The past in scene: retrieving memory in places of memory

Ref.: 299
Key theme: 03 Visual integrity of historic urban landscapes
Date of reception: 15/11/2008

AUTHORS (*Main author)

LOPES, Maria Conceição * (Portugal) - University of Coimbra
FERREIRA MACÍAS, Santiago Augustro (Portugal) - Campo Arqueológico de Metorla

ABSTRACT

The visual integrity of urban historic landscapes that are, by nature, spaces of exhibition and experience of collective memory and cultural identity, is structured on the dialog that contemporaneity undertakes with the diversity and variety of heritage constructed expressions that, by juxtaposition or interpenetration, are responsible for past experiences. Archaeology, by proposing itself to study the dynamic of past societies, fundamentally from hidden elements, builds on and enriches that dialog with the sediments of the processes of transmission, transformation and construction of collective memory and cultural identity that are indispensable to the integrity and consolidation of the scenario.
Archaeology, in its specialization of Urban Archaeology, by retrieving and giving visibility to a long term and hybrid nature heritage, brings to the debate the latency potential that facts gone with time still keep and that, due to a wide array of reasons, and by one mean or another, societies and communities revive, even if reinterpreted, as a participation subject and factor of integrity and cohesion.
In the contemporary debate between the constructed past and the present in construction, into which the multiple heritage expressions are summoned, the ways in which Archaeology puts the past in scene are invoked, giving identity and legitimacy to the urban historical landscapes.
Some historical cities of small dimensions from the inner South of Portugal, Moura, Beja, Serpa, are presented as examples of how Archaeology can determine a process of continuous construction by discovering the facts again and provide to the communities of the present ways to remember the past and renovate the fundamental principles for the construction of its identity and collective memory.

REFERENCES