Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Ancient Asia, 4:
Ancient Asia 4, pp. 1-14, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/aa.12314
RESEARCH PAPER
This article explores some of the ways in which photographs and their archives establish archaeologi-
cal knowledge. It draws upon histories of photography and archaeology within South Asia to create
focus upon archaeology’s evidentiary regimes. The aims are to: a) demonstrate the importance of
engaging with photographs and their archives as objects for reckoning archaeology’s evidentiary ter-
rains, b) draw attention to multiple social biographies a photograph or photographic archive acquires,
c) highlight the visual as a force of archaeology’s historiography, and d) impress upon the necessity
of attending to historiographical issues. The aims allow us in seeing some of the ways in which field
sciences create their evidentiary frames, and have a special resonance within the context of South
Asian archaeology where professional and amateur archaeologists continue to promote the belief that
archaeological facts exist out there, and that archaeological research produces better and more robust
sources for the past than scholarship based on texts. Visual histories also highlight the mutation of the
so-called ‘colonialist’ historiography within the post-colonial histories of archaeology’s developments,
and encourage us to go beyond the hackneyed formulations of colonial legacies and the hagiographic
literature of individual practitioners.
Introduction art and aesthetics, and vision has been theoretically con-
‘In a world dominated by visual images the photograph has textualised in a number of ways to tease out its interven-
become almost invisible’ (Clarke 1997: 11). tions within relationships between archaeological topog-
The above sentence with which the late photo-historian raphies and their inhabitants and creators (examples are
Graham Clarke began his book The Photograph, aptly the edited volumes by Molyneaux 1997, Fejfer, Fischer-
describes the archaeological episteme, where too visual Hansen and Rathje, 2003, Brodie and Hills 2004, Renfrew,
images dominate and where too the photograph remains Gosden and DeMarrais 2004). The focus on visualisation
almost invisible. Considering that archaeological knowl- within archaeology has derived much inspiration from
edge is assuredly anchored upon the transcription of the force of material culture studies, and this emanated
sight, as in field surveys and excavations, photography’s from changing orientations in themes of enquiries dur-
intervention within archaeology’s evidentiary terrain is ing the 1980s within disciplines such as social anthropol-
expectantly profound. Yet, the distinguishing impact of ogy, history of science, sociology and cultural history (see
photography vis-à-vis other technologies of visual encryp- Buchli 2002, for examples of pioneering research). They in
tions on archaeological practices are often glossed over, turn opened up new areas of archaeological research on
and when they are not, it is to correct notions of visual ‘visual essences’ of past encounters (e.g. Frieman and Gill-
verisimilitude (e.g. Shanks 1997). Despite the growing ings 2007), legacies of ‘embodied materiality’ (e.g. Meskell
research on ‘Visualisation and Knowledge formation in 2005), and ontology of vision, including its status within
Archaeology’ (i.e. www.viarch.org.uk), photographs are sensory perceptions (e.g. Ouzman 2001).
usually viewed as images, and grouped with lithographs, The privileging of sight as a ‘sense of reason’ has also by
posters, cartoons, models, digital reproductions and other now produced a fair share of criticism from archaeologists
such ‘visual images’ for directing our attention to the fact who study the visual, and explore the bias of a, western,
that ‘perception and representation are intimately related’ historiography built upon Enlightenment’s heritage (e.g.
(Watson 2004: 95). Hamilakis 2002, but see Poole 2005). Yet, despite the theo-
The neglect of field-photographs within creations of rising, one finds that the growing intellectual thrust upon
archaeological knowledge has not meant that archaeolo- vision’s performance within archaeological spaces (e.g.
gists ignore the phenomenological value of vision; quite Wheatley 1995, Fontijn 2007; for South Asia see Shaw &
the opposite. Over the last two decades the sensory expe- Sutcliffe 2005), which includes investigations on the ‘poli-
rience of seeing has been creatively explored through tics of vision’ (Thomas 1993), nature of ‘gaze’ (e.g. Duncan
research on landscape archaeology and the archaeology of 1993), and ‘materialisation of culture’ (DeMarrais 2004),
overlooks, to a considerable extent, the ways in which the
visual mediate within our selection of that which we pro-
* Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA), Cambridge,
United Kingdom mote as raw data from the field. The dictum ‘to see, hence,
sg10012@cam.ac.uk to know’, which promised antiquarian research the means
Art. 4, page 2 of 14 Guha: Photographs and Archaeological Knowledge
of securing relatively objective histories from things, as human mind in its questions and probing. He reigns in
opposed to from written records, is rarely appraised for photography within this metaphor by pitting experiential
the ways in which it has nurtured archaeology’s eviden- responses that are elicited in our engagements with the
tiary terrain. And an inevitable casualty of this neglect is visual and material, and excavates the value of photogra-
the tendency of ignoring photography and photographs phy ‘for going beyond (and beneath) an artifact’s superfi-
as makers of archaeological knowledge. In this respect cial appearance in order to capture what is deemed most
although Michael Shank’s ruminations of what photo- valuable in it (ibid).
graphs do within archaeology may come across as an early A brief foray of the photographic creations of archaeo-
exception (ibid), they, in effect, illustrate the opposite, logical realities in this article, one hopes, would offer some
namely, the neglect. possibilities of gauging the tactility of such metaphors and
Enunciating that ‘photographs are powerful rhetori- experiences that are being increasingly used for discerning
cal instruments in establishing objectivity’, Shanks had relationships beyond that of mere perceptions and repre-
focused not on photographs but on photoworks (Shanks sentations between photography and archaeology.
ibid: 3, italics his), which for him represent ‘one aspect of
how archaeologist may take up the remains of the past Visual Memory: Photography and Archaeology
and work upon them’ (ibid: 73). Hence, despite the fact By the beginning of the twentieth century the embrace
that Shanks’s article remains a pioneering synthesis of of visual memory by the newest of the new Victorian
the research that had been undertaken on the ‘cultural ‘descriptive science’ of archaeology was rather well enun-
lives’ of photographs until the late 1990s, his analysis ciated by Mathew Flinders Petrie. In his seminal publica-
effectively disengaged photographs from their physical tion on Methods and Aims in Archaeology (1904) Petrie
forms. By emphasising upon the photographic iconogra- had remarked that ‘of all inherent material qualifications
phy alone, Shanks greatly eroded photographs’ saliency, there is perhaps none more essential to a digger than this
reducing their epistemic value to something that, as he permanent picture of a site. And in the transient memory
himself eulogised, ‘cannot be encapsulated within verbal of day to day should include the appearance of every hole
description’ (ibid: 101). on all sides, the meaning of it and the purposes for which
However, as Deborah Poole was to demonstrate, the it is being dug’ (Petrie 1904: 19).
same year as Shanks’s article was published, photographs, Petrie’s instructions for ‘the orderly arrangement of
like most objects, acquire vastly different meanings the material in plates’ within archaeological publications
through their myriad performative spheres. Through her (ibid: 115–6) remains a classic example of the crafting of
research on the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century visual memory for showcasing the quality of archaeologi-
photographic practices in Peru, Poole showed that the cal data, and creating a unique identity for archaeological
domain of visual economy within which photographs undertaking. Such creations of memory have continued
circulated, and which shaped their production and con- to remain vital within archaeology’s disciplinary history
sumption, was the ‘cultural and discursive system’ through throughout the twentieth century.
which they ‘are appraised, interpreted and assigned his- As the Excavations in Cranborne Chase by General
torical, scientific and aesthetic worth’ (Poole 1997: 8–9). Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers, or Pitt Rivers, clearly
Although Poole’s work anticipated Geoffrey Batchen’s, demonstrate, the use of photographs in excavation reports
who was to locate photographs within a ‘social dimension involved placing the readers in ‘possession of all the facts
[and] a dynamic web of exchanges and functions, that and materials’ (to quote Petrie 1904: 114). Pitt Rivers was
gives them a grounded but never static identity’ (Batchen adamant that ‘every details should … be recorded in the
2002: 78), Poole explained fully why ‘it becomes impor- manner most conducive to facility of reference, and it is
tant to ask not what specific images mean, but rather ought at all times to be the chief object of an excavator to
how [they] accrue value’ (Poole 1997: 10). The need for reduce his own personal equation to a minimum’ (1887:
understanding vision’s material intervention within the xviii). His excavation photographs and their captions (e.g.
framing and sustenance of discursive regimes, which she plate 255, 1898: facing page 80) elucidate the many ways
emphasised, calls for an approach to photographs not as in which the reader was made to focus on those aspects of
photoworks but as artefacts. a dig which the excavator wished him to see.
In recent years, the nascent historiography that engages Throughout the twentieth-century, through maps,
with the social and cultural lives of nineteenth-century drawings and photography archaeologists have continued
archaeology has taken some cognisance of the epistemic to emulate Petrie’s views that excavation reports should
shifts induced by photography and described by Walter show clearly that the ‘author’s conclusions are only a co-
Benjamin as transforming the dominance of the auratic ordination, presented to enable the reader to grasp the
to that of the non-auratic (e.g. chapters in Smiles and material, and to feel clearly the effect of it on his sum of
Moser 2005). Photography is received in one such his- idea. For, ‘plates and texts is to show the meaning and rela-
tory as enabling the ‘archaeological metaphor’, and pho- tion of the facts already expressed by form’ and therefore,
tographs as establishing the semantic grounds for expe- ‘the orderly arrangement of the material in plates is the
riencing the past (ibid: Bohrer’s article: 184). By giving first duty [of the report writers]’ (Petrie ibid: 114–5).
meaning to the idea of excavating an imagination, the art Considering that archaeological practices have always
historian Frederick Bohrer has developed a metaphor of involved the recovery of a non-present past, the crea-
archaeology, which according to him is expressive of the tion of visual memories through methodologies of field
Guha: Photographs and Archaeological Knowledge Art. 4, page 3 of 14
the European travellers since the sixteenth-century, was us in India is to be quite certain of our data, to place the
rather well developed by late eighteenth-century within monumental record before them exactly as it now exists,
the picturesque ‘views’ of the cities and towns on the and to interpret it faithfully and literally.’ When read
river Ganga and in Central India that were drawn and together as they were meant to be, the quotations draw
painted by William Hodges. Hodges was the first, Brit- our attention not only on the emphasis that was placed
ish, professional painter to visit Hindustan, between upon seeking historical truths through archaeological sur-
1780 and 1783. And in his introduction to his retro- veys, but also on the accuracy of presenting this work visu-
spective travelogue (1793) he explicitly stated that his ally. With respect to procedures on excavations, especially
sketches and paintings were ‘plain observations, noted while they were in progress, the amateur archaeologists
down upon the spot in the simple garb of truth without of nineteenth-century India, such as Robert Sewell who
the smallest embellishment from fiction, or from fancy’ excavated the stupa of Amravati in 1877, felt the need for
(Hodges 1793: iv). This representational logic was to root the presence of a draughtsman and photographer ‘on the
photography’s launch of archaeological practices within spot’. The ‘one’, as Sewell was to remark, ‘to take measure-
India, mainly from the 1850s, and initially for document- ments, and mark the position of every marble as it comes
ing India’s architectural heritage. to light; the other to stamp in permanence the general
The aesthetics of the sublime, which Hodges’s drawings progress of the work in all its different stages, as well as
are potent expressions of, permeated antiquarian views, to afford accurate information on the position of those
especially in the manner in which antiquaries received stones which remain in situ’ (1880: 8; see Guha 2010 for
their objects of study. The Scottish antiquary, Hector more details).
McNeil’s description of the caves of Kanheri and Elephanta The manuscript, seemingly in Sewell’s hand, on the
(near Bombay), which he saw in 1783, elucidates this inte- reverse of a photographic folio made up of photographs
gration rather clearly. Macneil wrote: ‘be this as it may, pasted in a series to establish a panoramic view of the stupa
the grand cave of Cannara must ever be considered by the site at Amravati reads: ‘this is a photograph of the com-
man of taste as an object of beauty and sublimity, and by plete circle of the middle of the circular mound, which is
the antiquary and philosopher as one of the most valu- all that remains of the Buddhist stupa at Amravati on the
able monuments of antiquity. … Indeed, where I desirous river Krishna. It was taken section by section from the cen-
to spin out my description, the cave of Elephanta might tre of the circle, just after the undersigned’s excavation in
furnish ample food for the most ravenous antiquary. Every 1876’ (Fig. 2). Although an accompanying note casts the
part teems with human forms; every wall seems to move authorship and the date of the photographs in doubt––as
with life obedient to the will of the artist, who seems Saxa it alerts to the fact that the photographs may have been
movere fono testudinis, et prece blanda, Ducere quo vellet” taken by John Kelsall during the Duke of Buckingham’s
(1786: 260, 275). Although ignored as being of relevance excavations at Amravati in the 1880s––the inscription
to histories of antiquarianism within South Asia, particu- adds to the scroll’s value as an accurate transcription of
larly those that are written by archaeologists today, this the field. Such transcriptions of the physical tasks under-
rooting of visual aesthetics within antiquarian scholarship taken during the clearance and excavations of sites were
is of importance for gauging some of the ways in which consciously endeavoured from the middle of the nine-
archaeology appropriates dominant modes of visuality to teenth-century onwards through drawings, water-colours
create evidentiary terrains. and other forms of manual illustrations, often made with
the aid of cameras obscura and lucida, and they enunci-
Photographs and ‘Indian’ archaeology ate the eighteenth century antiquary, William Stukeley’s
The overlapping realm of the visual and archaeological injunctions that ‘without drawing or designing the Study
evidence strongly resonate within the two quotations that of Antiquities or any other science is lame and imperfect’
were printed on the title page of each of the twenty-three (quoted in Piggott 1978: 1).
reports of the Archaeological Survey of India, which docu- Within the Indian subcontinent as much as outside it,
ment the field surveys of Alexander Cunningham (Direc- the genealogical lineage for photographs that came to
tor and Director General of the Archaeological Survey represent the face of a professionalized archaeology by the
from 1861–65, and 1871–85 respt.) and his staff between mid-twentieth century are the nineteenth-century draw-
1862 and 1885. They are a phrase from the Governor Gen- ings which direct the eye to objects found in situ under
eral of India, Lord Canning’s speech on the eve of the insti- the earth’s surface. Although sketches of the geology of
tution of the Archaeological Survey in 1861, enunciating the excavated soil strata abound within the nineteenth-
his government’s archaeological programme that ‘what is century mining and prospecting accounts of India, depic-
aimed at is an accurate description, illustrated by plans, tions of artefacts embedded within the soil stratigraphy
measurements, drawings, or photographs, and by copies are best represented within the corpus of drawings (of
of inscriptions, of such remains as most deserve notice, cromlechs, dolmens and stone circles) created by Philip
with the history of them so far as it may be traceable, and Meadows Taylor, who undertook archaeological explora-
a record of the traditions that are preserved regarding tions of the Hyderabad State, between the 1830s and the
them’. This quotation was placed above the implorations 1850s (Fig. 3). The precision with which Taylor delineated
of James Prinsep in 1838, as the Secretary to the Asiatic his archaeological finds, distinguish his sketches from
Society of Bengal, that ‘what the learned world demand of those of his peers, but although Taylor was a talented
Guha: Photographs and Archaeological Knowledge Art. 4, page 5 of 14
Fig. 2: Note on reverse of folio with twelve albumen prints for panoramic display of the stupa site, Amravati, ca.
1870s–1880s, courtesy The British Museum.
Fig. 3: Drawing, section through large ‘cairn’ (megalith) excavated near Jiwarji, Meadows Taylor, ca. 1849–50, (Plate 6
in Taylor 1851).
Art. 4, page 6 of 14 Guha: Photographs and Archaeological Knowledge
Fig. 5: Captioned ‘The remains of a Buddhist shrine consisting of four handsomely carved pillars, standing on an
ancient platform, with the usual Singhasun facing to the east’, Muslim Graveyard, Bakariya Kund, Banaras, ca. 1863–
4, photographer H.L. Frazer, lithograph, plate 2 in Sherring and Horne 1865.
‘Aurangzeb’s mosque’ and the ghats of Banaras. Worthy ‘Hindu ghats’ (steps leading to the river) is indeed note-
of note is the letterpress that accompanies the photo- worthy for exploring some of the ways in which photogra-
graph numbered 14, taken by Samuel Bourne (Neg no. phy has served Indian archaeology.
1187, Asia Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library),
which affirmed: Collections of ‘archaeological’ photographs
The curatorial impulse for the establishment of coher-
‘Nevertheless, Benares is not of very ancient fame ent collections provides a more direct understanding of
as a Hindu city. All its early religious celebrity is the nexus between photography and archaeology for
derived from Buddhism, which supplanted or understanding the kinds of reciprocities and exchanges
overshadowed Brahmanism in the greater part that occur within professionalisation of knowledge, flow
of India for nearly a thousand years. No doubt of information, and nascence of disciplinary domains.
Brahmanism obtained in the district of Benares, With respect to the British archaeology of India, two very
as elsewhere in India, when Sakya Muni (Buddha) distinctive archives of photographs inform of the shift-
began his preaching there; but there seems an entire ing parameters of archaeological research as a specialist
absence of evidence (whether of written record domain. One was established in 1869, and remains at pre-
or the sometimes more trustworthy one of stone sent in the British Library (London, Asia, Pacific and Africa
and brick) that Benares enjoyed any religious pre- Collection). This archive represents some of the earliest
eminence in pre-Buddhist days. It was Buddhism, photographs of historical architecture, which were taken
and the splendid colleges or monasteries belonging during the ‘listing’ of monuments, and characterises the
to that faith, which gave celebrity and sanctity to nascent archaeological documentation projects that were
the district which Brahmanism inherited after the undertaken within South Asia, between the 1850s and the
expulsion of the Buddhist.’ 1880s. It presents the work of the vast array of amateur
and professional photographers and informs of the early
The above memorialisation of a Buddhist Banaras through history of photography in India, which was launched at
photography and photographs of a mosque and the Calcutta in 1840 (Fig. 6a). The other, established in 1904,
Art. 4, page 8 of 14 Guha: Photographs and Archaeological Knowledge
Figs. 7: a) Album page and reverse of photograph from excavations at Mohenjodaro, 1925–26 (A.61.HRG), Courtesy MAA.
Fig. 9: a) Positive image of glass negative with paper Fig. 9: c) Lantern slide, LS.26731.WHI
frame for highlighting the boy’s head, Thomas Whiffen,
Northwest South America, ca. 1908-'09, Courtesy MAA. ations on the status of vision as a sensory perception does
not present sufficient challenges for situating the role of
vision and the visual within archaeological practices. It is
only by accepting the centrality of vision within archae-
ology’s evidentiary domain, can we question the stability
of the object of our enquiries. Photographs and photo-
graphic archives lend us the heuristic means to do so.
Conclusion
From the early twentieth-century, photographs with no
dark room manipulation beyond that which was needed
to achieve a tonally balanced print were produced mainly
to express the truth-value of direct field observations.
Such photographs inform of scientific excavations that
crosscut geographical and chronological differences, and
bespoke of realist records of the field. Yet, eyewitness
accounts of archaeological evidence has often entailed
observations through analogical prisms, and photogra-
phy’s seminal contribution to archaeology can, perhaps,
be best perceived as enabling the analogical nature of
archaeological enquiry. In this respect, although photo-
graphs typifying Indian village scenes, and occupations
of jatis, which were in wide circulation from the 1870s,
were not published within the early specialist literature
on archaeology, notions of unchanging cultural traditions,
which such photographs were used for conveying, created
truths about India’s civilisational history. The following
dictate of two, rather well known, archaeologists of South
Asia, Raymond Allchin and Bridget Allchin, shows just
Fig. 9: b) The negative sans frame, ibid, N.26839.WHI how facile it is to impress upon the truths of civilisational
Art. 4, page 12 of 14 Guha: Photographs and Archaeological Knowledge
heritage through ethno-archaeological analogies that 2008) sustain a historiography that endorses the notion
are substantiated by photographing the modern world. that the natives of Hindustan were beholden to the Brit-
In their Origins of a Civilization, a book widely used for ish for acquiring proper tools for undertaking historical
undergraduate teaching, the authors had declared that: investigations. Conceptual contradictions are inevitably
‘If one needs further confirmation of the profound and bred when primary elements of a much-maligned his-
lasting character of the Indus civilisation, and of its being toriography are simply accommodated as raw data. And
the antecedent of the later civilisation which sprang up considering that the modern histories of Indian archaeol-
during the Iron Age and early Historic Period, one cannot ogy claim to castigate the colonial historiography, their
do better than to visit the modern towns and villages of blatant emulation of the latter can only be summarised as
Sindh and the Punjab. Standing on the top of the high being profoundly ironic.
mound at Sehwan, on a winter’s dawn, looking through In a world where archaeological knowledge is being
the smoky haze that hangs over the town, it is not difficult increasingly showcased for establishing the historicity of
to envisage the centuries slipping back some four and a unique cultural identities as national heritage, gleaning
half millennia and to picture this as a Harappan rather the ways in which archaeological practices create palpa-
than twentieth-century town’ (1997: 204–5). ble truths and material presence of a non-present past
The Allchins appended the above text with a photo- through photography, to my mind, is perhaps the most
graph of a view of the modern town of Sehwan, which important reason for exploring archaeology’s histories.
they took during their fieldwork of the area during the The experiential metaphor, which has been drawn by
1950s–’70s (ibid: plate 63). The photograph was meant Bohrer for discerning photography’s relationship with
to transmit the reality of their evocation, and its publica- archaeology, may indeed allow us to see the nuances
tion demonstrates the extent to which archaeology relies within the history of this relationship. However, we need
upon photography for creating the force of analogy as clear and focused analyses of what the semantic grounds
logic. Juxtapositions of disparate time frames through of this relationship may be, which Bohrer wishes us to
uses of photography satiates the ethno-archaeological explore, for gauging the implications of photographs and
method, and has often aided in exhibiting archaeological photography on the constitution, transformations and
realities about a non-material, ideational ethos, namely, uses of archaeological evidence.
India’s unique civilisational heritage. Photographs of re- Versions of the article are in 2012, ‘Visual Histories,
enactments showing possible uses of historical terrains by Archaeology and Photographic Knowledge’, in R. Allana
their past inhabitants has facilitated many compromised (ed.) ‘Depth of Field’, Lalit Kala Contemporary 52, 29–40,
histories of a supposedly tactile, and materially recovera- and in forthcoming (2013), ‘Beyond Representations: Pho-
ble entity, which in reality is continuously created because tographs in Archaeological Knowledge’, Complutum (Spe-
of changing historical circumstances. Engaging with the cial Issue on History of Archaeology, eds. C. Huth and O.
history of photography for exploring constructs of archae- M. Abadia), Vol. 8., Journal of Universidad Complutense
ological knowledge, therefore, occasions us to take stock de Madrid.
of our historicizing processes.
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How to cite this article: Guha, S 2013 Photographs and Archaeological Knowledge. Ancient Asia, 4: 4, pp. 1-14, DOI: http://
dx.doi.org/10.5334/aa.12314
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