Envisioning the Past Archaeology an the Image

by Smiles, Sam; Moser, Stephanie

• ISBN13: 9781405111515
• ISBN10: 1405111518
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-01-28
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

Envisioning the Past brings together archaeologists, art historians, and anthropologists to offer new perspectives on the construction of knowledge concerning the antiquity of man. The volume demonstrates the extent to which the visual presentation of archaeological research creates a particular discourse, powerful enough to shape our understanding of archaeological knowledge. No category of images is immune from this process, from site drawings to museum displays and from manuscript illustrations to digital media. Yet, given the frequent use of images as illustrative material in professional archaeological publications, museums, websites, and TV programs, there are important lessons to be learned. If a genuinely unmediated image is impossible, how should images be used? What can we learn from considering the use of images in the past and present that might guide our responsible use of them in the future? Moving beyond unchallenged presumptions about the passivity of the visual record, Envisioning the Past re-evaluates the importance of the image as a key contributor to the reconstruction of the past.

Author Biography

Sam Smiles is Professor of Art History at the University of Plymouth. He is the author of The Image of Antiquity: Ancient Britain and the Romantic Imagination (1994) and Eye Witness: Artists and Visual Documentation in Britain, 1770–1830 (2000).

Stephanie Moser is Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Southampton. She is the author of Ancestral Images: The Iconography of Human Origins (1998) and Exhibiting Egypt (2005).

Table of Contents

Series Editor's Preface	vii
List of Illustrations	ix
Notes on Contributors	xi
Introduction: The Image in Question	1	(191)
Stephanie Moser and Sam Smiles
1 Romancing the Human: The Ideology of Envisioned Human Origins	13	(16)
Paul Privateer
2 "We Grew Up and Moved On": Visitors to British Museums Consider Their "Cradle of Mankind"	29	(22)
Monique Scott
3 The American Time Machine: Indians and the Visualization of Ancient Europe	51	(21)
Stephanie Pratt
4 "To Make the Dry Bones Live": Amédée Forestier's Glastonbury Lake Village	72	(20)
James E. Phillips
5 Unlearning the Images of Archaeology	92	(23)
Dana Arnold
6 Illustrating Ancient Rome, or the Ichnographia as Uchronia and Other Time Warps in Piranesi's Il Campo Marzio	115	(18)
Susan M. Dixon
7 Thomas Guest and Paul Nash in Wiltshire: Two Episodes in the Artistic Approach to British Antiquity	133	(25)
Sam Smiles
8 A Different Way of Seeing? Toward a Visual Analysis of Archaeological Folklore	158	(22)
Darren Glazier
9 Photography and Archaeology: The Image as Object	180	(12)
Frederick N. Bohrer
10 Wearing Juninho's Shirt: Record and Negotiation in Excavation Photographs	192	(12)
Jonathan Bateman
11 Video Killed Engaging VR? Computer Visualizations on the TV Screen	204	(19)
Graeme P. Earl
12 The Real, the Virtually Real, and the Hyperreal: The Role of VR in Archaeology	223	(17)
Mark Gillings
Index	240