of power, energy, or brightness/purity (Teague). Whether or not these qualities were something that the patron was seeking or simply a bonus is irrelevant; the fact that the tree had been struck with lightning translated to a specific decision based on magic-related traits valued by the commissioner. The number of sides was actually suggested by me; however, to be clear, the final decision was confirmed by the patron. I offered the 13-sided barrel frame construction as a consideration based on the fact that I already offered these as part of my regular frame drum options, inspired by Lovecraftian horror narratives that include references to the number thirteen, the most recurring being “the thirteen gates of the Necronomicon” found in cosmic horror stories (Levenda; Tyson 13-21, 385-402). To be clear, although Lovecraft, Paganism, and magic are more than simply aligned (Price), Lovecraftian horror often implies magical practice diegetically, but the reader typically discovers the perceived magical elements to be something supranatural rather than supernatural, thus magic becomes explainable science, at least exegetically (Littmann). The number 13 still has relevance in the stories, where it shows up, which is why I often used the number 13 in my drum designs. However, it was another association of a 13-sided drum that aligned with the interests of the patron. In Pagan calendars, there are thirteen full moons per year—the final one serving as the mark of harvest and the new year celebrated during Samhain (Wittington). Acoustically speaking, 13 sides change the drum’s timbre (as compared to a circular frame), slightly reducing the midrange, and increasing some higher-end frequencies, but the acoustics of the instrument were of seemingly lower importance than the magical associations the 13 sides provided. For a Wiccan or Pagan, this choice of a number of sides was one of two that probably would not be ignored (the other being a 5-sided option). Playing techniques expected to be used are often a primary consideration for making instruments in my personal experience, both during my time as a frame drum maker and during my internship with a drum builder in Germany as part of my PhD research. The playing techniques expected during creative/expressive performance definitely informed the construction of the drum, but magical expectations, meaning how the drum was expected to be played during magic-related practices, were also a consideration for the expected playing technique. Factors like playing with hands only, using a beater or stick only, a combination of the two, use of finger rolls, beater position (i.e. upright like a bodhran tipper, sideways like a shaman drum, or above like a trap set or pow-wow drum), and position of the drum itself (i.e. upright holding it from underneath, resting it on the player’s knee, held between the player’s legs while seated, or being held by handle) were discussed. How the drum is going to be played for a performance partially depends on the expectation of the drum’s function musically—is the player going to stand on stage, sit in a recording studio, or participate in a ritual, for instance. In this case, there was an expectation of all three, but given the nature of the commission, that being a patron commissioning the drum as a gift for her partner as a romantic and magic-based token of affection with added functionality, the magic-related expectation became the principal influence on her decisions. In the end, the patron opted to incorporate all the possibilities for performance techniques, giving her partner the most flexibility. This decision provided her partner with the capability to participate in ritual activities easily as well as giving him ergonomically sound means to perform (creatively) with the drum in a recording or live setting. The tonal qualities of the drum were already partially decided, but one other important point was also discussed: one influenced by magic considerations. The leading edge of the drum (where the rim of the frame interacts with the skin stretched over the top of it) has several possible ways to be designed. For my drums, I offered two options that can be considered what equates to more or less the two timbral extremes: a flat leading edge similar to a typical shaman drum or bodhran, or a timpani-style leading edge that has a curved, quarter-circular rounded edge with a very small ledge underneath that. The flat edge makes the drum respond with an even set of frequencies when struck in the centre of the skin and often has a shorter sustain to the sound produced in comparison to a drum with a rounded or pointed edge (Crosby). The timpani-style edge gives an emphasis on lower frequencies, often complementing those with a highlight of high frequencies (giving the aural illusion of fewer midrange tones) and adds a fairly long sustain to the sound created (Crosby). For a creative performance-only commission, the decision would be almost entirely timbral, but for this patron, a consideration of ritual practices and magical context came into play: the lower tone expected to be provided by the timpani leading edge, combined with the longer sustain aligned with the patron’s sensibilities of how the human body may respond to those tonal qualities. Furthermore, the sheer volume was taken into account, as the loudness perceived when playing a lower-pitched drum with a greater sustain can assist with awakening spirits or deities as seen by a practitioner of Paganism (Gustafson), thereby making the timpani leading edge the appropriate choice for the commissioned drum. Visual aspects of drum construction are often almost purely aesthetic. This, however, does not exclude them from being an integral part of the drum’s construction, and in fact, they may be the initial factor to which a player or audience member reacts when first interacting with the drum. The commissioned drum already holds some aesthetic distinction, given its shape and the material choices made. Beyond that, some other visual aspects were notably influenced by the drum's expected magical association. The black walnut being used had a greyish tint to it in an unfinished state, but the suggestion I made was to finish the wood, oiling the frame instead of staining it, giving it a more or less natural finish, but much darker in hue. As far as I can tell, that was entirely a personal taste choice and not based on anything magic-related, but the other visual choices, both decorative, were definitively inspired by Pagan or Wiccan beliefs. The outside of the frame was requested to be wood burned with designs that included various sigils and markings meaningful to the patron and her partner. The sigils have a direct relationship to magic, and it was/is expected that when the drum is played, the decorations would “speak to the universe,” emanating their messages through any given ritual or performance (akin to Tibetan lungta or wind horse flags; Adalakanzhu 13). The specific meaning of the sigils is being redacted on purpose due to the private nature of their meaning; let it suffice to say that they are simultaneously magical and romantic in nature, binding the couple in various ways. Parallel to the wood burning on the side and bottom of the drum was a design made from henna on the front of the skin. The design also presented sigil and sigil-like elements alongside magic or fantastical artwork serving as a sort of cultural flag that the instrument was not only an instrument of sound creation but also one of magical practice (see figure 3). Figure 3: Decoration on the front of the commissioned drum's skin Fig. 4: Wood-burning decorations on the bottom edge of the commissioned drum This commissioned drum is not the only example of relationships between an instrument’s construction and the belief system upheld by the maker, player, and/or audience of the music made with it. Another drum I made recently was for a graduate student who obtained his master’s degree from my current university: as a congratulations gift, I built a drum for him. Upon his request, the drum was 11-sided, which aligned with some of the student’s Buddhist beliefs and practices, and also incorporated all expected playing techniques into the construction, with mainly shamanic and meditative performances in mind (see figure 5). Fig. 5: 11-sided drum built for a graduate student who is also a practicing Buddhist Another example is a 5-sided drum I created for a professional musician performing in a Neo-medievalist band with very strong Gothic and Pagan influences and aesthetics. The shape of the drum was selected for both its timbral qualities and the relation to Lovecraft and the occult, specifically a pentagram reference being made indirectly and directly (in the form of a Necronomicon symbol emblazoned on the goat-skin head; see figure 6). Fig. 6: 5-sided drum in progress (finished in 2017) Fig. 7: A commissioned 5-sided, Lovecraft and magic-inspired drum. (Note: this is not the drum mentioned above, but a different commission with similar traits) Another 13-sided drum that was also commissioned to be a prize for a contest that was Pagan and Lovecraft-related, was also decorated with a large Necronomicon symbol and other rune and rune-like sigil images (see figure 8). Fig. 8: Lovecraft-inspired drum for competition prize Even the 7-sided drum I offered had a belief system inspiration: my aunt who wanted to learn to play the bodhran, and wanted a style that showed off her religious faith, commissioned a 7-sided drum as a Christian-based frame that was just as representative of beliefs as the magical or Lovecraftian-inspired frames. In all cases of barrel-style drum frames, especially those with an odd number of sides, the timbre is affected by the overall shape and ways in which the membrane vibrates, creating a series of interference patterns that often highlight some of the upper frequencies and dampen some of the midrange frequencies simultaneously (an enhancement of the bass comes from the leading edge of the drum, as mentioned above). The point to note here is that the number of sides does slightly have acoustic considerations, but more than the sound, the number of sides has strong semiotic and visual aesthetics (plus some ergonomic factors) that inject social and (sub)cultural values into the drums via their design, which is what makes the number of sides important. Fig. 9: 7-sided drum for a Christian patron Something to which I have already alluded is the notion that values upheld by the performers, makers, and audience of a community are entangled with both the music involved and the musical instruments played and their construction. Concepts of circles can represent reincarnation, protection, cycles of celestial bodies, or notions of regeneration, and translate to frame shape or ensemble performance configurations. Drum shapes as well as skin types can influence sonic qualities that in turn evoke magical properties or specific deities/demons. Beliefs can fuel trance-inducing rhythmic patterns played until an ecstatic state is achieved by the practitioner, which practically requires consideration for performance techniques employed, and therefore instrument design. Widening the lens that focusses on the relation between drum-building and magic practices, an undertaking of any creative or design endeavour comes to light in which a level of agency decides expected functionality, materials, and aesthetics. Examining how the makers, operators, and community members involved develop the network between themselves and what they produce can highlight the perception, value, and ways in which they incorporate the world around them physically and philosophically. Acknowledgment Unless otherwise noted, all photographs by the author. References Adalakanzhu, Ella. “The Wind Horse Flag.” Skipping Stones 14.1, (2002): 13. Beggetta, Albert, Barry Gross, and James Miller. Compendium of Wooden Wand Making Techniques. Fox Chapel, 2021. Blavatsky, H.P. Esoteric Papers: A Comprehensive Compilation of H.P. Blavatsky’s Esoteric Papers Compiled by Daniel H. Caldwell. Kessinger Publishing, 2005. Connor, William K. “Sound and Musical Instruments in Paganism.” Wyldspirit (Winter 2015-16): 32-35. Connor, William K. “Constructing the Sounds of Devils: Diabolical Interactions between Culture, History, and the Construction of the Czech Vozembouch.” Ziva Hudba (Folk Music) 8 (2017): 12-41. Connor, William K. Constructing Musical Associations through Instruments: The Role of the Instrument Maker in the Maker-Instrument-Player Network within the Neo-Medievalist Gothic Music Scene. Ph.D. dissertation. Royal Holloway University of London, 2011. Crosby, Andy (Guru Drums). Video conversation, 2017. Cupchik, Jeffery W. “Buddhism as Performing Art: Visualizing Music in the Tibetan Sacred Ritual Music Liturgies.” Yale Journal of Music and Religion 1.1 (2015): 31-62. Eason, Cassandra. A Practical Guide to Witchcraft and Magick Spells. Foulsham, 2001. Godwin, Joscelyn. Harmonies of Heaven and Earth: Mysticism in Music from Antiquity to the Avant-Garde. Inner Traditions, 1995. Gustafson, Katrina. How to Communicate with Your Ancestors. 2020. 2 Aug. 2023 <https://www.gaia.com/article/how-to-communicate-with-your-ancestors>. Kepler, Johannes. Harmonies of the World. Global Grey, 2017. Koudela, Pál, and Jinil Yoo. “Music and Musicians in Kut, the Korean Shamanic Ritual.” Revista de Etnografie şi Folclor (Journal of Ethnography and Folklore) 1.2 (2016): 87-106. Levenda, Peter (Simon). The Complete Simon Necronomicon. Harper-Collins, 1980. Lewis, James R. Witchcraft Today: An Encyclopedia of Wiccan and Neopagan Traditions. ABC-CLIO, 1999. Littmann, Greg. “H.P. Lovecraft’s Philosophy of Science-Fiction Horror.” 2018 Science Fiction Popular Culture Academic Conference Proceedings, Hawai'i, 13-16 Sep. 2018. Eds. Timothy F. Slater and Carrie J. Cole. Create Space Independent, 2018. 93-108. Maclir, Alferian Gwydion. Wandlore: The Art of Crafting the Ultimate Magical Tool. Llewellyn, 2012. O’Driscoll, Dana. Land Healing: Ritual for Putting the Land to Sleep. 2022. 2 Aug. 2023 <https://thedruidsgarden.com/2020/02/23/land-healing-ritual-for-putting-the-land-to-sleep/>. Okunola, Rashidi Akanji, and Matthais Olufemi Dada Ojo. “Zangbeto: The Traditional Way of Policing and Securing the Community among the Ogu (Egun) People in Badagry, Nigeria.” Etnoantropološki Problemi 8.1 (2016): 204. Olson, Ronald L. “Tlingit Shamanism and Sorcery.” Anthropological Society Papers 25 (1961): 207-220. Pelletier, Louise. Architecture in Words: Theatre, Language, and the Sensuous Space of Architecture. Routledge, 2006. Price, Robert M. Black Forbidden Things. Starmont House, 1992. Robbins, Shawn, and Leanna Greenaway. Wiccapedia: A Modern-Day White Witch’s Guide. Sterling Ethos, 2011. Sharpe, Eric J. “Music.” In Man, Myth, and Magic: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Mythology, Religion, and the Unknown. 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Introduction There is much to be said about house and home and about our media’s role in defining, enabling, as well as undermining it. […] For we can no longer think about home, any longer than we can live at home, without our media. (Silverstone, “Why Study the Media” 88) For lesbians, inhabiting the queer slant may be a matter of everyday negotiation. This is not about the romance of being off line or the joy of radical politics (though it can be), but rather the everyday work of dealing with the perception of others, with the “straightening devices” and the violence that might follow when such perceptions congeal into social forms. (Ahmed 107) Picture this. Once or twice a week a small, black, portable TV set goes on a journey; down from the lofty heights of the top shelf of the built in storage cupboard into the far corner of the living room. A few hours later, it is being stuffed back into the closet. Not far away across town, another small TV set sits firmly in the corner of a living room. Yet, it remains inanimate for days on end. What do you see? The techno-stories conveyed in this paper are presented through – and anchored to – the idea of the cultural biography of things (Kopytoff 1986), revealing how objects (more specifically media technologies) produce and become part of an articulation of particular and conflicting moral economies of households (Silverstone, “Domesticating Domestication”; Silverstone, Hirsch and Morley, “Information and Communication”; Green). In this context, the concept of the domestication of ICTs has been widely applied in Media Studies during the 1990s and, more recently, been updated to account for the changes in technology, household composition, media regulation, and in fact the dislocation of domesticity itself (Berker, Hartmann, Punie and Ward). Remarkable as these mainstream techno-stories are in their elucidation of contemporary techno-practices, what is still absent is the consideration of how gender and sexuality intersect and are being done through ICT consumption at home, work and during leisure practices in alternative or queer households and families. Do lesbians ‘make’ house and home and in what ways are media and ICTs implicated in the everyday work of queer home-making strategies? As writings on queer subjects and cyberspace have proliferated in recent years, we can now follow a move to contextualize queer virtualities across on and offline experiences, mapping ‘complex geographies of un/belonging’ (Bryson, MacIntosh, Jordan and Lin) and a return to consider online media as part of a bigger ICT package that constitutes our queer everyday life-worlds (Karl). At the same time, fresh perspectives are now being developed with regards to the reconfiguration of domestic values by gay men and lesbians, demonstrating the ongoing processes of probing and negotiation of ‘home’ and the questioning of domesticity itself (Gorman-Murray). By aligning ideas and concepts developed by media theorists in the field of media domestication and consumption as well as (sexual) geographers, this paper makes a contribution towards our understanding of a queer sense of home and domesticity through the technological and more specifically television. It is based on two case studies, part of a larger longitudinal ethnographic study of women-centred households in Brighton, UK. Gill Valentine has identified the home and workplaces as spaces, which are encoded as heterosexual. Sexual identities are being constrained by ‘regulatory regimes’, promoting the normalcy of heterosexuality (4). By recounting the techno-stories of lesbian women, we can re-examine notions of the home as a stable, safe, given entity; the home as a particular feminine sphere as well as the leaky boundaries between public and private. As media and ICTs are also part of a (hetero)sexual economy where they, in their materiality as well as textual significance become markers of sexual difference, we can to a certain extent perceive them as ‘straightening devices’, to borrow a phrase from Sara Ahmed. Here, we will find the articulation of a host of struggles to ‘fight the norms’, but not necessarily ‘step outside the system completely, full-time’ (Ben, personal interview [all the names of the interviewees have been changed to protect their anonymity]). In this sense, the struggle is not only to counter perceived heterosexual home-making and techno-practices, but also to question what kinds of practices to adopt and repeat as ‘fitting in’ mechanism. Significantly, these practices leave neither ‘homonormative’ nor ‘heteronormative’ imaginaries untouched and remind us that: In the case of sexual orientation, it is not simply that we have it. To become straight means that we not only have to turn towards the objects that are given to us by heterosexual culture, but also that we must “turn away” from objects that take us off this line. (Ahmed 21) In this sense then, we are all part of drawing and re-drawing the lines of belonging and un-belonging within the confines of a less than equal power-economy. Locating Dys-Location – Is There a Lesbian in the Home? In his effort to re-situate the perspective of media domestication in the 21st century, David Morley points us to ‘the process of the technologically mediated dislocation of domesticity itself’ (“What’s ‘home’” 22). He argues that ‘under the impact of new technologies and global cultural flows, the home nowadays is not so much a local, particular “self-enclosed” space, but rather, as Zygmunt Bauman puts it, more and more a “phantasmagoric” place, as electronic means of communication allow the radical intrusion of what he calls the “realm of the far” (traditionally, the realm of the strange and potentially troubling) into the “realm of the near” (the traditional “safe space” of ontological security) (23). The juxtaposition of home as a safe, ‘given’ place of ontological security vis a vis the more virtual and mediated realm of the far and potentially intrusive is itself called into question, if we re-consider the concepts of home and (dis)location in the light of lesbian geographies and ‘the production and regulation of heterosexual space’ (Valentine 1). The dislocation of home and domesticity experienced through consumption of (mobile) media technologies has always already been under-written by the potential feeling of dys-location and ‘trouble’ by lesbians on the grounds of sexual orientation. The lesbian experience disrupts the traditionally modern and notably western ideal of home as a safe haven and refuge by making visible the leaky boundaries between private seclusion and public surveillance, as much as it may (re)invest in the production of ideas and ideals of home-making and domesticity. This is illustrated for example by the way in which the heterosexuality of a parental home ‘can inscribe the lesbian body by restricting the performative aspects of a lesbian identity’, which may be subverted by covert acts of resistance (Johnston and Valentine 111; Elwood) as well as by the potentially greater freedoms of lesbian identity within a ‘lesbian home’, which may nevertheless come under scrutiny and ‘surveillance of others, especially close family, friends and neighbours’ (112). Nevertheless, more recently it has also been demonstrated how even overarching structures of familial heteronormativity are opportune to fissures and thereby queered, as Andrew Gorman-Murray illustrates in his study of Australian gay, lesbian and bisexual youth in supportive family homes. So what is, or rather, what can constitute a ‘lesbian home’ and how is it negotiated through everyday techno-practices? In and Out of the Closet – The Straight-Speaking ‘Telly’ As places go, the city of Brighton and Hove in the south-east of England fetches the prize for the highest ratio of LGBT people amongst its population in the UK, sitting at about 15%. In this sense, the home-making stories to which I will refer, of a white, lesbian single mother in her early 40s from a working-class background and a white lesbian/dyke couple in their 30s (from middle-/working-class backgrounds), are already engendered in the sense that Brighton (to them) represented in part a kind of ‘home-coming’ in itself. Helen and Ben, a lesbian butch-femme couple (‘when it takes our fancy’, Helen), had recently bought a terraced 1930s three-bedroom house with a sizeable garden in a soon to be up and coming residential area of Brighton. The neighbours are a mix of elderly, long-standing residents and ‘hetero’ families, or ‘breeders’, as Ben sometimes referred to them. Although they had lived together before, the new house constituted their first purchase together. This was significant especially for Helen, as it made their lives more ‘equal’ in terms of what goes where and the input on the overall interior decoration. Ben had shifted from London to Brighton a few years previously for a ‘quieter life’, but wished to remain connected to a queer community. Helen had made the move to Brighton from Germany – to study and enjoy the queer feel, and never left. Both full-time professionals, Helen worked in the publishing industry and Ben as a social worker. Already considering Brighton their ‘home’ town, the house purchase itself constituted another home-making challenge: as a lesbian/dyke couple on equal footing they were prepared to accept to live in a pre-dominantly straight neighbourhood, as it afforded them more space for money compared to the more visibly gay male living areas in the centre of town. The relative invisibility of queer women (and their neighbourhoods) compared to queer men in Brighton may, as it does elsewhere, be connected to issues of safety (Elwood) as well as the comparative lack of financial capacity (Bell and Valentine). Walking up to this house on the first night of my stay with them, I am struck by just how inconspicuous it appears – one of many in a long street, up a steep hill: ‘Most housing in contemporary western societies is “designed, built, financed and intended for nuclear families”’ (Bell in Bell and Valentine 7). I cannot help but think – more as a reflection on myself than of what I am about to experience – is this it? Is this the ‘domesticated lesbian’? What I see appears ‘familiar’, ‘tamed’, re-tracing the straight lines of heterosexual culture. Helen opens the door and orders me directly into the kitchen. She says ‘Ben is in the living room, watching television… Ben takes great pleasure in watching “You’ve been Framed”’. (Fieldnotes) In this context, it is appropriate to focus on the television and its place within their home-making strategies. Television, in its historical and symbolic significance, could be deemed the technological co-terminus to the ideal nuclear family home. Lynn Spigel has shown through her examination of the cultural history of TV’s formative years in post World War America how television became central to providing representations of family life, but also how the technology itself, as an object, informed material and symbolic transformations within the domestic sphere and beyond. Over the past fifty years as Morley points out, the TV has moved from its fixed place in the living room to become more personalised and encroach on other spaces in house and home and has now, in fact, re-entered the public realm (see airports and shopping malls) where it originated. At present, ‘the home itself can seen as having become … the “last vehicle”, where comfort, safety and stability can happily coexist with the possibility of instantaneous digitalised “flight” to elsewhere – and the instantaneous importation of desired elements of the “elsewhere” into the home’ (Morley, “Media, Modernity” 200). Importantly, as Morley confirms, today’s high-tech discourse is often still framed by a nostalgic vision of ‘family values’. There was only one TV set in Helen and Ben’s house: a black plastic cube with a 16” screen. It was decidedly ‘unglamorous’ as Helen pointed out. During the first round of ‘home-making’ efforts, it had found its way into a corner in the front room, with the sofa and armchair arranged in viewing distance. It was a very ‘traditional’ living room set-up. During my weeklong stay and for some weeks after, it was mostly Ben on her own ‘watching the telly’ in the early evenings ‘vegging out’ after work. Helen, meanwhile, was in the kitchen with the radio on or a CD playing, or in her ‘ICT free’ bedroom, reading. Then, suddenly, the TV had disappeared. During one of our ‘long conversations’ (Silverstone, Hirsch and Morley, “Listening”, 204) it transpired that it was now housed for most of the time on the top shelf of a storage cupboard and only ‘allowed out’ ever so often. As a material object, it had easily found its place as a small, but nevertheless quite central feature in the living room. Imbued with the cultural memory of their parents’ and that of many other living rooms, it was ‘tempting’ and easy for them to ‘accept’ it as part of a setting up home as a couple. Ben explained that they both fell into a habit, an everyday routine, to sit around it. However, settling into their new home with too much ‘ease’, they began to question their techno-practice around the TV. For Helen in particular, the aesthetics of the TV set did not fit in with her plans to re-decorate the house loosely in art deco style, tethered to her femme identity. They did not envisage creating a home that would potentially signal that a family with 2.4 children lives here. ‘The “normality” of [working] 9-5’ (Ben), was sufficient. Establishing a perceived visual difference in their living room, partly by removing the TV set, Helen and Ben aimed to ‘draw a line’ around their home and private sphere vis a vis the rest of the street and, metaphorically speaking, the straight world. The boundaries between the public and private are nevertheless porous, as it is exactly that the public perceptions of a mostly private, domesticated media technology prevent Helen and Ben from feeling entirely comfortable in its presence. It was not only the TV set’s symbolic function as a material object that made them restrict and consciously control the presence of the TV in their home space. One of Helen and Ben’s concerns in this context was that TV, as a broadcast medium, is utterly ‘conservative’ in its content and as such, very much ‘straight speaking’. To paraphrase Helen – you can only read so much between the lines and shout at the telly, it can get tiring. ‘I like watching nature programmes, but they somehow manage even here to make it sound like a hetero narrative’. Ben: ‘yeah – mind the lesbian swans’. The employment of the VCR and renting movies helps them to partly re-dress this perceived imbalance. At the same time, TV’s ‘water-cooler’ effect helps them to stay in tune with what is going on around them and enables them, for example, to participate and intervene in conversations at work. In this sense, watching TV can turn into home-work, which affords a kind of entry ticket to shared life-worlds outside the home and as such can be controlled, but not necessarily abandoned altogether. TV as a ‘straightening device’ may afford the (dis)comfort of a sense of participation in mainstream discourses and the (dis)comfort of serving as a reminder of difference at the same time. ‘It just sits there … apart from Sundays’ – and when the girls come round… Single-parent households are on the rise in the US (Russo Lemor) as well as in the UK. However, the attention given to single-parent families so far focuses pre-dominantly on single mothers and fathers after separation or divorce from a heterosexual marriage (Russo Lemor; Silverstone, “Beneath the Bottom Line”). As (queer) sociologists have began to map the field of ‘families of choice and other life experiments’ (Weeks, Heaphy and Donovan), a more concerted effort to bring together the literatures and to shed more light on the queer techno-practices of alternative families seems necessary. Liz and her young son Tim had moved to Brighton from London. As a lesbian working single mother, she raises Tim pre-dominantly on her own: ‘we are a small family, and that’s fine’. Liz’s home-making narrative is very much driven by her awareness of what she sees as her responsibilities as a mother, a lesbian mother. The move to Brighton was assessed by being able to keep her clients in London (she worked as a self-employed communication and PR person for various London councils) – ‘this is what feeds us’, and the fact that she did not want Tim to go to a ‘badly performing’ school in London. The terraced three-bedroom house she found was in a residential area, not too far from the station and in need of updating and re-decorating. The result of the combined efforts of builders, her dad (‘for some of the DIY’) and herself produced a ‘conventional’ set-up with a living room, a kitchen-diner, a small home-office (for tele-working) and Tim’s and her bedroom. Inconspicuous in its appearance, it was clearly child-oriented with a ‘real jelly bean arch’ in the hallway. The living room is relatively bare, with a big sofa, table and chairs, ‘an ancient stereo-system’ and a ‘battered TV and Video-recorder’ in the corner. ‘We hardly use it’, Liz exclaims. ‘We much rather spend time out and about if there is a chance … quality time, rather than watching TV … or I read him stories in bed. I hate the idea of TV as a baby sitter … I have very deliberately chosen to have Tim and I want to make the most of it’. For Liz, the living room with the TV set in it appears as a kind of gesture to what family homes ‘look like’. As such, the TV and furniture set-up function as a signal and symbol of ‘normality’ in a queer household – perhaps a form of ‘passing’ for visitors and guests. The concern for the welfare of her son in this context is a sign and reflection of a constant negotiation process within a pre-dominantly heterosexual system of cultural symbols and values, which he, of course, is already able to ‘compare’ and evaluate when he is out and about at school or visiting friends in their homes. Unlike in Helen and Ben’s home, the TV is therefore allowed to stay out of the closet. Still, Liz rarely watches TV at all, for reasons not dissimilar to those of Helen and Ben. Apart from this, she shares a lack of spare time with many other single parents. Significantly, the living room and TV do receive a queer ‘make-over’ now and then, when Tim is in bed or with his father on a weekend and ‘the girls’ come over for a drink, chat and video viewing (noticeably, the living room furniture and TV get pushed around and re-arranged to accommodate the crowd). In this sense, Liz, in her home-making practices, carefully manages and performs ‘object relationships’ that allow her and her son to ‘fit in’ as much as to advocate ‘difference’ within the construction of ‘normalcy’. The pressures of this negotiation process are clearly visible. Conclusion – Re-Engendering Home and Techno-Practices As women as much as lesbians, Helen, Ben and Liz are, like so many others, part of a historical and much wider struggle regarding visibility, equality and justice. If this article had been dedicated to gay/queer men and their techno- and home-making sensibilities, it would have read somewhat differently to be sure. Of course, questions of gender and sexual identities would have remained equally paramount, as they always should, enfolding questions of class, race and ethnicity (Pink 2004). The concept and practice of home have a deeply engendered history. Queer practices ‘at home’ are always already tied up with knowledges of gendered practices and spaces. As Morley has observed, ‘space is gendered on a variety of scales … the local is often associated with femininity and seen as the natural basis of home and community, into which an implicitly masculine realm intrudes’ (“Home Territories” 59). As the public and private realms have been gendered masculine and feminine respectively, so have media and ICTs. Although traditional ideas of home and gender relations are beginning to break down and the increasing personalization and mobilization of ICTs blur perceptions of the public and private, certain (idealized, heterosexualized and gendered) images of home, domesticity and family life seem to be recurring in popular discourse as well as mainstream academic writing. As feminist theorists have illustrated the ways in which gender needs to be seen as performative, feminist and queer theorists also ought to work further on finding vocabularies and discourses that capture and highlight diversity, without re-invoking the spectre of the nuclear family (home) itself (Weeks, Heaphy and Donovan). What I found was not the ‘domesticated’ lesbian ‘at home’ in a traditional feminine sphere. Rather, I experienced a complex set of re-negotiations and re-inscriptions of the domestic, of gender and sexual values and identities as well as techno-practices, leaving a trace, a mark on the system no matter how small (Helen: ‘I do wonder what the neighbours make of us’). The pressure and indeed desire to ‘fit in’ is often enormous and therefore affords the re-tracing of certain trodden paths of domesticity and ICT consumption. 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Citation reference for this article MLA Style Karl, Irmi. "Domesticating the Lesbian?: Queer Strategies and Technologies of Home-Making." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/06-karl.php>. APA Style Karl, I. (Aug. 2007) "Domesticating the Lesbian?: Queer Strategies and Technologies of Home-Making," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/06-karl.php>.