The case of the early imperial small rural settlement of Marzuolo, in south-central Etruria, paints a micro-history of arrested developments: a couple of decades into the site's existence, an ...abandoned wine-production facility was converted into a blacksmithing workshop, which in turn burnt down and was abandoned soon after. But were both these endings failures? This article uses the concept of failure as an epistemic lens to examine inequality: who could fail in the Roman world, and for whom was failure not an option? It argues that failure was tied up with particular notions of the future, which were not equally distributed. Yet in contrast to modern paradigms, in the Roman world even the privileged seem not to have embraced failure as a stepping-stone towards growth.
The article deals with the ceramic material from the excavations of 2021 on the territory of the multilayer archaeological site Syukeyevsky Vzvoz II. Judging by the totality of the finds (metal slag ...and pig iron, blanks and semi-finished iron products, blacksmithing tools), a blacksmithing workshop could have been located here in the Golden Horde period. Russian pottery make up the majority of the assemblage, which suggests that there is a settlement of immigrants from Russian lands here. By the nature of the finds, this location can be interpreted as the artisan periphery of a small urban-type settlement associated with iron processing.
This article examines the development of jewellery in Right-Bank Ukraine and Galicia from the XVI to XIX centuries, focusing on precious ecclesiastical artifacts as evidence of the flourishing of ...Ukrainian goldsmithing. The relevance of the research stems from its detailed exploration of ecclesiastical jewellery in Right-Bank Ukraine and Galicia, providing a unique perspective on the region's artistic heritage and European cultural integration. The purpose is studying the artistic techniques used by Lviv and Kyiv jewellers in creating church artifacts like domes, icon covers, and other ecclesiastical items. The historical-genetic method enabled comprehensively analysing the evolution of Right-Bank Ukrainian jewellery in the example of church artifacts. Periodization identified three stages of Ukrainian goldsmithing's development in the XVI-XIX centuries. The system- structural method emphasized Western European cultural influence on overall Ukrainian jewellery. The typological approach reflected empirical reality of Right-Bank Ukrainian jewellery development as evidence of flourishing culture. Narrative described and explained the significance of jewellery artifacts at each stage of the formation of Ukrainian goldsmithing. Research materials included art organizations' experience, archaeological documentation, and museum exhibits. As a result of the research, the article presents the work of such Kyiv masters as: Iyeremiya Biletskyy, Ivan Ravych, and Matviy Narunovych. Detailed descriptions of works of art by Lviv and Kyiv masters of the XVI- XIX centuries are provided. And information about the Kyiv goldsmith shop is displayed. Conclusions confirm that Right-Bank Ukraine and Galicia were a stronghold of European jewellery styles in the 16th-19th centuries. The study of church artefacts by Ukrainian craftsmen shows a special cultural mentality shaped by centuries-old traditions and the multidenominational nature of Christian faiths. Thus, the materials of the article represent a practical value for historians, ethnographers, and architects who are interested in the construction of Orthodox churches; and jewellers engaged in artistic blacksmithing.
Among materials from the Volga Bulgaria of the 11th–13th centuries, as well as the territories under Bulgarian rule, forged oval-shaped articles reminiscent of shoe heel section can be found. There ...is no unanimous opinion concerning these finds among researchers. A considerable assortment of these items was excavated at the Rozhdestvensky settlement in the Perm Region. Analysis showed that they were made of raw steel, with the base a half-oval plate with folded edges and with three apertures for little cylinder-capped nails, the cap standing out on the item’s surface.Cylinder nuts were put on the nails from the inner side and were forged when heated. The nuts held a leather plate in place, which was thought to be a lower lift of the built-up heel. Thus the items under scrutiny served as heeltaps. It is recognized that first heels appeared in the 9th century as a feature of Persian riders’ footwear. They helped to hold the feet firmly in the stirrups when the warrior stood on the stirrups to shoot with a bow or to slash with a sabre more efficiently. Volga Bulgaria had close relations with Iran, therefore Bulgar riders may well have adopted a new kind of footwear. Even though there is no other evidence save the iron heeltaps, it may be assumed that heeled footwear was adopted in Volga Bulgaria sooner than in Rus and European countries, where it happened in the 16th century. This fact is essential for both studying the footwear of the Middle Ages and tactics of fighting on horseback.
This Statement of Practice presents {Queer} + {Metals}, a multilayered project that engaged an international cohort of artists in a conversation about the intersection of queerness and metalsmithing. ...The purpose of the project was to crowdsource the question: What is queer metals? This Statement of Practice comprises three sections: an explanatory framework of the project; an interview between Rebekah Frank and Dauvit Alexander about the exhibition; and excerpts of the voices of eight participants in the project, accompanied by images of their work, who shared their thoughts with Frank during a recorded video conversation.
Refining predicted protein structures with all-atom molecular dynamics simulations is one route to producing, entirely by computational means, structural models of proteins that rival in quality ...those that are determined by X-ray diffraction experiments. Slow rearrangements within the compact folded state, however, make routine refinement of predicted structures by unrestrained simulations infeasible. In this work, we draw inspiration from the fields of metallurgy and blacksmithing, where practitioners have worked out practical means of controlling equilibration by mechanically deforming their samples. We describe a two-step refinement procedure that involves identifying collective variables for mechanical deformations using a coarse-grained model and then sampling along these deformation modes in all-atom simulations. Identifying those low-frequency collective modes that change the contact map the most proves to be an effective strategy for choosing which deformations to use for sampling. The method is tested on 20 refinement targets from the CASP12 competition and is found to induce large structural rearrangements that drive the structures closer to the experimentally determined structures during relatively short all-atom simulations of 50 ns. By examining the accuracy of side-chain rotamer states in subensembles of structures that have varying degrees of similarity to the experimental structure, we identified the reorientation of aromatic side chains as a step that remains slow even when encouraging global mechanical deformations in the all-atom simulations. Reducing the side-chain rotamer isomerization barriers in the all-atom force field is found to further speed up refinement.
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