Photography and Latin American Ruins

Ever since the nineteenth century photographers have regularly turned to Latin American ruins to express a diverse range of scientific, colonial, aesthetic and spiritual desires. This article looks at photographs of Latin American ruins from the nineteenth century through several archaeological expeditions in Central and South America over the course of the twentieth century. Focusing in particular on photographs of ruins that include human subjects, I argue that the human-material interactions evident in these images undermine the traditional view of a split between the archaeological subject and the material object, serving as a reminder of the political actuality of ‘classical’ ruins, sites that have sometimes been left out of the West’s contemporary fascination with the dark underbelly of modernity. Acknowledging that such politics is by no means always innocent, sometimes reflecting as it does the embedded power relations of neo-colonial desires, I argue nonetheless that ancient ruins in Latin America continue to be spaces around which social relations can be formed, not least through humour and pleasure.     

Reburial in the context of development: Approaches to reburial in the English planning process

Abstract

Rescue archaeology in England is now firmly embedded in the planning process, following the introduction by the UK government of Planning Policy Guidance Note 16 in 1990 (PPG 16; Departmentof the Environment. Planning Policy Guidance Note 16 — Archaeology and Planning. HMSO, London (1990)). The basic premise of PPG 16 is a strong preference for in situ preservation of nationally important archaeological remains. This often includes reburial of archaeology prior to construction activity, once it has been exposed in test-pitting (‘evaluations’) or full excavation. Reburial strategies are often prepared by civil engineers and there appears to be an overemphasis on consideration of the potential physical impacts on the archaeology. These strategies usually include the use of geotextiles and sand, or other graded material, chosen for its particular particle size/shape characteristics. A greater awareness of the chemical and physical characteristics of a burial environment is now required to ensure that reburial is effective. Archaeologists and conservators are beginning to consider both the natural and, increasingly, the ‘man-made’ (industrial, domestic and agricultural) changes to the soil chemistry of an archaeological site. More use needs to be made of the potential information ‘locked up’ in the artefactual material retrieved from evaluations and excavation nearby. An assessment of the degree of preservation of material should be an integral component for the design of a reburial strategy.     

Snapshots of History and the Nature of the Archaeological Image

By its very definition, archaeology is situated at the intersection of the material and the temporal worlds. Photography is similarly positioned, and yet it can be manipulated to produce constructed contexts according a photographer’s agenda. In order to explore how the abilities and limitations of archaeology and photography are entwined I examine the representational power of the photograph and the phenomenon of Japanese tourist photography. I then discuss the construction of archaeological photographs, both in practice and in the prescribed theory contained archaeological methods textbooks, as well as how photographs are used to represent the embodied, physical performance of archaeology.     

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Survey with Commercial-Grade Instruments: A Case Study from the Eastern Ḫabur Archaeological Survey,Iraq

Low-altitude photography in archaeology is now common practice at the scale of excavations; however, landscape-scale applications are a relatively new endeavor with promising analytical potential. From 2014–2016, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with a mounted camera was used to document sites recorded as part of the Eastern ?abur Archaeological Survey (E?AS), an archaeological reconnaissance project in western Dohuk Province, Iraqi Kurdistan. The E?AS team documented over 70 archaeological sites with the UAV, from single-phase artifact scatters, to archaeological remains with standing architecture, to tells that cover more than 30 hectares. Representative examples from this survey are presented here to outline the project workflow and primary output data layers, including digital orthomosaics and digital elevation models. The quality and utility of results are then assessed in relationship to available satellite-based data. Methods for analysis and interpretation are then considered to demonstrate applications in landscape archaeology. An A) orthomosaic and B) shaded relief model with surface collection area (in red) of site EHAS-C045 created from photographs taken from a UAV.     

Excavating Communities: Lewis R. Binford and the Interpretation of the Archaeological Record in Illinois

Lewis Binford’s contributions to field archaeology have been largely ignored in favor of his many contributions to theoretical issues dominating the discipline of archaeology at the end of the twentieth century. We examine Binford’s excavation methods in southern Illinois in the early 1960s and demonstrate how his considered approach served to systematize large-scale site excavation procedures. He adopted the time-honored tool of the salvage archaeologist—heavy equipment—and unapologetically employed it in a fundamentally new way, proving it to be a tool that served the greater goals of archaeological research. We trace the development of field methods and theoretical approaches in two case studies of Illinois archaeology and demonstrate how Binford’s contributions have been incorporated or rejected by subsequent CRM researchers.     

‘Resemblances to archaeological finds’: Guido Boggiani,Claude Lévi-Strauss and Caduveo body painting

In 1942, Claude Lévi-Strauss published an article on Caduveo body painting in the first number of the surrealist magazine VVV, with the editorial assistance of André Breton and cover by Max Ernst. In the article, Lévi-Strauss uses the photographs of the Caduveo women taken during his fieldtrip in 1935–36, together with drawings of facial designs collected to reflect on their ‘strong originality’, which ‘evokes a very ancient culture, and one full of preciosities’. Amongst these illustrations, there is an engraving taken from Guido Boggiani’s book, I Caduvei, published in 1895. Boggiani, an Italian landscape painter who visited South America in 1887–93, was captivated by the Caduveo graphic art, which he sketched in detail. In 1896 he returned, travelling to Paraguay, this time equipped with a new tool to help his ethnographic research: a photographic camera. Over a period of five years, Boggiani completed more than 400 photographs on glass gelatin plates of various sizes. For Lévi-Strauss, as for Boggiani, the originality of the Caduveo graphic art remained enigmatic, evoking a very ancient culture; it was a topic to which he would return in several of his most influential works. In this article, I focus on the visual images (engraved, drawn, photographed and filmed) that depict the body painting of the Caduveo people in central Brazil by Boggiani and Lévi-Strauss in order to explore the ways in which they enabled an ephemeral art – delicate arabesques painted on skin – to be studied as archaeological vestiges. In the process, I trace the aesthetic sensibility of Boggiani and Lévi-Strauss that provided them with the imaginative tools to do so.     

We are never alone: a conversation on bio art with Eduardo Kac

Brazilian-born artist Eduardo Kac’s (Rio de Janeiro, 1962) work has raised eyebrows especially for his ‘transgenic art’ projects, among others: Genesis, 1999; GFP Bunny, 2000; The Eight Day, 2001; Natural History of the Enigma, 2003/08. In all of these, Kac and his scientific collaborators realize genetic interventions into living organisms at the same time as they trigger audience reactions to these from playful kinds of interaction that is integrated into the works’ open and dynamic creative process. Yet whereas the ethical and political challenges Kac’s work poses have sparked lively debates within and beyond the realm of the arts – can and must art engage with the ‘creative’ potentials of biotechnology and genetics? Do these not in fact (as Vilém Flusser and others have suggested) hold the key to realizing the vanguardist dream of merging art and life? Or should the artist, from the vantage point of his own creative practice, not rather warn us against the ethical and political risks involved in genetic engineering? – much less attention has been paid to the way Kac’s art also continues and transforms a particular legacy of post-concretist, ambient and performance art in Latin America.

Kac himself has referred to Brazilian artists Flávio de Carvalho, Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark as informing his interest in open, participative forms, which characterize both his transgenic and his earlier ‘tele-presence’ art projects. Other Latin American artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century have been producing intriguing engagements with living materials, multispecies habitats and organic remains, including such diverse names as Luis Fernando Benedit, Nicola Constantino, Nuno Ramos, or Teresa Margolles. In a conversation with Jens Andermann and Gabriel Giorgi at the University of Zurich’s Center of Latin American Studies on March 12, 2015, Kac addressed the way in which his work might be seen as continuing or challenging long-standing representations of the New World as a repository of ‘nature’, from colonial chronicles of discovery to contemporary discourses of biodiversity and conservation. To what extent is bio art – and the questions it raises about the Anthropocene as a threshold of radical biopolitical convergence between ‘history’ and ‘nature’ – necessarily ‘transcultural’ and planetary in its extension?     

Global Application of Indigenous Archaeology: Community Based Participatory Research in Turkey

What does Indigenous archaeology offer archaeologists who do not work on Native land, at Indigenous sites, or with Indigenous people? This article demonstrates the broad applicability of Indigenous archaeology and the way it can be utilized by archaeologists working in any locale. Through recent fieldwork in south central Turkey working with a non-indigenous community of local residents near the archaeological site of Çatalhöyük, I demonstrate ways that the theories and methodology of Indigenous archaeology are a useful and relevant part of practice for archaeologists working in areas that are neither on Native land nor involve sites related to indigenous heritage. It also points to the need for further investigation into collaborative methods for the development of a set of best practices within archaeological and heritage management settings.     

数字近景摄影测量在秦始皇陵百戏坑考古中的应用研究

既要保留遗迹在不同阶段的信息资料,又不影响发掘研究工作的继续进行,一直是考古工作者探索研究的问题。为配合秦始皇陵百戏俑坑的考古发掘工作,为后续考古研究和文物遗迹的保护提供必要的基础信息资料,针对大场景考古发掘现场,通过数字全站仪对文物挖掘现场布设的一定数量控制点进行观测获取其三维点位坐标。利用非量测数码相机获取现场多航带序列影像,通过数码相机检校、自动空中三角测量、影像特征提取与影像匹配、数字微分纠正等数字近景摄影测量方法,获取反映发掘现场文物分布情况的数字高程模型(DEM)和正射影像(DOM)数据。在生成的正射影像图上进行文物轮廓线条的提取,获得发掘现场文物的正射投影矢量图。实现文物位置、形状及分布的平面量测。实验证明:该方法不仅可大面积、快速获取文物挖掘现场文物分布的正射投影平面图,实现考古数字制图,而且能保证一定的精度。具有较高的推广应用价值。     

From Masada to the Little Bighorn: The role of archaeological site interpretation in the shaping of national myths

Abstract

This paper describes the changing commemoration, political meaning and archaeological presentation of Masada and the Little Bighorn National Battlefield in an attempt to understand the role that each has played in the crystallization of national consciousness. In examining official efforts to preserve the site of ‘Custer's Last Stand’ – from its establishment as a US military cemetery in the late nineteenth century through recent archaeological exploration by the National Park Service – the paper analyses the theme of heroic death of ‘the few against the many’ as symbolic legitimation of frontier conquest. In tracing the history of the commemoration of Masada – from its initial identification by Edward Robinson in 1838, through its adoption as a Zionist symbol in the 1930s, to the large-scale excavations of the 1960s – the paper discusses archaeological attempts to verify Josephus' account of the mass suicide of the Jewish rebels and the site's use as a symbolic legitimation of territorial sovereignty. Finally, changes in the ‘official’ interpretations of the two sites (and emergence of dissenting viewpoints) are placed in political and intellectual context. This cross-cultural comparison is the basis for general observations on the role of archaeology, patriotic mythology and tourism in the development of modern nation states.     

The role of research and education in site management at the Lemba Experimental Village,Cyprus

Abstract

The project developed at the Lemba Experimental Village in Cyprus seeks to explain some aspects of the workings of archaeology through the medium of an ongoing and dynamic research project. The Lemba Experimental Village was established in 1988 with a view to understanding site formation processes through the construction of full-scale experimental buildings of the Chalcolithic period (3500–2800 BC). Experiments have been carried out with mud construction, lime plaster making and building construction. Monitoring and recording of construction and erosion processes provides a long-term history of events on the site which can be related to the deposits and features encountered when excavation is undertaken. Comparative information has been obtained from the structural analysis and excavation of buildings abandoned 25–30 years ago in the village of Souskiou, where similar deposits are encountered. The results of the work at Lemba and Souskiou are used as a comparative database for understanding deposits on prehistoric archaeological sites. The juxtaposition of the experimental building constructions with completed excavations at Lemba has led to the emergence of a policy of site presentation in which the methods of a particular form of archaeological research – experimental archaeology – constitute the main focus of interest on the site. This has been encouraged in the development of the site as a visitor centre, with an annually changing programme of new buildings being constructed and older ones being destroyed.     

Site Interiography and Geophysical Scanning: Interpreting the Texture and Form of Archaeological Deposits with Ground-Penetrating Radar

The remarkable potential of geophysical scanning—to assess the internal variability of sites in new ways, to highlight important phenomena in the field, to exercise co-creation of interpretation and commitment to minimal destruction of community partners’ resources, and to aid in the practice of due diligence in avoiding desecration of the sacred—continues to be underutilized in archaeology. While archaeological artifacts, features, and strata remain primary foci of archaeological geophysics, these phenomena are perceived quite differently in scans than in visual or tactile exposures. In turn, new registers of site exploration afforded by geophysical prospection may be constrained by the language of site excavation and visual observation, requiring adjustments in the ways of thinking about and describing what the instruments are measuring. The texture and form of site deposits as rendered in ground-penetrating radar scans can be examined in detail prior to making interpretations of cultural features or stratigraphy. Far more than simple “anomalies” demanding our attention for excavation, patterns in geophysical data can be the focus of extensive archaeological analysis prior to, in conjunction with, or independent from excavation.     

Re-visiting the field: Collaborative archaeology as paradigm shift

Abstract

The emphasis of the JFA on field methods resonates strongly with current disciplinary interest in multivocality and participatory research. In this new epistemology of inclusiveness, communities play an active role in the production of archaeological knowledge as well as in the conservation of cultural heritage. From the perspective of archaeologists trained in the U.S. who conduct research in Latin America, we historicize changes in the triadic relationship among archaeologists, contemporary communities, and things of the past. This examination focuses on the evolving social context of archaeological practice. The social milieu within which archaeology is conducted is explored further by reference to a recent survey of archaeologists that elicited comments on grand challenges to archaeology. A few examples of the many forms that an engaged archaeology might take are offered from the Maya region. Although collaborative research poses challenges that emerge as communities entangled with archaeological practice become research partners, we suggest that the enhanced relevance that accompanies this transformation is well worth the effort.     

Archaeology and the Irish rediscovery of the Celtic past

This article examines the place of archaeology in the second wave of Irish cultural nationalism, and how archaeological findings were appropriated by rival ethno‐religious communities in Ireland. In particular, it focuses on George Petrie, who was the founder of ‘scientific’ archaeology and was also one of the leading figures in the nineteenth‐century Celtic revival that sought a moral regeneration of the Irish nation In Ireland, as elsewhere, archaeology was important in reconstructing an early history of the nation where few written records existed and in making this visible through material artefacts. However, archaeology was only significant as part of a wider cultural revival that presented artefacts and sites as national symbols to an island undergoing rapid social change. This article will explore the relationship between archaeology and this national revival, and how the material objects recovered by archaeologists extended and transformed the existing repertoires of how the nation was imagined and felt. It will assess the different reception of these images in the rival Catholic and Protestant communities. Finally, it will comment on the capacity of a medieval ‘Celtic’ repertoire to provide the basis of a dynamic modern Irish national culture.     

The Colonial (Dis)order and the (Im)possibility of Redemption: Jeong,Abolition, and Living from the “End of the World”

This article develops the oppositional edge of postcolonial theologies by way of Frantz Fanon’s anti-colonial desire for the “end of the world.” It connects W. Anne Joh’s elaboration of jeong – the living in excess of (neo)colonial violence – to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s anti-fascist critique of the godlike desires of European humanism (the sicut deus). The overall aim of the article is to clarify and assess what is at stake in a project of eschatological decolonialism. What might it mean to think theologically about salvation as abolition? And what might it look like to live from the “end of the world?”     

Personal,Political, Pedagogic: Challenging the Binary Bind in Archaeological Teaching,Learning and Fieldwork

In this paper, we consider how we can undercut the various binaries of gender and sexuality in archaeological practice and particularly in our teaching. We argue that taking an assemblage theory approach enables us to look at the multiplicity of identities of those practicing archaeology as different and intersecting assemblages that bring one another into being through their connections at different scales. In particular, we examine how this approach can be applied to archaeological pedagogy and how this in turn enables us to move away from modern binary distinctions about sex and gender identities from the ‘bottom up’, fostering an approach in our students that will then go on to be developed in professional practice.     

Units of Archaeological Stratification

The excavating archaeologists’ methodological set ‐ excavation, recording, analysis and publication ‐ rests on the notions and principles of the stratigraphic succession of archaeological deposits. Since 1954 when Sir Mortimer Wheeler published Archaeology From the Earth, there has been a dearth of published discussion on the stratigraphie theory in archaeology. This paper examines some of the background of the stratigraphie notion in archaeology and a revised model for archaeological stratigraphy based on ‘units of stratification’ is presented. Re‐evaluations of stratigraphie configurations in archaeology arc perhaps long overdue and this article is an attempt to engender discussion on this fundamental archaeological tenet.     

Beached Shipwrecks from Channel Islands National Park,California

Abstract

Three shipwreck sites of the 19th century in Channel Islands National Park, California form case studies in evaluating the contribution of beached shipwrecks to maritime and historical archaeology. Two of the sites are consistent with the historically-documented Pacific coast lumber schooners J. M. Colman and Dora Bluhm, but the archaeological record is sparse. Material remains are compared to primary documents, such as original 19th-century construction contracts and insurance classifications, to make a case for the beached shipwreck scatters belonging to these ships. A third site, Comet, presents the other end of the spectrum; its remains have been conclusively identified by historical photographs and the site is a partially-intact hull embedded in the beach sand. This site was also recorded in detail and the formation processes of all three sites were examined to aid in archaeological interpretation.     

The past as commodity: Archaeological images in modern advertising

Abstract

Despite increasing scholarly interest in archaeology and popular culture, the subject of archaeology and advertising has attracted little notice. This article takes a first step towards exploring the topic by deconstructing select ‘archaeoadverts’ from popular North American magazines, published primarily during the last two decades. Particular attention is given to images of Greek, Roman and Egyptian cultures. The sample is used to address several overarching questions: What popular preconceptions about archaeology and the archaeological record do advertisers believe are most effective? What kind of ‘authority’ do modern consumers grant to antiquity? How permeable are the boundaries between past and present? And do archaeologists unwittingly collude in perpetuating some of the detrimental stereotypes projected by these advertisements?