archaeology and photography

Photography radically changed earlier pictorial conventions by offering reliable representations of observed phenomena, and its ability to ‘surpass the works of the most accomplished painters, in fidelity of details and true reproduction of the local atmosphere’ was noted as early as 1839 by François Arago. It was adopted by observational sciences such as archaeology on the assumption that the optical, mechanical, and chemical features associated with it were largely independent and free of the selective discrimination of the human eye and hand. The camera has been systematically used as a recording device within the discipline, although the observed archaeological reality which it supposedly captures was a creation of disciplinary requirements and has always involved conscious manipulations of photographic technique.

During the 19th century, investigations of the past were strongly tied to antiquarian fascination with Old World civilizations and Western colonial interests. Ancient ruins and art objects were among the first images to be photographed after the technology became available. They were widely circulated by commercial and amateur photographers, and, in an age of imperialism, catered to growing popular interest in other cultures and early civilizations. Daguerreotypes of Egyptian monuments (e.g. the harem gate of Mehmet Ali in Alexandria) created in 1840 by Horace Vernet and Frédéric Goupil-Fesquet mark the beginning of a remarkable chapter in the production of architectural records through photography. The concerns of colonial governments (mainly European) stimulated scholarship and research on colonized people and their histories, and led to various projects to document the subjugated world. An early example of photography's systematic use to record a colonized terrain is from the Indian subcontinent where, from 1855, the East India Company initiated a project of photographing major historical monuments in the western and southern regions. Although this was short-lived, the rich corpus of architectural photographs taken by officers of the company was assimilated into the archives of the Archaeological Survey of India, a bureaucratic organization formally established in 1870. These remain invaluable sources for the architectural history of the country.

Developments in photographic technology between the 1850s and 1880s made it progressively cheaper and easier to use, and permitted the large-scale replication of images. By then, photography had superseded other forms of recording practices, such as sketching, painting, and model making. Some of the earliest examples of photographs taken during archaeological excavations date from 1873-85, from the jungles of Yucatán (Mexico), by the antiquarians and mystics Augustus (1826-1908) and Alice le Plongeon (1851-1910). By scrupulously photographing their discoveries under trying conditions and publicizing their photographs, the couple had hoped to win fame and fortune, although they died in penury. Forty years later, in the 1920s, photographs of the excavations of Tutankhamun's tomb in Egypt and the Royal Cemeteries in Ur (modern Iraq) played a significant role in generating public enthusiasm and support for archaeological activities in the respective regions. The relationships forged between archaeology, tourism, and heritage in the early 20th century were largely formalized through photography, and the Illustrated London News registered this interdependence consistently until the 1940s. In 1923, referring to the tourist invasion of the Valley of the Kings, it commented that ‘the incessant click of the ubiquitous Kodak indeed must be a sound as familiar there as the constant creaking of the crude water wheels which abound in the locality’.

From the late 19th century, photography became central to systematic methods of excavating that were being developed to promote archaeology as an empirical science. The camera became an essential tool for recording excavation procedures and, with drawings of site maps, trench sections, and artefacts, photographs taken in the field formed an important corpus of material, accepted as depicting facts. Excavation photographs are still used for cross-referencing analyses and illustrating reports and lectures. They are treated as material objects incorporating valuable information and—although this ‘commodity’ role within the discipline has been largely overlooked—often circulated and exchanged as such.

Frederick Ward Putnam's (1839-1915) excavations of the Indian Mounds in the Ohio River Valley (1882-6) are an early example of archaeology's systematic engagement with photography to record all aspects of an excavation. Endorsing the maxim that ‘to dig is to destroy’, Putnam followed a cautious method of trenching and slicing, and ordered his helpers to undertake careful photography at every stage. The glass-plate negatives developed in the field served as sources for line engravings for Putnam's scholarly articles. They were copied on to lantern slides that he used for teaching and fund-raising both locally in Ohio and in the Boston area.

Photography was systematically drawn into archaeological excavations through the pioneering work of Lieutenant-General Augustus Pitt Rivers (1827-1900), who used the camera extensively between 1880 and 1895 to document his Excavations in Cranborne Chase. In fifteen years, Pitt Rivers transformed the hobby of barrow digging into a rigorous scientific pursuit. His lavishly produced reports, recording his excavations at Woodcuts and Rotherley, Woodyates, Wor Barrow, Bokerley Dyke, and Wandsdyke, included not only detailed contour maps, drawings, and lithographs of mounds and unearthed artefacts, but also photographs of the actual spadework, and of every object and skeleton in situ. The total of 317 photographic plates included in the four volumes were aimed at conveying the precision, and emphasizing the merits, of his scientific techniques.

Pitt Rivers understood that visual evidence was crucial for attesting his claims of obtaining high standards of accuracy in his excavations. He and Putnam were both able to show how photography could produce a document of systematic fieldwork, and to achieve this end they consciously experimented with the technology. Rules for archaeological photography that were subsequently formulated in the early 20th century stemmed from their work. These demonstrate how conditions on the ground were manipulated to provide a clear view of the excavated surface and finds, and were formulated after exhaustive experiments with the photographic apparatus.

Flinders Petrie (1881-1946), the renowned excavator in Egypt and Palestine, was one of the first professional archaeologists to discuss at length correct procedures for archaeological photography. He allocated an entire chapter to the subject in his seminal manual on archaeological practice, Methods and Aims of Archaeology (1904), providing guidelines for the preparation of objects for photography, lighting, choice and direction of cameras, shutter speed, and procedures for the development of glass-plate negatives. Twenty years later, Mortimer Wheeler (1890-1976) established standards for archaeological photography, through his excavations of Roman forts and towns in Wales and England (1922-38), that are still followed today. With the camera, Wheeler produced strong, clearly defined images of excavations directing the viewer's eye to aspects of fieldwork he wanted them to see. The excavation report on Maiden Castle, Dorset, is a classic example (1943). Wheeler also introduced many new types of excavation image. Photographs of pottery yards, removal of artefacts from their find spots, and payment of wages to labourers became common from his time.

In the early 20th century, the use of aerial photography revolutionized field observations and initiated the study of settlement archaeology. Although the possibility of taking photographs from a non-captive balloon was conceived between 1880 and 1887, the first successful such aerial photograph was taken in 1906 of Stonehenge, from a military balloon, by Lieutenant P. H. Sharpe. In 1913 Henry Wellcome developed Sharpe's methods and successfully created large box kites with specially devised automatically controlled cameras for photographing the archaeological sites and his own excavations in the Upper Nile region of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. The impetus given by the First World War to aerial photography led to rapid developments in the principles of aerial archaeology. One of the pioneers, the French Jesuit Antoine Poidebard, in 1925-32 used aerial observation to trace ancient caravan routes leading to Roman frontier defences in the Syrian deserts. In 1936 he also discovered many new forts and roads, and an ancient harbour beneath the sea at Tyre (Lebanon); its partial excavation with the help of divers was one of the first successful investigations of an underwater site.

Throughout the 20th century, photographic technology has been variously used in archaeological investigations. Stereoscopic photography and photogrammetry have permitted greater accuracy in the reading of inscriptions. The photomicrographic technique, scanning electronic microscopy (SEM), has allowed detailed artefact analyses providing, for example, information on their manufacturing techniques and constituent materials. Sophisticated methods of photoanalysis have made photography all the more crucial to modern archaeological research and interpretation.

Like field notes of site excavations, archaeologists have extensively used their photographic archives for reference. Nineteenth-and early 20th-century photographs of ancient sites and ruins have been widely used for conservation projects, as these photographs sometimes recorded features that have since been lost, destroyed, or altered. One example of the value of early photographs for later archaeological work is from Copan (Honduras), where pictures taken during the exploration of the classic Mayan sites in 1891-3 were the only reliable sources available to the archaeologists of the Carnegie Institute for rebuilding the 2, 500-glyph-block stairway in 1931.

Archaeological photographs reveal clearly, and at times more extensively than written texts, the complex trajectories of the discipline's development. The increasingly precise depiction of excavation techniques permitted by photography is one example of how 19th-century antiquarian pursuits were transformed into a field science of archaeology. In the process, norms of pictorial depiction were heavily borrowed from the natural sciences, and the profound impact of photographic technology on the discipline is clearly visible. It has offered a distinct visual identity for archaeology's unique investigating techniques by allowing the production of visually coherent excavation accounts. Through photography, archaeologists have been able to create lasting testimony to the value of their methodology.

— Sudeshna Guha

Bibliography

• Banta, M., and Hinsley, C. M., From Site to Sight: Anthropology, Photography and the Power of Imagery (1986).
• Molyneaux, B. L. (ed.), The Cultural Life of Images: Visual Representation in Archaeology (1997).
• Poole, D., Vision, Race and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (1997).
• Edwards, E., ‘Material Beings: Objecthood and Ethnographic Photographs’, Visual Studies, 17 (2002).
• Richards, J., Stonehenge. A History in Photographs (2004)