Photographs and Archaeological Knowledge

Sudeshna Guha

doi:10.5334/aa.12314

Abstract

<p class="p1">This article explores some of the ways in which photographs and their archives establish archaeological knowledge. It draws upon histories of photography and archaeology within South Asia to create focus upon archaeology’s evidentiary regimes. The aims are to: a) demonstrate the importance of engaging with photographs and their archives as objects for reckoning archaeology’s evidentiary terrains, b) draw attention to multiple social biographies a photograph or photographic archive acquires, c) highlight the visual as a force of archaeology’s historiography, and d) impress upon the necessity of attending to historiographical issues. The aims allow us in seeing some of the ways in which field sciences create their evidentiary frames, and have a special resonance within the context of South Asian archaeology where professional and amateur archaeologists continue to promote the belief that archaeological facts exist out there, and that archaeological research produces better and more robust sources for the past than scholarship based on texts. Visual histories also highlight the mutation of the so-called ‘colonialist’ historiography within the post-colonial histories of archaeology’s developments, and encourage us to go beyond the hackneyed formulations of colonial legacies and the hagiographic literature of individual practitioners.

Highlights

The above sentence with which the late photo-historian Graham Clarke began his book The Photograph, aptly describes the archaeological episteme, where too visual images dominate and where too the photograph remains almost invisible
Considering that archaeological knowledge is assuredly anchored upon the transcription of sight, as in field surveys and excavations, photography’s intervention within archaeology’s evidentiary terrain is expectantly profound
Ignored as being of relevance to histories of antiquarianism within South Asia, those that are written by archaeologists today, this rooting of visual aesthetics within antiquarian scholarship is of importance for gauging some of the ways in which archaeology appropriates dominant modes of visuality to create evidentiary terrains

Summary

Introduction

The above sentence with which the late photo-historian Graham Clarke began his book The Photograph, aptly describes the archaeological episteme, where too visual images dominate and where too the photograph remains almost invisible. Guha: Photographs and Archaeological Knowledge of securing relatively objective histories from things, as opposed to from written records, is rarely appraised for the ways in which it has nurtured archaeology’s evidentiary terrain.

Results

Conclusion