ABSTRACT
Earth buildings and their materials of construction are impacted by the effects of climate and climate change. Literally shaped from the earth, they intersect with both cultural and natural heritage in thought-provoking ways, challenging notions of authenticity, durability and fragility. Earth buildings are never stable or static. How we respond to that instability depends on the way in which we observe and understand change. At different temporal and spatial scales, we see different things and, therefore, interpret the process and substance of ‘change’ in different ways. For instance, close-up, microphysical changes to components of earth – such as contraction and expansion of clay particles – are clear in laboratory conditions, but their significance and processual consequences are not fully appreciated in the field. At mid-range, impacts to the physical shape and form of monuments are evident, but the connection of these changes to microscale processes is not always recognised. At a larger scale, impacts to landscapes and human social-cultural mechanisms of the craft-making heritage skills that are connected to the maintenance of earth buildings may be evident, but are not often understood holistically alongside the smaller-scale processes. While in the short to medium term changes result in erosion and collapse of buildings and artefacts, over the longer term changes in those processes result in abandonment, and subsequent formation and deformation of earthen building materials, while the intangible heritage of earth-building craft skills are often glossed over entirely. Earth buildings are sometimes abandoned, sometimes recycled back into other earthen building materials and at other times are managed to become static cultural heritage ‘objects’. Those objects become ‘products’ – monuments protected under local, national and international cultural heritage and conservation protocols. Thus, they are artificially stabilised in a form that would seem to reside outside processes of ‘change’ – an inevitably forlorn attempt to resist change and adaptation. As such they have suffered an ill-fit within nineteenth-and twentieth-century conservation paradigms that privilege the maintenance of ‘current condition’.
