Bøger udgivet af Verlag D.Oesterreichische

This publication presents the proceedings of the OeAW Young Academy's Science Day on sustainability. Humanity faces a multiple sustainability crisis: global resource consumption has reached a level transgressing several planetary boundaries (including, e.g., climate change and biodiversity loss), while at the same time major societal challenges prevail, including ending hunger, reducing poverty, ensuring equal rights and sustaining world peace. Across disciplines, research addresses diverse and interconnected sustainability challenges, departing from diverging starting points and developing a plethora of theoretical and methodological approaches, problem diagnoses, and potential solutions. Despite having become a topic of public interest in recent, crucial evidence from sustainability research still does not feed sufficiently into political and economic decision-making to achieve ecological and societal sustainability goals. In view of these considerations, and as groundwork for advancing its sustainability agenda, the Young Academy solicited positions from its members and selected guests in order to determine the bandwidth of approaches. Three questions were asked: 1) What characterizes the current sustainability crisis? 2) How would societies need to change to attain a transformation toward sustainability? 3) How can research contribute to mastering this challenge? Thus, what you are holding in your hands is a preliminary output of this exchange, a collection of inputs, and by no means a treatise on sustainability. If anything, it demonstrates that sustainability can, and must, be conceived as a multidimensional challenge affecting ecological, socio-economic and cultural processes.

As neighbors since the ninth century, the German and Czech inhabitants of the Austrian and Bohemian Lands have experienced substantial political, economic, social, and cultural changes. In the Holy Roman Empire, Premyslides, Babenbergs, Habsburgs, and Luxembourgs founded abbeys and towns and promoted settlement based on German law. In 1526, Ferdinand I began common Habsburg rule. Under his successors, confessional conflict erupted in the Thirty Years' War. The Peace of Westphalia allowed absolute control of the realm but not the Holy Roman Empire until victory over the Ottomans. Reforms under Maria Theresa and Joseph II brought modernization. After the Congress of Vienna, ethnic nationalism increased, leading to Czech-German national conflict in the Bohemian Lands. Still, Austria-Hungary experienced economic, technological, educational, and cultural quantum leaps under Emperor Francis Joseph I until it disintegrated in WW I, a fate sealed by the unbalanced Treaties of Saint-Germain (1919) and Trianon (1920). Hitler's policy of aggression, the forced "Anschluss" of Austria, the Munich Agreement, and the creation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia pitted Austrian, Czech, and Sudeten-German societies against each other and annihilated the Jews. In 1945/46, the BeneS Decrees forced the expropriation, expulsion, and resettlement of Sudeten Germans. In 1948, Austria and Czechoslovakia were separated by the Iron Curtain. Twenty years after the suppression of the Prague Spring by the Warsaw Pact in 1968, a socio-political watershed occurred in 1989/90, creating a new Central European community: Austria joined the European Union in 1995, Czechia in 2004.

The journal "Mitteilungen zur Christlichen Archäologie" was founded in 1995 and is published regularly once a year. In addition to the - on average - five scientific articles on topics relating to Christian archaeology, in the broadest possible sense and in the context of classical archaeology, ancient history, art history, Byzantine studies, classical philology and religious studies, it also provides bibliographies of works on Late Antiquity and Christian archaeology in Austria (with an appendix on late antique / early Christian Ephesos). Since Volume 9 (2003), an electronic version of the journal has also been published. Its primary objective is an international orientation, i.e. disseminating new results from research in the discipline of Christian archaeology around the globe. Another aspect is supporting the next generation of researchers. The articles, written in German, English, French and Italian, are written by authors from around the world. Because of the topic of research, the regional focus is on the European and Mediterranean regions, but it is not limited to these areas.This time we start with two catacombs, the Generosa Catacomb in Rome and the complex of Wignacourt 17 (St Paul's Grotto Complex) in Rabat (Malta). The third contribution deals with archaeological evidence for the cult of relics in the Holy Land, the fourth with probably the oldest archaeologically verifiable diakonia in Ephesus. Then follow the two Pannonian saints (Quirinus and Martin) and their reception in Savaria/Szombathely and, as always, the bibliography on Late Antiquity and Christian Archaeology in Austria (with an appendix on Late Antique-Early Christian Ephesus).