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The translation of so-called 'honorific' titles from Punic to Latin, and their deployment in a number of public monumental inscriptions in Lepcis Magna, have often been promoted as evidence for successful Romanisation in the cities of Tripolitania. Titles such as amator concordiae and ornator patriae have been understood as affirmations that the local Lepcitan community had engaged with Augustan ideological concepts and were using them to demonstrate loyalty and support for the principate. This paper argues that a more likely influence on the translation of the titles into Latin came from the notions of philia exhibited by the Greek-speaking communities of the eastern Mediterranean in their interactions with Rome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine a Terminal Formative-period (150 bc–ad 250) bundled offering from the site of Cerro de la Virgen, located on the Pacific coast of Oaxaca, Mexico. The offering was emplaced below a prominent public building in the site's ceremonial centre and contained five stone objects, including a rain deity mask, a fragment of a second mask, a figurine of a deceased ancestor and two miniature table altars, as well as nine small ceramic vessels. Considered together as a ‘sacred bundle’, the stone objects collectively reference agricultural fertility, rulership and ancestor veneration, which we interpret to be a metaphorical invocation of a fundamental tenet of prehispanic Mesoamerican religious belief—the sacred covenant. The offering also played an active part in founding the community of Cerro de la Virgen, connecting its residents with the divine, the ancestors and the outside world and constituting differences in status among its members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mixture of neo-Renaissance and neo-Classical forms of the National Assembly in Belgrade was to become a visual paradigm of the democratic course and national sovereignty of the Kingdom of Serbia, affirming the status of this newly horn nation-state in nineteenth-century Europe. Yet, the interpretation of political messages associated with the building's nineteenth-century architectural features is still in progress. The aim of this paper is to explore how the image of the National Assembly developed into the visual repository of different ideological connotations depending on the character of public events being organized, in the building or in the space in front of it either to support state ideologies or to fight against them. In addition to ideological settings of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this research will focus on political meetings and public gatherings of the post-WWII state constructs, from the socialist federation of Marshal Tito to the more recent emanations of Serbian statehood. Along with analyzing the architectural forms of the building serving in different political contexts, this discussion will illuminate the appropriation of space in front of the building by examining the overall staging of public events which have become embedded in the contrasting layers of a collective memory associated with the same image: the National Assembly as the backdrop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the role of public architecture in anchoring Cherokee communities to particular points within the southern Appalachian landscape in the wake of European contact in North America. Documentary evidence about Cherokee public structures known as townhouses demonstrates that they were settings for a variety of events related to public life in Cherokee towns, and that there were a variety of symbolic meanings associated with them. Archaeological evidence of Cherokee townhouses—especially the sequence of six townhouses at the Coweeta Creek site in southwestern North Carolina—demonstrates an emphasis on continuity in the placement and alignment of public architecture through time. Building and rebuilding these public structures in place, and the placement of burials within these architectural spaces, created enduring attachments between Cherokee towns and the places in which they lived, in the midst of the geopolitical instability created by European contact in eastern North America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]