During a period when the lines between the dilettante and scholar were being accentuated, Leake pointed the way forward. Leake’s work provided the topographical standard, both in media (text + map + plan) and practice (observation/description + Classical texts + survey), upon which a specialized field of classical topography and, eventually, survey archaeology could be built. The ‘lone’ figure in the landscape could make a substantial and scholarly contribution to knowledge. However, my explicit interest has been in constantly pointing out how the ‘stand alone’ figure is a very modern intellectual misnomer. Leake, who history has proclaimed as the ‘model geographer’, the ‘individual’ who defined 19th century topography is himself part of a distributed collective situated in a complex heterogeneous network (pace Olsen 2003). William Martin Leake is an instrumental mixture, a machinic assemblage, which defined topographical practice in the Greek countryside. Of course, we construct knowledge, but we only do so by virtue of those things, the pocket watches, theodolites, tapes, sextants, paper and pens, we mobilize for that purpose and which in turn comprise us. In this way, I must necessarily situate things—both media and instruments—alongside the ‘great figures’ and ‘intellectual traditions.’

Likewise, through the compilation of a more accurate flat projection by the French Expédition, the brigades of French cartographers, troops, and so on, who are distant in linear time, are intimately folded into subsequent practices as a quality of the map which mediates subsequent engagements. The multiple fields of contemporary practice are mostly made up of previous practices and without them we would not produce anything. The sociotechnical genealogy of archaeological fieldwork unfolds these strains of ontological connection and accentuates this complexity. It is in this respect that we must trace a few more strains in order to situate contemporary survey practice and its scenographic modes in the Argolid.

In this second section I attend to the further proliferation of instruments and media through acts of delegation and enrollment that had a profound part to play in the professionalization of classical archaeology. By the mid 19th century, there was still plenty of room for improvement in the ‘template to standardization’—the combination of text, map, plan, and diagram—that arose in response to questions of how to best and most accurately describe landscape and site. Much of this occurred around the image. For a discipline, which needs to show things, the instruments and media associated with photography would have a decisive role in the development of archaeology’s modes of visualization and witnessing.

We should not forget that archaeologists have to bring the landscapes, sites and materials back with them in order to facilitate the witnessing of, not only, what was there, but also what practices were brought to bear upon what was there—how a landscape, site, feature or thing was transformed. To be sure, a professional archaeology must convince people and unless one wants to limit the mobility of information to those who stand around the trenches, one has to develop an immutable and mobile mode of dealing with the event. The ability to manifest a feature or ‘object’ on a flat, two-dimensional surface made photography a key mode of visualization for archaeologists. Indeed, while the chemistry and optics, national boundaries and patents, the camera obscura and light, all come together into this process of visualization, the relationship between photography and archaeology must be understood in terms of how it accretes over time. Moreover, this relationship should not be limited to the issue of visualization. While the history of photography has now been intimately detailed (e.g. Gernsheim 1969), revised (e.g. Jeffrey 1999) and rearticulated (e.g. Hirsch 1999) very little has been done on the role played by photography in transforming how archaeologists work on the ground. How does photography in both camera and print come to shape archaeological practice?

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