This is an edited volume, produced as part of the H2020 Twinning project Promised - Promoting Archaeological Sciences in the Eastern Mediterranean (Grant Agreement 811068), a joint project between the Cyprus Institute and the Universities of Leuven and Cambridge. We would like to thank Patrick Degryse, Cyprian Broodbank, and Marcos Martinón-Torres, who helped for Promised to be so successful - and all contributors to this guide! This Handbook is dedicated to Myrto Georgakopoulou, an invaluable colleague and a dear friend, who dedicated her life to promoting Archaeological Science in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East.

La pseudociencia suele ser identificada como una manifestación de la ignorancia científica o una inexactitud en conceptos científicos que proviene de una confusión (confundir el concepto de satélite con el de planeta, o el concepto de la energía en física con el concepto tradicional ajeno a esta ciencia); sin embargo, la pseudociencia no se limita a una información errada, sino que implica una forma de pensar el mundo y las relaciones propias con ese mundo. Este artículo se escribe desde la preocupación de intentar entender la pseudociencia como un fenómeno del pensamiento y la posibilidad de acceder a su comprensión.

Breve resumen del concreto en estado fresco

Michelangelo’s extraordinary drawings for the fortifications of Florence (c. 1526-1530) are widely regarded as a turning point in his architectural career. Yet despite considerable scholarly attention the rationale behind these unconventional designs remains a mystery. Lack of familiarity with the practice of siege warfare and fortress design has led art historians to offer implausible explanations for the admittedly bewildering formal appearance of Michelangelo’s plans. To this day they are interpreted as formalist, irrational works intended to frighten the enemy with their aggressive, zoomorphic appearance, and even, in downright psychoanalytic terms, as panic drawings expressing Michelangelo’s subliminal fear of death. But such interpretations fail to explain how Michelangelo arrived at this startling variety of unprecedented architectural forms. This paper argues instead that eccentric forms do not require eccentric explanations. A fresh analysis of the twenty drawings will show that they are not enigmatic doodles of an inscrutable genius but the result of a specific design process. I aim to elucidate Michelangelo’s method by demonstrating that his complex plans were essentially generated by ingeniously combining a limited set of rational design principles. Dating from a uniquely fertile moment in the history of fortification – after its basic design precepts were overturned by advances in artillery, but just before the pentagonal bastion became the standard solution – Michelangelo’s drawings document his characteristically idiosyncratic attempt to rethink the core problem of military architecture – how to reconcile the conflicting demands of attack and defense? – from first principles. Conceived not for heavy cannon but for portable and medium-sized firearms (which explains the absence of massive earthworks and the proliferation instead of gun positions for short-range frontal and flanking fire), Michelangelo’s fortifications are not whimsical fantasies but reasoned, even overwrought proposals to respond to the actual siege methods of the time.