Archaeology's visual culture : digging and desire

Author(s)

    • Balm, Roger

Bibliographic Information

Archaeology's visual culture : digging and desire

Roger Balm

(Routledge studies in archaeology, 19)

Routledge, 2016

  • : hbk

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Note

Includes bibliographical references and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

Archaeology's Visual Culture explores archaeology through the lens of visual culture theory. The insistent visuality of archaeology is a key stimulus for the imaginative and creative interpretation of our encounters with the past. Balm investigates the nature of this projection of the visual, revealing an embedded subjectivity in the imagery of archaeology and acknowledging the multiplicity of meanings that cohere around artifacts, archaeological sites and museum displays. Using a wide range of case studies, the book highlights how archaeologists can view objects and the consequences that ensue from these ways of seeing. Throughout the book Balm considers the potential for documentary images and visual material held in archives to perform cultural work within and between groups of specialists. With primary sources ranging from the mid-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, this volume also maps the intellectual and social connections between archaeologists and their peers. Geographical settings include Britain, Cyprus, Mesoamerica, the Middle East and the United States, and the sites of visual encounter are no less diverse, ranging from excavation reports in salvage archaeology to instrumentally derived data-sets and remote-sensing imagery. By forensically examining selected visual records from published accounts and archival sources, enduring tropes of representation become apparent that transcend issues of style and reflect fundamental visual sensibilities within the discipline of archaeology.

Table of Contents

1. Insistent Visuality A Theoretical Framework Visual Culture as a Field of Investigation Images in Science Agents and Networks The Context of Modernity Rupture and Rapture Visual Stability Visual Instability Spaces of Display Looking Inwards and Seeing Through 2. Scopic Privilege and Appropriation Circulation of the Archaeological Story Cesnola and Squier in Print Set in Stone: Cesnola in Cyprus Temples, Tombs and Temptations Family Photographs Appraisal and Accusation Metrics and Meaning: Squier in South America Sizing-up Tiwanaku Photographing Tiwanaku Cuzco Bones 3. Stratigraphy Diagrammatic Picturing Anatomy Time, Embodiment and the Subsurface Augustus Pitt Rivers and "Cranborne" Culture and the Cross-section Mortimer Wheeler and the Aesthetics of Excavation Exhumation Harris Matrix and the Rope of Time Surface and Assemblage 4. Imagination and the Ruin Tatiana's Chair Paper Ruins Traveling Glyphs Stela 14 Edgewalking Bodega at Palenque Thought Sketches 5. Aerial Archaeology and its Haunting The Aerial Domain Flight Militant Flight Archaeological Osbert Crawford and Ghosts of Old England Stonehenge Avenue Celtic Fields Evocation Advocacy Ghosts of Old Yucatan The Lindbergh-Carnegie Survey The University of Pennsylvania Survey 6. Remote Sensing and Rocket Visions Visual Continuities Documentary Prosthetics Encounters beyond Visible Light "Invisible Rays" Infrared Arizona Desert Traces Nimbus "Radar Rivers" Seeking Ubar Seeking Tanis 7 Wither the Object? The Weightless Past The Weightless of Scopic Opportunity The Weightlessness of Cyber-archaeology Archaeological Imagination Art Nexus Collaborations Confrontations The Wistfulness of the Archaeological Eye

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