THE BABYLONIAN ASTRONOMICAL DIARIES: A GRAPHICAL ANALYSIS OF THEIR IMPLIED REFERENCE SYSTEM Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry (MAA) 2016

https://www.academia.edu/39945922/THE_BABYLONIAN_ASTRONOMICAL_DIARIES_A_GRAPHICAL_ANALYSIS_OF_THEIR_IMPLIED_REFERENCE_SYSTEM?rhid=41533914141&swp=rr-rw-wc-170578636&nav_from=1ae0c90f-0944-4a55-9ac0-35fc4fadb954 The intent of this study is to describe the directional relations employed in the Babylonian Astronomical Diaries and visually demonstrate their function with charts showing positions of the Moon, planets and stars as viewed on dates corresponding with diary entries. The Babylonians observed and recorded celestial events each night for over six centuries during the first millennium BC. A number of cuneiform tablets containing these astronomical diaries have been recovered and were later translated by Abraham Sachs and Hermann Hunger. The majority of diary entries track the position of the Moon with reference to 31 "normal stars," all within 10 degrees of the ecliptic. Entries specify the moon as being "above," "below," "in front of," or "behind" a second body by a specified distance in "cubits." The extant tablets fail to adequately define the reference system used for the topographical relations. Computer-generated star-charts that are specific for the date and location of selected diary entries show a general interdependence between the topographical relations and the celestial course of the Sun, Moon, and planets. John Steele has discussed the Babylonians as having considered the Moon and planets to move through the zodiac within their own individual bands. This is considered with regard to graphical data that represents a distinct correlation between diary descriptions and the path of the general direction of ecliptic travel.

A study of Babylonian planetary theory III. The planet Mercury (2021) Teije deJong

https://www.academia.edu/126021122/A_study_of_Babylonian_planetary_theory_III_The_planet_Mercury_2021_?rhid=41533914141&swp=rr-rw-wc-170578636&nav_from=518796bb-d04a-4365-89f3-87222d6462b7 In this series of papers I attempt to provide an answer to the question how the Babylonian scholars arrived at their mathematical theory of planetary motion. Papers I and II were devoted to system A theory of the outer planets and of the planet Venus. In this third and last paper I will study system A theory of the planet Mercury. Our knowledge of the Babylonian theory of Mercury is at present based on twelve Ephemerides and seven Procedure Texts. Three computational systems of Mercury are known, all of system A. System A 1 is represented by nine Ephemerides covering the years 190 BC to 100 BC and system A 2 by two Ephemerides covering the years 310 to 290 BC. System A 3 is known from a Procedure Text and from Text M, an Ephemeris of the last evening visibility of Mercury for the years 424 to 403 BC. From an analysis of the Babylonian observations of Mercury preserved in the Astronomical Diaries and Planetary Texts we find: (1) that dates on which Mercury reaches its stationary points are not recorded, (2) that Normal Star observations on or near dates of first and last appearance of Mercury are rare (about once every twenty observations), and (3) that about one out of every seven pairs of first and last appearances is recorded as "omitted" when Mercury remains invisible due to a combination of the low inclination of its orbit to the horizon and the attenuation by atmospheric extinction. To be able to study the way in which the Babylonian scholars constructed their system A models of Mercury from the available observational material I have created a database of synthetic observations by computing the dates and zodiacal longitudes of all first and last appearances and of all stationary points of Mercury in Babylon between 450 and 50 BC. Of the data required for the construction of an ephemeris synodic time intervals t can be directly derived from observed dates but zodiacal longitudes and synodic arcs λ must be determined in some other way. Because for Mercury positions with respect to Normal Stars can only rarely be determined at its first or last appearance I propose that the Babylonian scholars used the relation λ t −3;39,40, which follows from the period relations, to compute synodic arcs of Mercury from the observed synodic time intervals. An additional difficulty in the construction of System A step

MESOPOTAMIAN PLANETARY ASTRONOMY-ASTROLOGY: Cuneiform Monographs 18 David Brown 2000, CM 18

https://www.academia.edu/44807000/MESOPOTAMIAN_PLANETARY_ASTRONOMY_ASTROLOGY_Cuneiform_Monographs_18?rhid=41533914141&swp=rr-rw-wc-170578636&nav_from=6c50c7b6-3f33-49a4-be5e-8bfe4e8076c5

Roundtable ‘Revisiting the History of Participation: Urban Design as Commoning and New Theoretical Frameworks’ chaired by Marianna Charitonidou, 37th Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ) 2020 Marianna Charitonidou, Pelin Tan, Alfredo Brillembourg

https://www.academia.edu/44439792/Roundtable_Revisiting_the_History_of_Participation_Urban_Design_as_Commoning_and_New_Theoretical_Frameworks_chaired_by_Marianna_Charitonidou_37th_Annual_Conference_of_the_Society_of_Architectural_Historians_Australia_and_New_Zealand_SAHANZ_2020?rhid=41534009075&swp=rr-rw-wc-170573813&nav_from=f5991b29-66aa-439e-a9e9-21df2fa43532 Under the headers of ‘collaboration’, ‘participatory design’ and ‘co-production’ participation is nowadays at the centre of the debate on urban design. Architects and urban designers are developing new concepts, tools and roles to comply with these new participatory modii operandi. However, it seems that it is sometimes forgotten that the issue of participation has a longstanding history. The roundtable aims to explore this longstanding tradition of experiments with participatory processes in the practice and teaching of urban design. Departing from the projects of ILAUD (International Laboratory of Architecture and Urban Design) in Italy, the ARAU (Atelier de recherche et d’action urbaines) in Belgium, and the SAAL (Service for Local Mobile Support) in Portugal, the roundtable aims investigate the various forms that participation in urban design practice can take, from collective processes of design, to collaborative construction and common management. Understanding the critical differences between these different approaches can help us to refine our theories and tools of urban design. The participatory concern in the urban design process has not only a long history in practice but also in urban design education. Various experimental initiatives with participation emerged in the domain of architectural pedagogy in the late sixties, often starting from student initiatives. Good examples are The Architects’ Resistance (TAR), a group formed in 1968 by architecture students from Columbia GSAPP, MIT Department of Architecture, and Yale School of Architecture describing itself as «a communications network, a research group, and an action group … concerned about the social responsibility of architects and the framework within which architecture is practiced», as well as the National Organization of Minority Architecture Students (NOMAS). Many of these groups emerged within the context of the struggles for civil rights and thus made a plea to have non-hegemonic or ‘other’ voices heard in the urban design process. These initiatives explored how new concepts, roles and tools for participation could become part of the education of the architect and urban designer. The objective of the roundtable is to explore how, within the context of the contemporary interest in new urban design methods that reinvent the relationship between urban design and democracy, the long history of the participation can offer us clues on how civic engagement and social responsibility can be critically conceived. The contemporary interest in methods of ‘collaboration’, ‘participatory design’ and ‘co-production’, can learn from the long history of participation about how urban design can forge a critical relationship with civic engagement and social responsibility. Instead of repeating the concepts, roles and tools that were tested some decades ago, we hope that contemporary urban designers engage more intensively with the historical examples and use them as a base for new critical approaches. Most importantly, historical experiments like The Architects’ Resistance (TAR) and National Organization of Minority Architecture Students (NOMAS) remind us that the issue of participation in not only a question of urban design practice, but also – and maybe most urgently – requires experiments and changes in urban design education. The roundtable aims to reflect upon such experiments and changes and to explore how new theoretical frameworks concerning the historiography of architecture and urban design could enhance these reinvented conceptions of the notion of participation.

From Idea to Infrastructure: The Archaeological Imagination In Urban Futures Michael Shanks 2026, Cambridge University

https://www.academia.edu/170573813/From_Idea_to_Infrastructure_The_Archaeological_Imagination_In_Urban_Futures?email_work_card=title This is a slide deck to accompany a conference paper about the archaeological imagination applied to urban architecture, planning, design. Hosted by the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge on July 17 2026, the global conference on Situated Imagination and Imaginaries of Urban Futures brought together over 70 scholars, practitioners, and artists from around the world for a day to investigate how real-world conditions are shaping and contesting imaginations and imaginaries across politics and space – [Link] - https://www.arct.cam.ac.uk/events/situated-imagination-and-imaginaries-urban-futures-conference The argument We start with Chris’s analysis of massive infrastructural failure in New York City in the wake of Superstorm Sandy 2012 – a story of (failure of) complex interconnected processes. Typologies of infrastructure systems (roads, water supply, energy systems) don’t help deal with this, and miss out the human component – the people who live in cities. How might we shift to a process-oriented human-centered approach (to urban infrastructures) that is design-actionable, that can guide action? Consider archaeology and the archaeological imagination. This conference asks how situated imaginaries become infrastructure — how collective visions of resilience, decarbonisation, circularity and equity might translate into spatial form, technical systems, and lived urban experience. We want to argue that this translation demands what can be called an archaeological imagination — a design sensibility grounded in temporal depth, process-relational thinking, and urban memory practice. Consider the city Chris described. Every city is precisely what remains. The urban present is a palimpsest, percolated by many pasts: every pipe, cable, regulation and corridor carries forward earlier decisions — earlier imaginaries of governance, risk and collective life. Some of these decisions and dependencies go back thousands of years to the very beginnings of city life. Infrastructure is both archive and instrument: a material memory practice that also does work in the present. Consider those East River seawalls, built to the high-water mark Hurricane Donna set in 1960. Superstorm Sandy overtopped them. That was not a failure of engineering. It was a failure of temporal imagination — an archive misread as a guarantee. The archaeology of cities. Cities are not built; they are performed. A city is not a stable object but something done, generation after generation — a dynamic constellation of interacting energies. And no city was ever invented from nothing. The Mediterranean city-state of the first millennium BCE emerged as a re-articulation of two inherited machines — Near Eastern urban institutions and European configurations of group membership — a recombination that, incidentally, gave us politics. Urban futures too. The generative design question is never: what shall we build on empty ground? It is: what do we have, and what new combination is latent within it? The stratified section read as repertoire, not constraint. Cities performed – in a repertoire of processes. We rolled out a guiding diagram of ours that summarizes such a view of urban dwelling - a constellation of processes associated with what gets called urbanism. How might we share this approach? Teach it? Chris rounded off the talk with studio-based learning, project-based learning by doing, with the studio a laboratory for infrastructural prototyping. Just as presented in our book last year – Creative Pragmatics for Active Learning in STEM Education [Link] - https://mshanks.com/2025/04/19/creative-pragmatics/.

Q. Baril, "Le fort Liédot, étude archéologique d’un fort napoléonien", 5e rencontres militaires de Napoleonica la Revue "Des archives papier aux archives du sol : l’archéologie napoléonienne", 13 oct. Fondation Napoléon, Paris. HADES Archéologie

https://www.academia.edu/170571437/Q_Baril_Le_fort_Li%C3%A9dot_%C3%A9tude_arch%C3%A9ologique_d_un_fort_napol%C3%A9onien_5e_rencontres_militaires_de_Napoleonica_la_Revue_Des_archives_papier_aux_archives_du_sol_l_arch%C3%A9ologie_napol%C3%A9onienne_13_oct_Fondation_Napol%C3%A9on_Paris?email_work_card=title

N. Sauvaitre, "La redécouverte du château des Lostanges de Sainte-Alvère", 33e Rencontres d’archéologie et d’histoire de Périgueux "La saisons dans les châteaux", (25-27 septembre 2026, Périgueux) HADES Archéologie

https://www.academia.edu/170571285/N_Sauvaitre_La_red%C3%A9couverte_du_ch%C3%A2teau_des_Lostanges_de_Sainte_Alv%C3%A8re_33e_Rencontres_d_arch%C3%A9ologie_et_d_histoire_de_P%C3%A9rigueux_La_saisons_dans_les_ch%C3%A2teaux_25_27_septembre_2026_P%C3%A9rigueux_?email_work_card=title Pour son 33 e colloque annuel, l'association des Rencontres d'archéologie et d'histoire en Périgord a retenu le the me des saisons au cha teau. Il ne s'agit pas ici de refaire un colloque, qui a biento t vingt ans : Le château au quotidien : les travaux et les jours 1 mais d'aborder les saisonnalite s du cha teau sous un autre angle au prisme de recherches historiques re centes et de de couvertes arche ologiques nouvelles. De rive du verbe serere, « semer » et « planter », la saison est e tymologiquement le temps des semailles, mais aussi un laps de temps juge favorable, opportun pour faire quelque chose, et de signe par me tonymie l'aboutissement d'une re alisation. Ce doublesens est bien visible dans la grande varie te d'expressions e labore es depuis le XII e sie cle. Les unes (saison fraî che/chaude, saison des pluies, etc.) mettent pluto t l'accent sur les caracte ristiques climatiques des saisons et leurs conse quences sur les pratiques agricoles, associe es au temps astronomique (re volution terrestre, e quinoxes, solstices), d'autres de signent ce qu'il est opportun de faire (de saison, saison des amours) ou pas (hors saison), sans oublier bien su r le panel des interme diaires qui se jouent des deux sens, la pe riode favorable de l'anne e ou des visiteurs peuvent affluer en un lieu, de finissant, par exemple, la notion de haute -et par de faut, basse -saison touristique. Si la structure de l'anne e calendaire en quatre saisons (printemps, e te , automne, hiver) est valable pour les re gions de la zone tempe re e, force est de constater qu'elle ne s'applique pas partout et que la variabilite climatique de la saison se distingue, dans son rapport au temps, de la notion de saisonnalite qui de signe le caracte re saisonnier et cyclique d'un phe nome ne social, religieux, politique, e conomique qui n'est pas ne cessairement lie au temps qu'il fait. Il y a une forme de provocation, assume e, que d'inviter a interroger « Les saisons au cha teau », dans la mesure ou la demeure castrale ne tisse que tardivement des liens explicites avec la repre sentation calendaire des saisons. Les perceptions antiques des saisons, grecques puis romaines, davantage lie es au monde me diterrane en, proposent une explication du monde selon les re ve lations de la religion 2 . Ne anmoins, l'architecte romain Vitruve, repris par tous les grands architectes de la Renaissance, d' Alberti a Palladio, accordait dans son ce le bre Traité 3 , toute son attention non seulement a l'emplacement mais aussi a l'exposition des villas. Celle-ci e tait rigoureusement choisie en fonction des saisons, a partir de crite res fonde s entre autres sur le chaud et le froid et sur l'ensoleillement.