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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.
22 Slices of mummy: a thin perspective John Denton My first introduction It was in 1973 at the University of Manchester Medical School, where I was a relatively young pathology technician, that I was introduced to Rosalie David for the first time. Her passion for the multi-faceted complex investigation of Egyptological remains was apparent from the beginning. In 1975 the team formed by Rosalie David came together in one of our seminar rooms to undertake the unwrapping of mummy 1770, one of the rare scientific studies of a relatively intact Egyptian mummy. The
–1850’, Urban History, 25 (1998), 289–301; J. Wolff and J. Seed, The Culture of Capital: Art, Power and the Nineteenth-Century Middle Class (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). E. P. Hamm, ‘Unpacking Goethe’s collections: the public and the private in naturalhistorical collecting’, British Journal for the History of Science, 34 (2001), 275–300. Manchester Museum Central Archive (hereafter MMCA), CNH1/1, 30 June 1821. CNH1/1, 2 August 1822; C. Fisher (ed.), A Passion for Natural history: The Life and Legacy of the 13th Earl of Derby (Liverpool: National Museums and
: Reaktion, 1994); W. Muensterberger, Collecting: An Unruly Passion: Psychological Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); S. M. Pearce, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition (London: Routledge, 1995). N. Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1991); A. B. Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). On the ‘Relational Museum’ project at the Pitt Rivers
mummy from the Roman Period, Amelia Edwards describes the woman’s ‘oriental languor’ 43 – echoing an expectation established by Edward Lane of the modern Egyptians’ sensuousness and ‘indulgence of libidinous passions.’ 44 Even mummified flesh could carry erotic undercurrents. Thus in Jane Loudon’s 1827 novel The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty Second Century , one male protagonist – echoing Belzoni’s dramatic accounts of the so-called ‘mummy pits’ – describes how ‘I shrank back with horror as I found the arm I grasped
Petries and the Haworths. Even if separately exhibited, other material remained within the conceptual domain of the natural sciences. Ethnology was absorbed into the remit of the zoologist Robert Standen, and his son-in-law, the geology assistant J. Wilfrid Jackson, took charge of prehistoric archaeology.36 Although like Standen a conchologist by first passion, Jackson soon established himself as an authority on faunal cave deposits and began to study not only human remains but also accompanying artefacts. He was involved in British archaeology throughout his career
Prag, Jones was also instrumental in the establishment of the Greater Manchester Archaeological Unit, one of a series of regional archaeology units set up by local government from 1973 as a way of coordinating rescue archaeology.93 Together with the activities of curators and other University fieldworkers, rescue archaeology generated a significant increase in the volume of material arriving at the Museum from the ‘field’. Purchases and gifts, by contrast, proportionally diminished in this era. But whatever the quantity, all these objects were evidence of the passion
rather than the recovery of the material remains of her civilization’ (C. Breasted, 1943: 77). This reconstruction project soon became his life-long goal, institutionalised in The Epigraphic Survey at the University of Chicago, whose continuing mission is to record all surviving inscriptions on temple and tomb walls in Egypt and publish them before they perish with time (Abt, 2011: 46–7, 281–301; Epigraphic Survey, 2014). Petrie not only taught Breasted how to excavate, but also allowed Breasted to realise that excavation was not his passion or purpose. Throughout his
matter was manipulated physically, ideologically, and emotionally, as well as how they engage in dialogues with the backdrop and the landforms where they sit. If, traditionally, rock art studies concentrated on classification and formal analysis of motifs, thus focusing on the second word, ‘art’, today, our study object is seen as the sum of ‘rock’ and ‘art’. My passion for ethnography has ancient roots: as a student at Moscow University I understood, though without full awareness, that ethnography is no less an art than a science. (Kandinsky quoted in Sers 1974: 192
Monroe had witnessed first-hand numerous contested cases including those involving deep conflicts among Native Hawaiian claimants. It was entirely possible that such an exhibition might prompt a NAGPRA claim, or cause further discord in what some viewed as an already fractured Hawaiian community. The practice of he alo ā he alo is premised upon the establishment and evolution of a relationship over time that has been tried, tested and tended, and it requires a level of compassion based on an understanding of each other’s cares, concerns, passions and fears. It requires