Does a photograph freeze a moment of time? What does it mean to treat a photographic image as an artefact? In the visual culture of the 21st century, do new digital and social forms change the status of photography as archival or objective – or are they revealing something more fundamental about photography’s longstanding relationships with time and knowledge?Archaeology and Photography imagines a new kind of Visual Archaeology that tackles these questions. The book reassesses the central place of Photography as an archaeological method, and re-wires our cross-disciplinary conceptions of time, objectivity and archives, from the History of Art to the History of Science.Through twelve new wide-ranging and challenging studies from an emerging generation of archaeological thinkers, Archaeology and Photography introduces new approaches to historical photographs in museums and to contemporaryphotographic practice in the field. The book re-frames the relationship between Photography and Archaeology, past and present, as more than a metaphor or an analogy – but a shared vision.Archaeology and Photography calls for a change in how we think about photography and time. It argues that new archaeological accounts of duration and presence can replace older conceptions of the photograph as a snapshot orremnant received in the present. The book challenges us to imagine Photography, like Archaeology, not as a representation of the past and the reception of traces in the present but as an ongoing transformation of objectivity and archive.Archaeology and Photography will prove indispensable to students, researchers and practitioners in History, Photography, Art, Archaeology, Anthropology, Science and Technology Studies and Museum and Heritage Studies.

Through photographs we preserve the past, and looking for the past is the very job of the archaeologist. But what are we looking at in an archaeological photograph? Archaeological photography is often largely deserted, to be scanned with a forensic gaze, towards finding evidence of what once took place. At the same time, photographs of excavated sites and artefacts have revealed stunning ancient works, shot as works of art. In Photography and Archaeology, Frederick Bohrer examines some of history's most famous archaeological excavations, as well as lesser-known and previously unpublished finds, from the Mediterranean, Middle East, Asia, Europe and the Americas, and the ways these sites have been represented in photographs. Bohrer shows how the development of photography in the nineteenth century made archaeology available to a much wider audience, and he discusses how these images revealed the material traces of the past, as well as their meaning and use today. Spanning the dual histories of both photography and archaeology, the book makes evident how what we know of the archaeological past has always been related to how it has been photographically represented and circulated: in scholarly papers, popular accounts, scientific archives, museum catalogues and numerous other formats. Bohrer concludes that such images possess contending, if not mutually exclusive, properties. While photography seems to guarantee documentary objectivity, at the same time it also fundamentally alters the archaeological object, transforming it into a work of art. Along the way, he discusses archaeological examples and images by photographers including Maxime du Camp, Francis Frith, John Beazley Greene, Ernst Herzfeld and others, to more contemporary photographers such as Aaron Levin, Roger Wood and Marilyn Bridges. Beautifully illustrated with fine archaeological images, many published here for the first time, Photography and Archaeology will be of interest to archaeologists, art historians and photographers, as well as anyone concerned with, or captivated by, archaeology's ongoing engagement with the past.--

Does a photograph freeze a moment of time? What does it mean to treat a photographic image as an artefact? In the visual culture of the 21st century, do new digital and social forms change the status of photography as archival or objective – or are they revealing something more fundamental about photography’s longstanding relationships with time and knowledge?Archaeology and Photography imagines a new kind of Visual Archaeology that tackles these questions. The book reassesses the central place of Photography as an archaeological method, and re-wires our cross-disciplinary conceptions of time, objectivity and archives, from the History of Art to the History of Science.Through twelve new wide-ranging and challenging studies from an emerging generation of archaeological thinkers, Archaeology and Photography introduces new approaches to historical photographs in museums and to contemporaryphotographic practice in the field. The book re-frames the relationship between Photography and Archaeology, past and present, as more than a metaphor or an analogy – but a shared vision.Archaeology and Photography calls for a change in how we think about photography and time. It argues that new archaeological accounts of duration and presence can replace older conceptions of the photograph as a snapshot orremnant received in the present. The book challenges us to imagine Photography, like Archaeology, not as a representation of the past and the reception of traces in the present but as an ongoing transformation of objectivity and archive.Archaeology and Photography will prove indispensable to students, researchers and practitioners in History, Photography, Art, Archaeology, Anthropology, Science and Technology Studies and Museum and Heritage Studies.

In this revised and updated edition of his 1989 book, Peter Dorrell provides a comprehensive guide to the uses of photography in archaeology. Drawing on thirty-five years of experience, he examines the use of photography in field archaeology, in surveys, in archaeological laboratories, and in conservation. He offers a clear and well-illustrated explanation of the techniques involved, with sections on equipment and materials, survey and site photography, architectural photography, the recording of different types of artifacts, registration and storage, the use of ultra-violet and infra-red, and photography for publication. He also covers the growing use of video and electronic recording systems.

This book explores the history of visual technology and archaeology and outlines how the introduction of interactive 3D computer modelling to the discipline parallels very closely the earlier integration of photography into archaeological fieldwork.

Making Time grapples with a range of issues that have crystallized in the wake of 15 years of discussion on time in archaeology, since the author's seminal volume The Archaeology of Time, synthesizing them for a new generation of scholars. The general understanding of time held by both archaeologists and non-archaeologists is often very simple: a linear notion where time flows along a single path from the past into the future. This book sets out to complicate this image, to draw out the key problems and issues with time that impact archaeological interpretation. Using concrete examples drawn from different periods and places, the book challenges the reader to think again. Ultimately, the book will suggest that if we want to understand what archaeological time is, then we need to accept that things do not exist in time, they make time. The crucial question then becomes: what kinds of time do archaeological materialities produce? Written for upper level undergraduates and researchers in archaeology, the book is also accessible to non-academics with an interest in the topic. The book is relevant for cognate disciplines, especially history, heritage studies and philosophy.

Archaeology has been an important source of metaphors for some of the key intellectuals of the 20th century: Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, Alois Riegl and Michel Foucault, amongst many others. However, this power has also turned against archaeology, because the discipline has been dealt with perfunctorily as a mere provider of metaphors that other intellectuals have exploited. Scholars from different fields continue to explore areas in which archaeologists have been working for over two centuries, with little or no reference to the discipline. It seems that excavation, stratigraphy or ruins only become important at a trans-disciplinary level when people from outside archaeology pay attention to them and somehow dematerialize them. Meanwhile, archaeologists have been usually more interested in borrowing theories from other fields, rather than in developing the theoretical potential of the same concepts that other thinkers find so useful. The time is ripe for archaeologists to address a wider audience and engage in theoretical debates from a position of equality, not of subalternity. Reclaiming Archaeology explores how archaeology can be useful to rethink modernity’s big issues, and more specifically late modernity (broadly understood as the 20th and 21st centuries). The book contains a series of original essays, not necessarily following the conventional academic rules of archaeological writing or thinking, allowing rhetoric to have its place in disclosing the archaeological. In each of the four sections that constitute this book (method, time, heritage and materiality), the contributors deal with different archaeological tropes, such as excavation, surface/depth, genealogy, ruins, fragments, repressed memories and traces. They criticize their modernist implications and rework them in creative ways, in order to show the power of archaeology not just to understand the past, but also the present. Reclaiming Archaeology includes essays from a diverse array of archaeologists who have dealt in one way or another with modernity, including scholars from non-Anglophone countries who have approached the issue in original ways during recent years, as well as contributors from other fields who engage in a creative dialogue with archaeology and the work of archaeologists.