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This article provides a glimpse into the story and meaning of the Bebegig Sukamantri Mask which is used in the art of a sustainable and fast-growing folk carnival in West Java, Indonesia. The masks used in the carnival are unique and are an expression of the cultural heritage left by the ancestors of the ancient Sundanese people in West Java. Each mask creation, in various colors and shapes, derives from the face of Batarakala, who is a very well-known figure in Hindu culture and represents the god of anger. Based on the various shapes and colors of the masks, there are three groups, which are believed to relate to the mythology of the existence of astral creatures that protected ancient Sundanese people, namely Rakshasa for the nobility, Detya for the common people and Denawa for the clergy. The existence of these astral beings is found in the 15th-century ancient manuscript entitled Sanghyang Siksa Kanda ing Karesian (a clue to Reshi). Preserving the Bebegig Sukamantri mask as part of ancient Sundanese cultural heritage is a worthwhile goal because of its uniqueness and its significance for future generations. It is, moreover, greatly appreciated as a cultural carnival event at both national and international level. Conservation Science in Cultural Heritage, Vol. 20 (2020)

The osteological investigation of archived and historic skeletal collections can often provide clues to how they were organised and managed, offering key osteobiographical insight into past populations. A small, yet significant, collection of skulls housed at the Museum “Giuseppe Sergi” of the Sapienza University of Rome, remained anonymous prior to a recent reassessment protocol started in 2018. This collection was excavated from a funerary area discovered during the 19th century from the site of Castel Trosino (Ascoli Piceno, Italy). The cemetery was part of an important community during the Longobard domination of Italy, as testified by the richness of the cultural artefacts reported with the burials. The 19 skulls presented in this paper are the only ones available for assessment; all the others were lost shortly after the first excavation. Their importance is related to providing a better understanding of biological evidence of a community that lived in Italy during the Early Middle Ages. Conservation Science in Cultural Heritage, Vol. 20 (2020)

The study concerns Italian masonries and focuses on historical, medieval and modern mortars. Within the context of the different regions under examination (Piedmont, the Po Valley area, Latium, the Umbria-Marche region, and Apulia and Sardinia) a wide variety of materials with different chemical-physical characteristics were used in masonry work, determining different structural behaviors. The project aims at improving our knowledge about historical mortars in order to further the conservation of Italian built heritage, especially in zones with seismic risk. To achieve these results, we took samples and carried out analyses to investigate the different mechanical and cohesion properties that influence the vulnerability of ruined or collapsed structures. This information has enabled advances to be made in the prevention, maintenance, protection and preservation of historical buildings. Further details will concern the history of construction techniques, with particular regard to the relationship between local resources and construction sites. Another important topic is the role of different components and additives during the preparation of the mortars and their level of hydraulicity. Conservation Science in Cultural Heritage, Vol. 20 (2020)

This paper presents the method adopted in the study of Ibo, a small island of the Quirimbas Archipelago in northern Mozambique. Ibo is part of a larger study, begun in 2004 which is still ongoing. In the first phase, the author's attention was focused on the restoration of the historic architecture built with coral limestone. But very soon it became evident that it was necessary to study the context in which these coral architectures were built. After a few years of careful observation, it was apparent that coral stone architecture is strongly conditioned by the knowledge and conservation of the natural environment in which it is built. And in the case of Ibo, the beauty of its heritage and its conservation lies in the delicate balance between architecture and nature. Conservation Science in Cultural Heritage, Vol 19 (2019)

The paper presents the results from Raman spectroscopy (RS) analyses of the works of Szymon Czechowicz and his workshop ‒ the most important Polish baroque painter. RS was used for clarification and supplementation of results carried out by the methods: Infrared False Colour (IRFC), XRF, XRD, SEM-EDS, GC-MS, and ATR-FTIR. A complementary analysis of the artist’s work allowed the characterisation of the fillers and the binders of the grounds and the paint layers in his art. The presented results showed that RS was especially useful for identifying the pigments used in the mixtures. It allowed the presence of Prussian blue in the blue and green colours to be determined and made it possible to distinguish the types of iron pigments in the mixtures. The method was useful also for the identification of several types of black pigments in the samples and to identify the massicot in the ground layers which contained another lead pigment – lead white. Tables and figures show the summation of test results carried out by RS analysis, the indication of specific chemical compounds in the painting layers and grounds, all of which provide additional information about the workshop of the most important painter of Polish Baroque. The main conclusion is that without using RS, it would be impossible to achieve these precise research results, helpful in the authentication of Szymon Czechowicz’s works. Conservation Science in Cultural Heritage, Vol 19 (2019)

In this study, conservative strategies are applied in order to limit any irreversible damage and to characterize and quantify microbial colonization that may induce the deterioration of constitutive heritage materials; subsequently, suitable antimicrobial interventions are performed based on the use of biotechnology. This paper presents a summary of the basic and applied biotechnology research developed in the Laboratory of Biology and Biotechnology for Cultural Heritage (LaBBCH, University of Palermo, Italy). It shows that biotechnology has an evidently important role in the preservation and restoration of cultural assets, also taking into consideration that “Prevention is better than cure”, a milestone in the field of human health that can be shifted and applied to the “cure and preservation” of cultural assets. Moreover, biotechnological tools offer great potential for application, thanks to the increasing interaction between the worlds of art and science, thus opening the way for advanced innovation in the conservation and restoration field of art works. Conservation Science in Cultural Heritage, Vol 19 (2019)

Conservation of historic cities is limited in many countries to valorization and safeguarding which is performed utilizing several types of interventions. Many countries aware of the importance of their heritage in the development of human life, are currently concerned with their inhabitants’ participatory role in conservation. The historic cities in Algeria are not immune to this fact. Nowadays, particular attention is paid to the quality of life in historic Algerian cities which are in continuous transformation. It has become an urgent issue to inquire into the state of these medinas. The aim of this article is to design an analysis grid of habitability for these historical cities in order to interpret the quality of life, as well as the understanding of the man-made quest for ideal livability. The adopted methodology is divided into two parts: first, making the grid and second, its projection and analysis. Application of the grid requires very diverse data and a field of study. For this purpose, several tools were mobilized: a questionnaire survey, field measurements and direct diagnosis. For a positive outcome to the research, fieldwork is essential. This is the case study of the Medina of Mostaganem. Conservation Science in Cultural Heritage, Vol 19 (2019)

We present LEDGAR, a multilabel corpus of legal provisions in contracts. The corpus was crawled and scraped from the public domain (SEC filings) and is, to the best of our knowledge, the first freely available corpus of its kind. Since the corpus was constructed semi-automatically, we apply and discuss various approaches to noise removal. Due to the rather large labelset of over 12'000 labels annotated in almost 100'000 provisions in over 60'000 contracts, we believe the corpus to be of interest for research in the field of Legal NLP, (large-scale or extreme) text classification, as well as for legal studies. We discuss several methods to sample subcopora from the corpus and implement and evaluate different automatic classification approaches. Finally, we perform transfer experiments to evaluate how well the classifiers perform on contracts stemming from outside the corpus.

Transliteration is the process of expressing a proper name from a source language in the characters of a target language (e.g. from Cyrillic to Latin characters). We present TRANSLIT, a large-scale corpus with approx. 1.6 million entries in more than 180 languages with about 3 million variations of person and geolocation names. The corpus is based on various public data sources, which have been transformed into a unified format to simplify their usage, plus a newly compiled dataset from Wikipedia. In addition, we apply several machine learning methods to establish baselines for automatically detecting transliterated names in various languages. Our best systems achieve an accuracy of 92\% on identification of transliterated pairs.