Re-Presenting the Past: Archaeology through Image and Text - A Political Economy of Visual Media in Archaeology By Michael Shanks and Timothy Webmoor

https://www.academia.edu/343730/Re_Presenting_the_Past_Archaeology_through_Image_and_Text_A_Political_Economy_of_Visual_Media_in_Archaeology Archaeology abounds not only in artifacts from the past but in modes of documenting and studying them. In this chapter, we look at the way visuality works in archaeology, from the graphics, maps, and photographs themselves to the roles they play. Along the way, we question the stress placed in much discussion of visual media on their mimetic and representational qualities—that is, their fidelity to what they are taken to represent. Looking at what might be called the political economy of visual media—the work they do in archaeology through networks of production, circulation, transaction, and articulation—also leads us to identify some of the implications of emergent digital media, not for more spectacular summations of data about the past, but as open forums for the co-production of pasts that matter now and for community building in the future. ...