Seeing the Past: Visual Media in Archaeology

As digital media become increasingly affordable and accessible, visual representation in archaeology is expanding across several dimensions. In this essay, I examine some emerging forms of visual media in archaeology, including online documentaries, maps and photographs, hypermedia, experimental films, and peripatetic video. Visual media offer powerful opportunities for engagement with the public. In addition, archaeologists are finding new ways to use the visual in interpretation, analysis, and critique. Experimental visual works often are self-consciously reflexive, questioning and exposing the ways archaeological knowledge is constructed, represented, and disseminated.     

Life in the Pueblo: Understanding the Past through Archaeology

Life in the Pueblo: Understanding the Past through Archaeology. Kathryn Kamp. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1998.224pp.     

The Nubian Past: An Archaeology of the Sudan

The Nubian Past: An Archaeology of the Sudan . David N. Edwards. New York: Routledge, 2004. 348 pp.     

Unlocking the Past: Celebrating Historical Archaeology in North America

Unlocking the Past: Celebrating Historical Archaeology in North America. Lu Ann De Cunzo and John H. JamesonJr., eds. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. 255 pp.     

Marketing Heritage: Archaeology and the Consumption of the Past

Marketing Heritage: Archaeology and the Consumption of the Past. Yorke Rowan and Uzi Baram, eds. Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2004. 315 pp.     

The Archaeology of Ethnicity: Constructing Identities in the Past and Present

The Archaeology of Ethnicity: Constructing Identities in the Past and Present. Sian Jones. London: Routledge, 1997. 180 pp.     

The Archaeology Education Handbook: Sharing the Past with Kids

The Archaeology Education Handbook: Sharing the Past with Kids. Karolyhn Smardz and Shelley J. Smith. eds. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2000. 447 pp.     

Traces of the Past: Unraveling the Secrets of Archaeology through Chemistry

Traces of the Past: Unraveling the Secrets of Archaeology through Chemistry. Joseph B. Lambert. Reading, MA: Perseus Books, 1997. 318 pp.     

The Professionalization of Science Studies: Cutting Some Slack

During the past hundred years or so, those scholars studying science have isolated themselves as much as possible from scientists as well as from workers in other disciplines who study science. The result of this effort is history of science, philosophy of science and sociology of science as separate disciplines. I argue in this paper that now is the time for these disciplinary boundaries to be lowered or at least made more permeable so that a unified discipline of Science Studies might emerge. I discuss representative problems that stand in the way of such an integration. These problems may seem so formidable in the abstract that no one in their right mind would waste their time trying to bring about a unified field of Science Studies. However, those of us who limit ourselves to the study of the biological sciences have already formed a society in which workers from all disciplines can share their expertise -- the International Society for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science.     

Mangling Symbols of Gentility in the Wild West: Case Studies in Interpretive Archaeology

Gentility (aka, "Victorian culture") was the preeminent model of propriety in mid- and late-nineteenth-century California. Thanks to industrial production and an efficient supply network, the genteel mores of Victoria's England came to be expressed in a suite of artifacts that became de rigueur for anyone who aspired to a position of respectability—even in the wilds of the American West. The trappings of gentility, however, were not used only by the aspiring white middle class to achieve some kind of nervous social acceptance. In this essay, we present archaeological examples from a high-ranking Mexican-Californio, a Chinese American merchant, African American porters, and an expensive brothel to suggest that the symbols of gentility had power outside the parlors of the white middle class and that other groups manipulated the potent symbolic content of these artifacts for their own diverse ends. [African Americans, Chinese Americans, historical archaeology, interpretive archaeology, Victorianism]