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Earthen heritage constitutes a significant yet vulnerable component of the world’s cultural legacy, encompassing archeological sites, historic monuments, vernacular buildings, and living cultural landscapes. Over the past five decades, approaches to its conservation have evolved in response to changing heritage paradigms. Since their inception in 1972, the international Terra events have played a pivotal role in shaping this field by providing a recurring platform for international exchange, knowledge production, and methodological development. This study aims to examine the shifts in research and practice through the lens of the Terra gatherings. Using a systematic review methodology conducted in accordance with the PRISMA 2020 guidelines, 638 papers from thirteen Terra proceedings (1972–2022) were analyzed and classified by geographic focus, disciplinary background, knowledge area, heritage type, construction techniques, deterioration factors, and intervention methods. The findings reveal a clear transition from early material and monument-centered approaches toward more holistic, interdisciplinary, and people-centered frameworks, with increasing attention to vernacular heritage, cultural landscapes, heritage management, and capacity building. The analysis also identifies persistent regional imbalances, a strong link between conference location and geographic representation, and a growing focus in recent decades on sustainability, disaster risk reduction, and climate change. Overall, the study demonstrates how trends reflected within the Terra proceedings have evolved and contributed to the discourse in earthen heritage conservation.
Historic Building Information Modeling (HBIM) presents significant opportunities for studying and managing heritage structure projects. This paper examines the application of HBIM in evaluating and documenting the current state, intervention design, and future worksite management of Hotel Comercio, a 19th-century building constructed of earth in the historic center of Lima, Peru. Hotel Comercio is a case study of the Seismic Retrofitting Project, a collaboration between the Getty Conservation Institute, the Ministry of Culture of Peru, and the Municipality of Lima, aiming to design, test, and implement seismic retrofitting strategies for earthen buildings using traditional techniques and local materials. Building Information Modeling (BIM) will become mandatory in Peru in 2030 for construction projects in the public sector, including heritage projects such as Hotel Comercio. Despite the established use of BIM in new construction, HBIM remains an underutilized tool for heritage conservation in the country and elsewhere. This paper highlights the advantages and limitations of HBIM use for heritage conservation projects, illustrating opportunities to integrate other documentation. It discusses factors considered to establish an effective workflow in future project stages, taking into account specific design team needs. Further, it presents considerations for facilitating successful collaboration among a multidisciplinary and international team. Showcasing the practical application of HBIM for this case study, which is currently in the design phase, offers a model for incorporating advanced technology into the conservation of historic buildings and aligning their management with practices in the built sector in Peru, ultimately ensuring their sustained care for future generations.
This study presents the results of an 11-year monitoring campaign at the V&A Museum investigating the long-term response of four drawers from an 18th-century French cabinet to the gallery environment after consolidation using the same method but different adhesives. Digital speckle pattern interferometry (DSPI) was used to detect and document delamination of the decorative layers, revealing a consistent trend in damage development. The results demonstrate that objects can acclimatize relatively quickly, within a few years of exposure to the gallery environment, corresponding to only a few climate-induced strain cycles. A major strength of this study is the long monitoring period and high comparability of the examined objects. Despite the use of different adhesives, the drawers exhibited similar rates of acclimatization, suggesting that this process represents a general phenomenon relevant to the preventive conservation of treated cultural heritage objects, or more broadly, objects exposed to environmental conditions beyond their proofed range.
Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have improved image captioning for cultural heritage. However, inferring structured cultural metadata (e.g., creator, origin, period) from visual input remains underexplored. We introduce a multi-category, cross-cultural benchmark for this task and evaluate VLMs using an LLM-as-Judge framework that measures semantic alignment with reference annotations. To assess cultural reasoning, we report exact-match, partial-match, and attribute-level accuracy across cultural regions. Results show that models capture fragmented signals and exhibit substantial performance variation across cultures and metadata types, leading to inconsistent and weakly grounded predictions. These findings highlight the limitations of current VLMs in structured cultural metadata inference beyond visual perception.
