Art and Archaeology

The visual devices used by Tony Blair and George Bush to get themselves elected and maintain power, come not from modern times, but a world that is thousands of years old. How Art Made the World ventures back to the creation of Stonehenge and the reign of Alexander the Great to reveal how imagery became an indispensable weapon in every leader's political armoury.

This episode explores how art can be used as a persuasion device by those in power and when did we learn to use images, to create a powerful icon or symbol, this way?

The use of art as a tool for those in power, started at different times, in different cultures. Near Stonehenge the grave of the Amesbury Archer was discovered in 2002, the grave was different to those previously found near the site, as this one was not Roman, but much earlier, dating to when the first sarsen stones were erected. What made him interesting were his gold hair tresses, possibly the oldest dated gold objects in Britain, and the fact that he was a foreigner, from the region that is now Germany / Switzerland. The archer had completed an epic journey for the time, and the treasures in his grave show a man of status. Art for personal adornment, like these hair clasps, elevated him above his peers.

As time progressed, art became a political tool, kings competed for more dazzling adornments. As kingdoms got bigger the kings had to overcome communication issues. Darius the Great of Persia, ruled over 20 nations from Persepolis. As very few people could read, Darius had stone reliefs created that combined styles from all over the empire, the carvings showed each nation bring tributes to their king. This showed respect, and the carvings communicated that Darius admired and respected his people. Darius created a symbol for himself, that of the archer, symbolic to Persians of leadership and wisdom, central to the concept of kingship. Darius embossed this symbol on gold coins, which became the currency to trade within the empire.

Darius’ conqueror, Alexander the Great, took this concept further. From an early age, Alexander’s image was being made for him. In his fathers tomb, an Ivory head recognisable as Alexander’s was found, showing that his image had been made for him in advance of him becoming king. In Pompeii, a copy of an original Macedonian painting, shows Alexander the Great, fearless, fixated on his enemy and leading from the front. He is in the midst of battle with king Darius, shown fearful and panicking. Where Darius had used a symbol to communicate his power, Alexander used his face. On defeating the Persians, Alexander melted down all their coins replacing them with coins bearing his head. Tests have shown that people are more influenced by the image of the head and this technique has endured 2500 years and still used today.

This artistic power can be used for sinister purposes, to persuade us to see things a certain way or even deceive us. The earliest known use of this dates back to the Romans. In 40BC Rome was in crisis, the city state was split between royalists and republicans. You could tell people’s political allegiance by how they dressed. Octavian (Augustus) understood the power of art and used it to his advantage. He needed to persuade his opponents ,and used artists to create a less threatening image, one that won over the republicans. Although the image showed him as a powerful general, it didn’t show any military arms, and his gestures were more about humility than power. His armour breast plates show him accepting surrender of the Parthian Empire, with the gods looking on approvingly. The statue offered reassurance, but it was all a lie. While he portrayed himself as a peace maker, he was getting rid of the opposition; while he was preaching humility, he lived like corrupt royalty and while pretending to hand power to the people he reinstated himself as a king.

The leaders of past used paint and marble, today we use digital manipulation. But as humans we still remain vulnerable to the persuasive power of art.

The discovery of prehistoric cave paintings in the nineteenth century led to the shocking realisation that humans have been creating art for over 30,000 years. Episode two reveals how the very first pictures were created, and how images may have triggered the greatest change in human history.

To discover the first two dimensional paintings we need to look at the art created in caves such as Altamira, Chauvet and Lascaux; these were created roughly 35,000 years, the time Archeologists identify with a ‘creative explosion’.

The first of these cave paintings were discovered in Altemira by Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, and his 8yr old daughter Maria, in 1879. The paintings they discovered on the walls of the caves were of animals such as aurochs, a long extinct relative of the bison. As these matched similar stone-age images he had seen, Sautuola concluded they were prehistoric. When the caves were opened to the public, however, they were considered a hoax, and unfortunately despite trying to clear his name, his discovery was not scientifically accepted until long after his death. Following this the caves of Lascaux and Chauvet came to light, and it is said that when Picasso saw images of the caves he declared “we have learned nothing”.

Today artists create images of every aspect of life, but back then the images were almost exclusively of animals,  in particular horses, bison and reindeer. The expert Henri Breuil believed the paintings to be linked to rituals that increased the chances of a successful hunt, however more recent archeology has shown that the animals depicted were not those eaten by the people of the time. In addition some of the paintings were in very hard to reach areas of the caves and featured dots and lines. However, it is easy to take a modern view such as this and miss the point completely, that being how did we learn to project our 3D world into 2D.

There are very similar paintings to be found in the Drakensburg Mountains of South Africa, however unlike their European cousins, these were not produced thousands of years ago, but much more recently. These images were produced by the San “bush men” and although they do not produce paintings like this today, Professor David Lewis Williams discovered papers from the late nineteenth century by a German settler that documented the life and rituals of the San people. It became clear to Williams that their religion was based around traveling in a trance state to a spirit world and that they documented in these pictures their experiences of the trance. Often these transitory states involved animals, and the animals depicted were normally large or powerful, such as the Eland, that were respected by the San people. Williams also noticed another similarity with their European counterparts, that of the dots and lines.

Research into altered states, such as the trances of the San people, show that on entering these states, visual disturbances similar to migraine aura that involved lines and dots occur. Furthermore, these images can also be produced through sensory deprivation, for example from being placed deep in a cave for a long time. Prehistoric people, it appears, had hallucinations , which took the form of things that were close to them, such as the horses, bison and aurochs. These hallucinations were remembered and prehistoric people then recreated them on the walls of their caves.

Returning to the European palaeolithic caves, it seems that 12,000 years ago people stopped painting. We don’t know why, but the discovery of Göbekli Tepe, in Southern Turkey may hold the answer.  When excavated the site revealed monolithic pillars built around 12,000 years ago, dated to just the time that the paintings in caves seem to stop. These stone pillars feature carvings of animals such as those in the caves. The effort in creating these stone pillars would have required considerable  labour and organisation, the workers for example, all needed feeding. Recent research has shown that modern wheat can be traced to wild wheat that grows within 20 miles of this site, which has lead scholars to speculate that this was the birthplace of agricultural farming and, in turn, complex society,'civilisation', itself.

One image dominates our contemporary world above all others: the human body. How Art Made the World travels from the modern world of advertising to the temples of classical Greece and the tombs of ancient Egypt to solve the mystery of why humans surround themselves with images of the body that are so unrealistic.

The main theme of this episode is how people rarely created images of the body that are realistic. By understanding this we  also understand something about our bodies, and human nature in general.

The Venus of Willendorf, in the Natural History Museum in Vienna, is a small Venus figure with exaggerated breasts, hips and sexual organs. These exaggerations are symbolic of fertility,  what is significant is that the artist ignored other parts of the body, such as her face and arms. Similar Venus figures with similar exaggerations and omissions have been found all over Europe and Russia. Professor Ramachandran explains why features were exaggerated. By making comparisons to research with Herring Gulls showing how their chicks, which are stimulated by the red stripe on their parents beaks, can be over stimulated by simulating a beak with additional stripes. He suggests that the same neurological process stimulated early man, explaining why they exaggerated these features of fertility over others.

Moving forward several thousand years. The Egyptians, who valued consistency and order in their society, abandoned the exaggerations of their ancestors and chose to use a mathematical approach to creating images of the body. They chose to show each part of the body from it’s clearest angle, developing their recognisable style and then preserving this style for thousands of years. When the Ancient Greek’s culture came into contact with the Egyptians, this ignited an artistic revolution across the Greek city states. The Greek culture wanted a more realistic representation of the figure for their temples, and as with the Kritios Boy, they measured and reproduced the body to exact dimensions in their sculptures. A generation later, however, the Greeks abandoned this ultra realism preferring exaggerated representations of the body based on the aestetic theories created by Polykleitos, such as the Riace Bronzes. Prof Ramachandran explains that art needs this exaggeration to be interesting.

The programme concludes with what we choose to exaggerate, saying this  “is where the magic comes in”. The choice of what to exaggerate has changed over the centuries to match changing human values.

Η παρούσα εργασία αφορά τον σχεδιασμό μίας εφήμερης / “pop-up” έκθεσης, όπου ένας ανασκαφικός χώρος, αυτός της Κουτρουλού Μαγούλας στη Φθιώτιδα, αποτελεί τον βασικό σεναριακό σκελετό για την αφήγηση των πολλαπλών εννοιών που σχετίζονται με την ανασκαφική πράξη. Κύριο αφηγηματικό μέσο αποτελεί η χρήση στατικών και κινούμενων εικόνων που εστιάζουν στα σώματα που δρουν σε ένα αφαιρετικά αποδοσμένο σκηνικό μίας αρχαιολογικής ανασκαφής. Η σύνθεση των εικόνων αυτών -αποτέλεσμα μίας φωτοεθνογραφικής έρευνας κατά τη διάρκεια της ανασκαφής της νεολιθικής θέσης- σε αφηγηματικές ενότητες συνδέονται με αποσπάσματα του ακαδημαϊκού αρχαιολογικού λόγου στο ψηφιακό τμήμα της έκθεσης. Αυτή η εικαστική εγκατάσταση, μια εναλλακτική, μη αντικειμενοκεντρική, έκθεση της αρχαιολογικής διαδικασίας έχει τη δυνατότητα να επιτελείται σε διαφορετικούς χώρους, εξαιτίας της ευέλικτης μορφής της και των λιτών εκθεσιακών στοιχείων της. Επιπλέον, τόσο οι ενότητες του εκθεσιακού σεναρίου της όσο και το οπτικοακουστικό υλικό που χρησιμοποιείται μπορεί να προσαυξηθεί, ακολουθώντας, για παράδειγμα, την παραγωγή του ακαδημαϊκού λόγου της εν εξελίξει αρχαιολογικής έρευνας.

The present essay concerns the design of an ephemeral / “pop-up” exhibition, where an excavation site, that of Koutroulou Magoula in Fthiotida, Greece, consists the basic backdrop for the narration of the multiple notions related to the excavation praxis. The main narrative medium is the use of static and moving images that focus on the bodies that interact in an abstractly rendered topos of an archaeological excavation. The composition of these images -the result of a photo-ethnographic research during the excavation of the neolithic site- into narrative sections are connected with textual excerpts of the academic archaeological discourse in the digital part of the proposed exhibition. This audiovisual installation, an alternative and non-object-oriented exhibition of the archaeological process, has the potential to be performed in different settings due to its flexible form and the minimal nature of the architectural and visual elements used. In addition, both the narrative sections of the exhibition’s scenario, as well as the audio-visual material used can be augmented, following, for example, the production of the academic discourse of the ongoing archaeological research.

Each year over seven billion people across the world are drawn to see the latest feature films at the cinema. This episode reveals how the most powerful storytelling medium ever created exploits visual techniques invented by artists in the ancient world.

The investigation starts with the oldest recorded story, that of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk. The story tells the tales (and adventures) of Gilgamesh and Enkidu.  One scene from the story, in particular, captured the imagination of Bronze Age people, and that was the slaying of a pride of lions. The story inspired the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal, in around 645BC, to cast himself in the leading role of Gilgamesh in a series of carved friezes for his throne room. The success of these lead Ashurbanipal to depict the battle against the Elamites and in particular visualised the prisoners grinding their ancestors bones to make their bread. Although mankind had discovered the power of the protagonist, in particular that of a hero, Ashurbanipal’s stories lacked emotion and so are hard to engage with.

Jumping forward several hundred years to the Ancient Greeks, we find the next missing element crucial to storing telling. In the grotto of the Villa de Tiberius in Spurlonga, Italy, a collection of sculptures were found that depict Odysseus‘s encounter with the cyclops. The statues show Odysseus getting the cyclops drunk and then tricking him, and driving a stake though his eye. By depicting the emotions in the scene we, as the viewer, get a greater connection with the story. If we care about the characters, we care about what happens next.

The Romans refined this process more when Emperor Trajan, celebrated his conquest of the Dacians, and created Trajan’s column in the heart of Rome. The 35m high marble column has the story of the event, spiraling around the column, from the base, right to the very top. Admired by Napoleon and Mussolini, it depicts an Epic with Trajan as the protagonist hero and the Dacian king Decebalus as the antagonist. The sculptors used many visual techniques still used today such as cut scenes, and birds eye and low views to add drama. The whole story can be summarised by looking up the western axis of the column. Although this captivated viewers there was still something missing.

The final piece in the jigsaw can be found in Australia which has some of oldest known painted images, some known to be over 40k years old. The aborigines still draw gods and spirits the same way their early ancestors did, for example images of barramundi fish. This consistency has lead to these images becoming symbols, triggering the viewer to recall well known stories passed down generation to generation. The real magic happened when the Aborigines came together to celebrate these stories, they recounted them adding drum beats, rhythm and chanting. Now two senses were being stimulated, the eyes and the ears.

When the pioneers of the nineteenth century created the first moving images, they were silent, but as soon as cinematographers added sound, cinema as we know it today took off.

Art and Archaeology: Unmasking Material Culture, volume editor David Barrowclough, General editors David Barrowclough and Mary Chester-Kadwell.

Papers by:
Colin Renfrew: Foreward
David Barrowclough: Art and Archaeology, Unmasking Material Culture: Introduction
James O Young: Archaeology and Aesthetics
Susanne Kuchler: Art and Mathematics
Marcia Langton and Bruno David: Art as Social Momentum; Coming into Being in Yolnu Art
Martin Henig: Icons and Idols: Meeting Romans Through Their Art
Sam Smiles: Antiquity and Modern Art in Britain c.1930-1950
David Barrowclough: How Little Does it Take to Represent a Face?
Ian Whightman: Walking into Existence: Prehistory and the Sculpture of Richard Long
Christine Finn: Maybe Art or Artefact: Cornelia Parker and the Body Behind the Glass (Tilda Swinton and 'The Maybe')
Robert Williams: Disjecta Cogitata

Sightations is an archaeology-inspired exhibition running as part of this year’s Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) conference.
In keeping with this year’s conference theme of ‘visualisation’, this exhibit seeks to unpack what it means to represent archaeology visually in 2016. Welcome mediums include drawings, photography, comics, painting, sculpture, textiles, ceramic, CGI, film, video, gaming, virtual reality, and digital works. By juxtaposing creative art forms with scientific approaches to representation Sightations takes aim at archaeological visual conventions and strives to reveal new links between different disciplines, creative industries and sectors of archaeology, drawing connections between ideas with an eye towards future directions for archaeological visualisations.

A une époque où on dessine ce que l'on voit, à la manière des photos ou des captures d'écran, l'art égyptien ne peut que nous paraître bizarre : pas de perspective, quasiment jamais de personnes de face, et des combinaisons étranges de vue de profil, de face ou en contre-plongée. Voici quatre clés pour mieux décrypter l'art égyptien.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxzNErj2xRg

#Egypte #Egypteancienne #Egypteantique #Histoire #Antiquité #Art #Artégyptien #Artantique #iconographie #symbole #perspective #aspectivité #anatomie #3D #elief #2D #documentaire #ToutankaTube #chaînedegyptologie #chaîneYT #chaîneYouTube #Educationnationale #sitestoquedantiquitetasqualikertoutankatube #AmandineMarshall

This outstanding new publication is the outcome of a long-running project investigating the 'art' of Neolithic Britain, funded by the Leverhulme Trust and principally inspired by Gosden and Garrow's Rethinking Celtic Art. As the authors note, artistic expression is afforded a central place in evolutionary accounts of the Upper Palaeolithic 'revolution', but the topic declines in importance somewhat in later periods of prehistory. Further, although megalithic art and open-air rock art have been of perennial interest to scholars, the mobiliary decorated objects of the Neolithic have been relatively neglected, and these provide the focus of the book. At the heart of this study is the application of a series of innovative new visual technologies, principally Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), but also structure from motion photogrammetry, and digital microscopy. These enable worked objects to be rendered in super-real detail, revealing traces that are barely visible to the naked eye. However, this is not an exercise in arid technological description, for it is informed by a series of current and interrelated theoretical approaches: process philosophies, assemblage theory and nonrepresentational theory (Whitehead 1978; Deleuze and Guattari 1988; Thrift 2007).

Contemporary sculpture has gradually developed into what we could describe as a wide program of research that takes a critical look at what we are. Characterized by a multiple or expanded nature, it is becoming culturally and socially more relevant. The exploration of ways of thinking, communicating and displaying characteristics of contemporary art expands the notion of art beyond the visual representation and turns it into an interesting way of research and communication for the other areas of knowledge.
Keywords: Heritage Studies; Art and Archaeology; Ceramic Technology

The ongoing European 'refugee crisis' is, among other things, a reminder that waterways have been connecting people for as long as we have been building boats. Since the Paleolithic, boats took travelers from one coast to another shore, from mainlands to islands. Boats have, of course, not always been successful in their endeavors. However, these moments of sinking and sites of wreckage have not hindered people in their overwater (im)migrations; on the contrary, they have encouraged us to adapt waterborne architecture to new needs and new waters, and to foster a spirit of intrepidity. It is ironic then, that maritime archaeologists who study shipwrecks are faced with such difficulty in public outreach. After all, the maritime legacy is the human legacy; it is colonization, trade economy, war, globalization, climate change. In this paper, recent efforts to address the void between humans and their watery world, and the vessels that have succumbed to it, will be analysed to see what has been done to (dis)place wrecked watercraft within the public imaginary, and how these efforts can be improved upon. Ultimately, a revision of how we conceptualize these “ruins underwater” may better integrate the ancient shipwreck with the post-modern sailor.

This article explores how we might use artistic representations to protect future generations from the dangers inherent in the burial of radioactive waste, taking the work of artists Bryan McGovern Wilson and Robert Williams in Cumbria, north-west England, as a case study. Art has been a means of long-range communication since prehistoric times, and may be deliberately deployed to
communicate with future generations. Contemplation of Wilson and Williams’s practice invites us to consider the longue dure´e of hundreds of thousands of years over which radiocarbon waste produced by nuclear power stations has to be stored safely away from humans. Adapting an Annales historical perspective, Cumbria’s archaeological past is interrogated for evidence of how we might construct monuments that communicate the presence of nuclear waste depositories to future generations. This in turn, and prompted by Wilson’s performance works, invites us to consider whether oral tradition and performance might serve better as a warning to future generations.

This forum response questions the 'creative turn' in archaeology with specific reference to the work of the Archaeology/Heritage/Art Research Network - a loose constellation of academics, artists, events and activities which aims to interrogate the cross-fertilisation of these fields. Focusing on the historical example of the 'conversazione' as a model for participatory debate and practice across different disciplines, the paper argues for more grounded interactions between artists and archaeologists in the light of their increasing conceptual and methodological entanglement.

This is a video of the conference paper entitled "Going beyond and letting go: non-archaeological art and non-artistic archaeology" that Professor Bailey gave at the 2013 Theoretical Archaeology Group in Chicago (in the session called The Way of the Shovel: On the Archaeological Imagination in Art, organized by Ian Russell.

Almost without exception workers at the interfaces of art and archaeology have restricted themselves to the boundaries of their respective discipline and discourse. Whether it is an archaeological investigation of ancient art and artefacts or an artistic recreation of past places, peoples and events, we have not grasped firmly enough the accompanying opportunities for transformative thinking and practice. In this paper, I argue that artists and archaeologists will benefit from moving beyond the current restrictions and limitations. The result will be a lack of discipline (in every sense of that phrase) that will have innovative and transformative things to say, show, do, and make around key issues of modern thinking in the humanities and social sciences. This paper will draw examples from prehistoric and contemporary art as well as from recent work by colleagues who have broken through and broken free.

É indiscutível que a ciência está na base do desenvolvimento tecnológico, económico e social das sociedades modernas. Mas é igualmente evidente que as mais importantes questões políticas e sociais estão enraizadas na ciência.Assim é que a ciência, feita por cientistas, tem impacto fora dos espaços cientí cos. Mas a atividade cientí ca é in uenciada e modelada por aqueles que a executam, consomem e criticam. Ou seja, a ciência é dos cientistas, mas é também de todos os cidadãos. No 4o congresso SciComPT iremos conhecer e debater a contribuição da comunicação de ciência em Portugal para o processo de apropriação da ciência pelos cidadãos.

Art and Archaeology: Unmasking Material Culture, volume editor David Barrowclough, General editors David Barrowclough and Mary Chester-Kadwell.

Papers by:
Colin Renfrew: Foreward
David Barrowclough: Art and Archaeology, Unmasking Material Culture: Introduction
James O Young: Archaeology and Aesthetics
Susanne Kuchler: Art and Mathematics
Marcia Langton and Bruno David: Art as Social Momentum; Coming into Being in Yolnu Art
Martin Henig: Icons and Idols: Meeting Romans Through Their Art
Sam Smiles: Antiquity and Modern Art in Britain c.1930-1950
David Barrowclough: How Little Does it Take to Represent a Face?
Ian Whightman: Walking into Existence: Prehistory and the Sculpture of Richard Long
Christine Finn: Maybe Art or Artefact: Cornelia Parker and the Body Behind the Glass (Tilda Swinton and 'The Maybe')
Robert Williams: Disjecta Cogitata

The drive to collect seems near universal, but nowhere is it so rarefied as in the world of art connoisseurship. This paper considers the work of contemporary artists, father and son Robert and Jack Williams. I focus on the relationship between collector and the collected, informed by my own experience as a practising archaeologist. I am interested in the example of the Williams' artwork which breaks down barriers between natural and cultural artefacts and reflect on how this might stimulate new opportunities for the archaeologist. I use the Williams' work 'Thesaurus Scienta Lancastriae' which took place at Williamson Park, Lancaster, UK, and explored the nature of collecting and collections, of classifying and classification, and of typology and display.

KEYWORDS:
Art, Archaeology, Landscape, Culture, Collector, Collection, Display, Artefacts, Robert Williams, Jack Williams, Mark Dion, Susan Hillier, Lancaster, Cultural History, Classification, Discovery, Archaeological Theory, Typology

Art and Archaeology: Unmasking Material Culture, volume editor David Barrowclough, General editors David Barrowclough and Mary Chester-Kadwell.

Papers by:
Colin Renfrew: Foreward
David Barrowclough: Art and Archaeology, Unmasking Material Culture: Introduction
James O Young: Archaeology and Aesthetics
Susanne Kuchler: Art and Mathematics
Marcia Langton and Bruno David: Art as Social Momentum; Coming into Being in Yolnu Art
Martin Henig: Icons and Idols: Meeting Romans Through Their Art
Sam Smiles: Antiquity and Modern Art in Britain c.1930-1950
David Barrowclough: How Little Does it Take to Represent a Face?
Ian Whightman: Walking into Existence: Prehistory and the Sculpture of Richard Long
Christine Finn: Maybe Art or Artefact: Cornelia Parker and the Body Behind the Glass (Tilda Swinton and 'The Maybe')
Robert Williams: Disjecta Cogitata

THE MATERIALITY OF THE INVISIBLE offers a hitherto unknown opportunity to research in practice the interaction between artists and archaeologists, to work together in close confines, to profoundly exchange information and to thoroughly questioning both professions in an age of change and fluctuating cultural attitudes.
In 2017 an exhibition and symposium is planned to unveil the outcome of this process to an international audience.

European Association of Archaeologists Annual Conference 2013.

A paper exploring the potential in collaborations between the arts and archaeology, particularly in terms of rural engagement. In collaboration with archaeologist David Connolly.