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This book presents a study of material images and asks how an appreciation of the making and unfolding of images and art alters archaeological accounts of prehistoric and historic societies. With contributions focusing on case studies including prehistoric Britain, Scandinavia, Iberia, the Americas and Dynastic Egypt, and including contemporary reflections on material images, it makes a novel contribution to ongoing debates relating to archaeological art and images. The book offers a New Materialist analysis of archaeological imagery, with an emphasis on considering the material character of images and their making and unfolding. The book reassesses the predominantly representational paradigm of archaeological image analysis and argues for the importance of considering the ontology of images. It considers images as processes or events and introduces the verb ‘imaging’ to underline the point that images are conditions of possibility that draw together differing aspects of the world. The book is divided into three sections: ‘Emergent images’, which focuses on practices of making; ‘Images as process’, which examines the making and role of images in prehistoric societies; and ‘Unfolding images’, which focuses on how images change as they are made and circulated. The book features contributions from archaeologists, Egyptologists, anthropologists and artists. The contributors to the book highlight the multiple role of images in prehistoric and historic societies, demonstrating that archaeologists need to recognise the dynamic and changeable character of images.
collectors. As discussed in chapter 3, the Committee members actively discouraged donations of anthropogenic material, but in vain. Numismatists in particular were stubbornly generous, especially Reuben Spencer, director of the large local business Rylands and Sons, who gave British and foreign coins in 1894 (as well as funds to provide cases and later electric lighting for the whole Museum). Spencer’s son Baldwin, who went on to a successful career in anthropology and directed the National Museum of Victoria in Melbourne, was a school friend of the Manchester Museum
the Domains of Artistic and Scientific Culture, something we are still working on. It is useful here to invoke the fungible as a counter to the indexical. Where the indexical touches or pierces, the fungible operates on the register of stand-in, distribution and replication. One thing is substitutable for another, like a coin. In new technologies multiple versions of a file may be manifested in different forms, various iterations assumed through a life cycle. Back Danielsson’s guldgubbar (Chapter 11) seem to occupy the intersection between indexicality and
upon the trustees the importance of acquiring original works of art, especially sculpture and vases, and in 1888, with the help of Professor Rodolfo Lanciani, whose interest in the Museum had been aroused when he came to Boston to lecture in 1887, a number of marbles, heads and portrait busts, as well as selected terracottas, bronzes, vases and coins from Italy were purchased’ (Chase, 1950: 1). It was his agreeing to assist US cultural institutions that cost Lanciani his reputation. In 1889, the archaeologist was accused by the Italian Minister of Public Education of
present Gold foil figures eventually go out of fashion, perhaps as late as in the early Viking Age (800s CE). They are seemingly not engaged with again until the eighteenth century, at which time the term or notion ‘guldgubbe’ entered into the academic literature. One of the earliest known and printed drawings of a gold foil figure is the one found in the thesis of the scholar Otto Sperling (1634–1715). In his book from 1700, an image of a gold foil couple is shown (Fig. 11.3). Sperling’s thesis, and his other publications on coins, must be seen as part of the general
fervour, see Hunter 2012 ; Joy 2014a ) this northern British bog custom complements the shifting nature of hoarding in other contexts – weaponry, torcs and coin hoards begin to dominate assemblages elsewhere (Wilkinson 2019 ). The early Roman hoard from Lamberton Moor or Moss also fits this pattern: an extraordinary assembly of vessels that were contained in some kind of wrapping that decayed upon exposure (Anderson 1905 : 367). Four Roman paterae, four bronze bowls, a beaded neck torc, two spiral rings, a dragonesque brooch and two fibulae comprise a mix of both
number of heirloom objects which were old when buried. This complexity is compounded because there are several different systems for artefact dating in use among early medieval scholars. Early Anglo-Saxon artefact typologies often include a mixture of local comparison, comparison with continental equivalents where coin-dating evidence might be available, and/or art-historical methods which are used particularly for the presence of Salin style I animal art, or the emergence of Salin Style II, which occurred around AD 560–70 (Lucy, 2000b : 16–20; Evison, 1987 ). Some
chronologically, within the great chain of art rather than the naturalists’ ‘great chain of being’.15 Similar objects in different arrangements generated very different knowledge. Once the Museum opened, the staff devoted little attention to the small historic displays. But a number of prominent donors nevertheless began to add to them (see chapter 4), with gifts of coins, mummies and stone implements. This material was accommodated for a while within Dawkins’s existing arrangement – but the overall scheme could not absorb the extensive Egyptian material loaned by the
presence of more intense localized learning processes (such as clusters of universities and other research institutes) contributes to the emergence and sustainability of RISs. Nevertheless, the circulation of this knowledge is complex and often unstructured (or structured through overlapping constellations of communities of practice), creating space for creative re-combination and innovation in an otherwise spatially fixed RIS. Following Philip Cooke ( 2001 , 950), who first described and coined the term “regional innovation systems,” emergent RISs are “non
notwithstanding, visitors generally reacted positively to at least some aspects of the Museum’s displays, even if only one of these key iconic objects. There were a few notable exceptions, and these were a constant worry for the Museum authorities: vandals and thieves. The former included students staging sit-ins in the adjoining Council Chamber (who damaged doors) to ‘Militant Suffragists’ (who never appeared).150 Among the objects that fell victim to those who sought to assist in the Museum in reducing its burdensome collection were twelve silver coins from the Hibbert