Evidence 93Consider, too, how documentation of the organization,
disposition and construction of the town of Thérouanne, in
the Pas-de-Calais of the French northwest, might help histo-
rians to understand the military strategies, techniques and
technologies of Charles V, whose army razed it to the ground
in 1553 and erased its existence by laying salt on the agri-
cultural land to prevent any possibility of its renewal. These
events are not obviously the architectural historian’s domain,
but knowledge of the town and city, the organization of the
siege and its attendant fortifi cations, as well as the process
of the town’s dismantling and destruction can enrich the
historical subject proper and open architectural history to
new perspectives.^14
The historian of culture or of technology might likewise
consider the nineteenth-century buildings of New Zealand
Maori as indices of certain attitudes towards cultural and
technological transmission and adaptation in the wake of
British colonization and settlement (from 1840). Such a
history might concern the nineteenth-century and twentieth-
century development of building forms and arrangements,
the development of fortifi cation techniques, the adaptation
of British and European architectural precedents for Maori
building, and such building technologies as paint and nails.
These historical developments have, in turn, implications
for the social, cultural, religious and artistic histories of
Maori.^15
Along with all those other works of various media that we
might call architecture, buildings are shaped by legislation,
technology, taste, convention and use. They therefore allow
insight into the broader historical conditions in which they
were made and inhabited, and therefore become useful docu-
ments for any number of cognate historical specializations.
But architecture’s appearance among the fi eld of evidence
gathered around a particular historiographical problem is no
guarantee of its direct availability to a historian. Especially
for those architectural historians trained fi rst as architects, a
privileged insight into the process from design to realization
to occupation would allow the historian of architecture to
assess where architectural works, as evidence, bear upon
issues that would be the proper domain of another kind of
historical specialist, in a world where the line between one