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AbstractThe impacts of climate change on heritage collections in Mediterranean museums are serious and lead to accelerated material degradation, loss of value, increasing conservation costs and climatisation. Climate change scenarios and simulation models have been developed to predict the extreme and average future environmental conditions and to assess the future long-term risks caused by global warming for museum buildings and their collections in Mediterranean countries, with Egypt being particularly at risk. This paper presents the results of the risk analysis of the indoor and outdoor environments in Alexandria Museum of Fine Arts (AMFA) in Egypt to provide an overview of the current situation of conservation and museum management and to provide evidence-based data to support decision-making regarding preventive conservation given the museum's limited funding, capacity and resources. Unfortunately, the air quality in the museum cannot be considered satisfactory and specific measures need to be taken to improve the level of air quality and museum and building management. The results enabled an assessment of indoor air quality and provided information on potential risks to the museum building and collections, including variations in temperature (T) and relative humidity (RH), concentrations of NO2, SO2, O3, CO2, acetic and formic acid and lighting conditions, as well as the location and management of the museum. The results necessitate the development of a preventive conservation plan to address the challenges associated with high T/RH fluctuations and pollution pressure. This requires more regular use of the HVAC system within certain T/RH set points as well as minimising light exposure and the use of UV-filtering glazing. Care should be taken to ensure that housekeeping and emergency preparedness reduce the damping and salt florescence in the museum building. However, dealing with the impact of climate change on indoor and outdoor environments and museum collections in Mediterranean museums requires a holistic and adaptive approach that includes joint collaboration, research, training and strategic planning to ensure the long-term preservation of valuable cultural heritage collections in different climates with customised adaptations based on local environmental conditions, resources and needs. Resilience planning should be region-specific and take into account the potential impacts of extreme weather events, sea level rise and other climate-related challenges.

ABSTRACT Exogamous marriage alliances involving royal women played a prominent role in the conversion of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to Christianity in the seventh century AD. Yet the large number of well-furnished female burials from this period suggests a broader change in the role of women. The authors present the results of isotopic analysis of seventh-century burials, comparing male and female mobility and the mobility of females from well-furnished versus poorly/unfurnished burials. Results suggest increased mobility during the Conversion Period that is, paradoxically, most noticeable among women buried in poorly furnished graves; their well-furnished contemporaries were more likely to have grown up near to their place of burial.

AbstractArchival boxes are used as a preventive measure to control the microenvironment in museums and archives storages. However, their efficiency in protecting valuable artefacts from fluctuations in relative humidity (RH) is not yet fully understood. In this study, the environmental performance of different archival boxes with different configurations (size, design, presence of holes/paper material, cardboard types, surface modification) was included in the evaluation of internal environment (RH). The effectiveness of archival boxes on reducing relative humidity fluctuations was investigated by testing various properties of boxes and boards, such as air exchange rates (AER), moisture sorption and water vapour transmission rates (WVTR). While most cardboard boxes showed only a limited buffering against the humidity ingress, strategies such as surface modification limited the interaction of a box with the external environment, resulting in a more stable internal environment. Material and box properties, such as moisture sorption, AER and WVTR proved to be useful quantitative tools for assessing the environmental performance of the selected archival boxes.

Abstract The digitization of the US Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) backfile of six million patents undertaken between 1951 and 2001 was a five-decade struggle, featuring several media transitions from print and microfilm to CD-ROMs and, finally, the Web. This mass digitization project is on a similar scale to Google Books and the Internet Archive, but it is rarely discussed within critical digitization scholarship or for its significance as a tool for knowledge production. In this article, I focus on the USPTO’s patent document’s digital and physical material form and how the current paradigm of access and storage of the digital backfile emerged. Through this case study, I build upon Ian Milligan’s distinction between the ‘text’ and ‘platform’ layers of a digitization project to demonstrate how historical decisions regarding format and metadata continue to influence how users retrieve and interpret documents, such as patents, online.

So-called ‘forgotten’ or ‘orphan’ crops are an important component of strategies aimed at preserving and promoting biodiversity. Knowledge of historical cultivation, usage, and geographic and evolutionary trajectories of plants, that is, crop history research, is important for the long-term success of such efforts. However, research biases in the crops chosen for study may present hurdles. This review attempts to systematically identify patterns in crop species representativeness within archaeology-based crop history research. A meta-analysis and synthesis of archaeo- botanical evidence (and lack thereof) is presented for 268 species known to have been cultivated for food prior to 1492 CE from the Mediterranean region to South Asia. We identified 39 genera with known crop plants in this geographical and histor- ical context that are currently absent from its archaeobotanical record, constituting ‘orphan’ crops of archaeobotany. In addition, a worldwide synthesis of crop species studied using geometric morphometric, archaeogenetic and stable isotope analyses of archaeological plant remains is presented, and biases in the species represented in these disciplines are discussed. Both disciplinary methodological biases and economic agenda-based biases affecting species representativeness in crop history research are apparent. This study also highlights the limited geographic diffusion of most crops and the potential for deeper historical perspectives on how crops become marginal- ized and ‘forgotten’. L'agrobiodiversité est un puissant levier d'action de l'agriculture durable à l'échelle mondiale. La culture, la conservation et la réintroduction de diverses espèces végétales, y compris les cultures ‘oubliées’ et ‘sous-utilisées’, contribuent à l'agrobiodiversité mondiale, aux écosystèmes vivants et à la production alimentaire durable. Ces actions bénéficient des connaissances traditionnelles et historiques des trajectoires évolutives et culturelles des plantes cultivées. Cette étude représente une première tentative de mesure systématique de la représentativité des espèces dans les études des restes archéologiques de plantes. Les résultats indiquent que, en plus des sources de biais méthodologiques spécifiques à la discipline, les biais agricoles modernes peuvent se répliquer dans la recherche sur l'histoire des cultures et influencer la compréhension des ‘cultures oubliées’. Reconnaître ces biais est un premier pas vers leur rectification et la promotion de l'agrobiodiversité dans la recherche et les applications pratiques. International audience