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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.
time, we have a duty to future generations to actually try and show the way things are today. Are there ways of putting on the brakes and saying enough is enough? You want to know what we collect and why – and it’s a good question. But to be quite honest, I think that sometimes it’s more a matter of having to decide what not to collect – not that that makes it any easier. The description and quotation above are fictional, in the sense that they are not literal descriptions or transcriptions (except in fragments) from a particular individual or any specific museum
them to be told, we need to think about participating subjects in the form of diverse communities of interest, as many writers in this book do: traditional or customary owners of things including their stories, general as well as scholarly audiences, and even future audiences, as Sharon Macdonald and Jennie Morgan suggest in ‘What not to collect? Post-connoisseurial dystopia and the profusion of things’: ‘But at the same time, we have a duty to future generations to actually try and show the way things are today’. What is suggested here is a curatorial duty to
justification for the controversial decision. 11 The autopsy, which resulted in the almost complete destruction of the mummy would be considered unacceptable and unethical today, reflecting a time when mummies were dehumanised as specimens rather than once-living individuals. Museums are charged with the ethical and social responsibility to act merely as custodians of ancient heritage, safeguarding collections for the benefit of future generations. In doing so, museums ensure that the integrity of the body, which the ancient Egyptians aimed
the World Heritage List (WHL 88, 1979). The outstanding and universal was salvaged. Monuments, buildings, and places that were not as spectacular disappeared into Lake Nasser, after having been examined and documented. Other remains could never be examined, however, and had to be denied priority. World Heritage, the outstanding and universal, is protected and preserved for future generations; but what happens to everything else? That the outstanding must be an exception cannot come as a surprise. But is World Heritage merely an alibi, so that the outside world can
of World Heritage sites? World Heritage sites are defined as monuments, buildings, and places of outstanding universal value which require protection and preservation for future generations. World Heritage may be cultural heritage, natural heritage, or a combination of both. World Heritage therefore represents both an idea and something concrete that can be visited. In a world full of diversity and conflicts, where people are separated by gender, language, culture, history, religion, politics, and economics, the World Heritage List is an attempt at a common
, so that nothing will be lost for future generations of researchers. The concept of the International Ancient Egyptian Mummy Tissue Bank has a crucial role in fulfilling these objectives. It is important for the conservation of ancient human remains that they be disturbed as little as possible, and therefore the storage of tissue in the tissue bank will mean that a mummy needs to be X-rayed, be endoscoped and have tissue samples taken only once in order for the tissue to be available in the tissue bank and carefully selected for future work. The central recording of
constant flux and becoming, but in a different way. Dealing with their future generations, here referring to the fact that we have generated alternative renderings of the gold foil figures, it is rather the hauntological versions of the figures that are in constant becoming and flux. Hauntology as a concept comes from Derrida (1994) and it has been elaborated upon by Karen Barad (2010: 253). She uses it to highlight how the production of specific material-discursive beings, when brought about, simultaneously excludes other phenomena. These exclusions then haunt the
, technological systems, and the environment in which they all develop cannot be so easily disentangled and, thus, that each may give insight into the others. Technology, technological change, and human society Traditional and mainstream discussions of technology tend to treat it as occupying a position separate from human society. People manipulate things and do so in ways that can have profound effects on other humans, on social structures, and on future generations, but the things themselves are passive, inanimate objects. Moreover, we tend to assume that the
whether later prehistoric communities knew of the preservative properties of the bog itself and knowingly exploited it, to different ends. Another factor repeatedly cited by these authors to explain the phenomenon of preservation was the medicinal, ‘antiseptic’ power of bog water, referred to by Pitiscus of Oldenberg (1791, cited in van der Sanden 1996 : 19) as ‘the real quintessence’. In a prescient passage that anticipates modern modes of passive conservation, he suggests that bog bodies could be stored in peat water so that future generations might see what they