Overlay architecture
Introduction
Archaeology of architecture, also known as mural archaeology, architectural archeology or archaeological architecture, is a branch of archeology that is dedicated to the study of architectural materials.[1].
Origins
This discipline arises in Italy. The term was coined by Tiziano Mannoni" in 1990, and since then there have been international conferences and meetings aimed at grouping experiences in research in which the archaeological method has been applied to the study of buildings.
There are two fundamental elements that have favored the development of this discipline:
Italy is where there are more consolidated critical studies. In Spain, Italian influence has made possible the so-called "stratigraphic literacy."
Schools
On the one hand there are a series of scholars who define the archeology of architecture as a new way of approaching the architectural record from post-processualist perspectives. It would be one of the many “archaeologies” that have been coined in the last two decades as a result of the fragmentation that characterizes postmodern idealist positions in archaeology. From this perspective, a whole series of interpretations of the architectural phenomenon can be grouped from contextual, structuralist, social, etc. positions. that pursues the interpretation of architecture both in symbolic and spatial terms.
Among the main themes that have been addressed so far, we must highlight the study of domestic architecture or the spatial dimension of the architectural phenomenon at various scales, delving into the symbolic dimensions and meanings of space.
A second approach, however, is more directly related to the expansion of the disciplinary scope of postclassical archeology in the last thirty years, in such a way that an archeology of architecture has been defined insofar as, having its own instrumental and conceptual baggage, it has generated a whole series of perspectives and models of social analysis of architecture that until now had not been systematically addressed by an archeology excessively indebted to stylistic-artistic positions.
In recent years there has been a certain rapprochement between both positions, in a kind of methodological and conceptual "mixing".