The fifth volume in the Institute of Classical Archaeology’s series on rural settlements in the countryside (chora) of Metaponto presents the excavation of a Greek farmhouse, illuminating the ...lifeways of fourth-century BC farmers of modest means.
Abstract
The Villa of Caddeddi, in the territory of Noto (Siracusa) is located on the south bank of the Tellaro river, about 3km from its mouth. The site, interpreted as a rural luxury residence ...dated to the 4th-5th century CE, was first discovered in 1972 and intermittently investigated in the subsequent decades and mostly studied from the perspectives of the splendid mosaic floors there uncovered. The excavated structure accounts for just a portion of the complex, which is partially covered by an 18th-19th century farmhouse. After a long period of neglect, the villa has been recently restored and opened to the public and become subject of new studies by the University of South Florida’s Institute for Digital Exploration (IDEx) which in 2019 and 2020 conducted a remote sensing campaign entailing terrestrial laserscanning and ground penetrating radar.
In modern societies, changes in population patterns are often studied based on a rural vs urban duality. This dichotomous simplification overlooks the existence of a broad range of human settlements, ...especially in the rural world. In this work, we quantified and analysed southern Spain’s population and rural settlements from the late eighteenth century to the present, distinguishing three types of settlements: agrotowns, the villages and dispersed settlements. To do this, we drew on a littleused source, Spanish property censuses, published since the mid-nineteenth century, as well as other historical sources. We observed that in southern Spain, characterised by a large number of agrotowns and scattered settlements, the method selected to estimate the rural population largely determined the settlement results obtained. We found that since the mid-twentieth century, the rural population had fallen not only in numbers but also in diversity. Historically, the rural population was heterogeneous, adapting to the territory in a context of organic economy and a reduced amount of trading. Especially notable was the weight of dispersed settlements, which accounted for almost two-thirds of rural population growth until the mid-twentieth century and for almost half the rural population
•We quantified and analysed the evolution of different types of rural habitats in southern Spain between 1787 and 2017•Population living in villages (main rural nuclei) has remained relatively stable during the last 220 years•Dispersed population comprised up to 40 % of rural population and was responsible of ∼60 % rural depopulation between 1960 and 2000•Agrotowns have historically been located the Valley and reached ∼10 % of rural population by mid-20th Century•Geographical factors and legacies from the Reconquista process (initiated in 1212) explain the spatial distribution of settlements.
The biodegradable portion of solid waste generated in farmhouses can be treated for energy recovery with small portable biogas plants. This action can be done across the Netherlands and all around ...the planet. This study aims to appraise the performance of anaerobic digestion of different wastes (cow manure, food waste and garden waste) obtained from a regional farmhouse. Batch reactors were established under mesophilic conditions in order to investigate the impact of ternary mixtures on the anaerobic digestion process performance. Different mixing ratios were set in the batch tests. The upshots from the experiments connoted that ternary digestion with cow manure:food waste:garden waste mixing ratio of 40:50:10 yielded higher biogas amount. The kinetics’ results showed quite good congruence with the experimental study. The results from the kinetic analysis appeared to be in line with the experimental one.
Ein aktualisierter Blick auf Bauernhäuser offenbart diese als widerständige Ressource - überkommen, aber beeindruckend, voller Geschichte(n), aber nicht immer geschätzt, vermeintlich nicht mehr ...zeitgemäß und doch charakteristisch für eine Region. Ines Lüder zeigt in diesem Kontext heterogene Praktiken des Gebrauchs und das Ringen um Deutungshoheit auf. Sie erarbeitet anhand der Fachhallen- und Barghäuser der Steinburger Elbmarschen eine Zustandsbeschreibung und typologische Neuordnung. Dabei kontextualisiert sie die mehrdeutigen Gebäude mit ihren Interdependenzen als Bestandteil der Transformation ländlicher Räume und prüft sie auf ihr baukulturelles Potenzial für künftige Weiterentwicklung.
The architect Hans Döllgast (1891–1974) has steadily gained in international recognition. His works of postwar reconstruction in Munich have been heralded as original contributions to modern ...architecture that resist historiographic classifications, such as modernist vs regionalist, avant garde vs traditionalist, or internationalist vs nationalist. Döllgast was also a revered pedagogue and prolific author, and his varied writings have yet to receive much scholarly attention. Döllgast’s books and essays present a significant body of sources that shed light on the complexity of architectural discourse in the formative years of modern architecture in Germany. This article considers Döllgast’s study of farmhouse ‘parlours’, entitled Alte und neue Bauernstuben (‘Old and New Farmhouse Parlours’) was first published in 1937. It was both his most popular book and the one that critics and historians have paid least attention to. Though it may appear antiquarian at first glance, it is in fact both critical and contemporary in spirit. Döllgast’s study sheds light upon his mature thinking about the relevance of the vernacular for the modern house. It also serves to question a general assumption in the existing literature that Döllgast only engaged with tenets of modern architecture after the war, having been a regionalist aloof from the discourse of the modern movement prior to the war. Scholars have shown that the loaded motif of the vernacular was never the sole preserve of anti-modernist conservatives and played a significant, if ambivalent, role within modernist discourse, from the late Wilhelmine period to postwar West Germany. While it reflects these wider trends, Alte und neue Bauernstuben also eschews alignment with the dominant strands of architectural discourse of its time by charting an independent-minded path in the context of imposed totalitarian uniformity. Döllgast’s text thus stands out in modern architectural discourse less for adducing the farmhouse as such, than for developing such a close, multifaceted reading of a particular vernacular interior, while alluding to more than elaborating its relevance for contemporary architecture. Ultimately, Döllgast’s study served him to develop a practical phenomenology of dwelling.