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Christopher Witmore |Precision, fungibility, legibility and repeatability were what the Leake’s work and the French map offered. With photography, not only did the ability to show things attain a new level of ‘accuracy and perfection of detail’ (Trachtenburg 1980, 12), but visual qualities of the material world could be manifest in two-dimensions and rapidly mobilized. Prior to photography these qualities resided solely with the thing and now for the first time in history something more of the world could be materialized in two dimensions and circulated beyond the time and location of the scene outside of the direct manipulation of the human hand. Of course, in the decades after (in fact throughout the rest of the 19th and early 20th centuries) Talbot and Daguerre’s announcements there were still many major hurdles. Beyond refining the quality of the photographic image and the equipment, the photograph also had to be multiplied. After Talbot and Daguerre’s acts of delegation, these two aspects of innovation and refinement would be spread out in a series of performances, transformations and patents (not to mention cascades of photographic media)—the invention of the collodion process, reduction of camera size, introduction of color and so on—across the 19th and early 20th centuries.
While pioneers such as Ruskin would use daguerreotypes in photographing monuments and architecture (Evans 1956, 290), the path of photography would not crossover into antiquarian endeavors with any significant force until into the 1850’s. It was in 1852 that the British Museum secured a promising assistant curator, Charles T. Newton (1816-1894), a position as vice-consul on the island of Lesbos. Effectively an archaeological mission, from 1852-1860, Newton would excavate at Branchide, Chidnus and Halicarnassos. Backed by the authority and resources of the British Museum (which maintained a tight alliance with the British government)—most useful in securing the difficult, but necessary, firmans or intimidating local officials—the consul would displace a tremendous harvest of sculpture and inscriptions, including the famed fourth century statuary and friezes from the Mausoleum of Halikarnassos, to a series of galleries off Great Russell Street in London. During his excavations at Halicarnassos (Budrum, Turkey), Netwon even had a British ship of war, the HMS Gorgon, under the command of Captain Towsey with a crew of 150 men at his disposal (Newton 1865 II, 67-68; Jebb 1895, 83; Stoneman 1987, 218-224). Beyond all these allies Newton was also able to mobilize a new one in the context of archaeological excavation (or rather the acquisition/appropriation of antiquities), photography (Evans 1956, 290, footnote 5; Dorrell 1994, 6; Newton 1862 and1865 II).
When Newton left England for the Levant in 1852 he was accompanied by Dominic Ellis Colnaghi, the proprietor of the renowned London art gallery (Newton 1865, 2). A close friend of Newton, Colnaghi traveled to a number of locations in his company and photographed many of the scenes Newton would later publish in his Travels and discoveries in the Levant (Figure 2.9). To be sure, Colnaghi’s presence impacted Newton’s recognition of the great merits of photography in the documentation of archaeological sites.
For his excavations at Budrum, Newton requested through the intermediary of British Museum that her Majesty’s Secretary for Foreign Affairs dispatch an officer of the Royal Engineers, Lieutenant (later General Sir) R. Murdoch Smith, and four ‘Sappers’ to accompany the Gorgon to Budrum. The purpose of these military personnel according to Newton, was ‘to direct any difficult engineering operations; and, in order to secure an accurate record of the excavations,’ Newton ‘suggested that one of the Sappers should be a photographer’ (1862 I, 85; 1865 II, 67). Once again, archaeology would benefit from military knowledge, skill and instruments through the direct participation of British military personnel. In fact, during his excavations Newton employed two photographers trained by the British Royal Engineers. From early November 1856, Corporal B.L. Spackman would photograph the excavations of the Mausoleum and other areas at Budrum and subsequently at Branchidae near Miletus. In December of 1857, Macartney (Newton never provides a forename or initial) replaced Spackman during Newton’s excavations at the site of Cnidus.
Newton was fortunate in his timing. The Corps of the Royal Engineers had only begun the instruction of photography at Chatham in 1856 (Gernsheim 1969, 231; Ryan 1997, 78). What is more, Spackman was one of only a handful of the first Sappers to receive instruction in photography from Charles Thurston Thompson (1816-1868) of the South Kensington Museum during the previous spring (Falconer 1981, 37-38).
RE personnel employed, according to Helmut Gernsheim, the wet-collodion process, which had been introduced by F. S. Archer in 1851. In this process, an emulsion of collodion containing iodide of potassium is poured evenly over a glass plate and immediately dipped into a bath of silver nitrate. The plate was then inserted while still moist into a camera and exposed for 10 to 20 seconds (a drastic improvement over long exposure times required for the calotype—daguerreotypes required less time). Almost all of the photographs from Newton’s excavations at Halicarnassos show the figures, often sailors or locals decked in regalia, in frozen poses, which is indicative of such exposure times (Figure 2.10). Wet-collodion photography required an array of equipment—camera, lenses, tripod, chemicals, ready-made solutions, glass negatives, dishes, a supply of fresh water and a portable dark-tent (Gernsheim 1969, 276). Such equipment proved cumbersome on the ground, which would, no doubt, have influenced negotiations as to what should be photographed. Given this it is surprising that the Newton only ever refers to Corporal Spackman’s equipment during its transportation to Branchidae as a ‘photographic apparatus’ (1865 II, 147). He does, however, describe a photograph of a local landowner, Hadji Captan, as ‘on the glass’ (1865 II, 83).
The enrollment and mobilization of photography in the context of excavation entered antiquarians into a new transaction with place. This very transaction would be fundamental to the making of the professional archaeologist. While on site, Newton delegates what normally would have required much time, and yet would have been subject to variability in the form of an illustration, to a person-with-a-camera. This collective would prove to be a more rapid, dependable and faithful witness. This collective would also have an immediate impact upon excavation practice. While digging in a field belonging to Hadji Captan, for example, Newton’s team (a combination of local workmen and sailors from the Gorgon) exposed an extensive tessellated pavement at a depth of around three feet below the surface. Believing the mosaic to be of Roman date, Newton would remove it in an effort to locate earlier Hellenistic levels. In a letter marked December 1856 Newton continues:
Before attempting to take up any floors, I had nearly the whole copied by photography, in the following manner:—The photographic lens was placed on a portable stage above the pavement, so as to take a vertical view of a small portion of it, and was shifted from point to point till views of the whole design had been obtained. Notes of the different colours were then made on the photographs. Exact plans of the patterns in each room were also made by Lieut. Smith. After all this had been done, I tried to take up some of the best of the floors (1865 II, 81).
Here, in the midst of an action whereby photographs come to stand in for a displaced mosaic pavement, we witness a new form of engagement with an archaeological context (Figure 2.11 (Plate 38 of 2.2)). Although, the view is a familiar one to be found in vertical, two-dimensional architectural plans (also refer to Crary 1990), Corporal Spackman and his camera balanced several meters above the tessellated pavement are involved in a fundamentally different act of viewing from that associated with the measurements and calculations necessary for Lieutenant Smith to collate his plans. This very act of viewing, this new ocular performance related by Newton, will become a routine mode of engagement upon thousands of excavations throughout the world with the aid of observation towers or eventually balloons, kites and airplanes. Corporal Spackman, the camera, and the photograph mediate a new form of practice.
But even with the ability to mobilize the material world with the aid of the mediator of the camera, Newton still had to circulate ‘his discoveries’ at a distance. These things had to travel beyond the trenches of Bodrum, Turkey. There is much more to the excavations of these sites than the select materials limited to the galleries of the newly created Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum. Still, Spackman and Macartney’s photographs were engraved into lithographic illustrations by T. Picken and E. Wagner of Day and Son, London in Newton’s final publications (1863). This transformation placed the detail of the photographs more or less on the same par with other archaeological drawings. Compare, for example, the etched photograph of Figure 2.12 to the line drawing of Figure 2.13. In the reduction of the photograph, the fine edge of the final publication volume replicated illustration and thereby filtered out the accuracy and detail of the image. Nevertheless, this reduction of the photograph through engraving was soon to change.
The enrollment of photography in excavation would have a part to play in the shift from the accumulation of antiquities via collecting, to the accumulation and circulation of antiquities via immutable mobiles. Newton’s days of displacing 384 cases of appropriated materials from Turkey to England, through the Herculean effort of hundreds of laborers and thousands of man hours, British Pounds, along with the sheers, ropes, blocks, timber, lifting bars, pick axes, would soon come to an end. It is far easier, much cheaper, and less controversial to assemble allies in the form of flat paper inscriptions in one place than it is to bring together thousands of heavy sculptures, architectural sections, fragile pots or pottery fragments into a single gallery. Conceptions of heritage, power relations between nations, and politics were transforming the ability of governments and museums to appropriate whatever they wished, whenever the wanted. Something of the things out there would now circulate more readily through the photograph and the ease of comparison facilitated by the medium was not lost on the nascent archeologists of the time.
In the autumn of 1870, J.H. Parker, predecessor to Arthur Evans as the Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, would extol the virtues of photography for the contrast and evaluation of archaeological materials. To undertake the study of things by comparison, according to Parker, ‘formerly required the power of traveling far and wide but the art of photography enables us to pursue this study by our own fireside, and sometimes even better than we could do by traveling, because we can place the objects side by side, and not have to trust to memory or drawings, which are not always depended on’ (quoted in Daniel 1967, 131). Maps, and plans could be doctored (cf. Monmonier 1991), illustrations and landscape imagery could be rendered as picturesque and pleasing even during a hot and mosquito invested afternoon. But as an accurate and faithful witness, the photograph, at least within the popular imagination of the ‘culture of realism,’ would tell no lies. Something of the reality, the material presence of ‘objects’ could be mobilized.
In this way, archaeologists such as Newton would no longer have to rely exclusively on a combination of experience, clout and authority, as with Leake. It was with the enrollment of this new technology that a new collectivity was formed. What is more, it is with this sociotechnological shift (recall that we also need other media and instruments) that we witness the coalescence of the ingredients necessary for a professional archaeology. Here it should be reemphasized that I am not attempting to make a ‘materialist’ argument in regard to the ‘origins’ of archaeology. Many other fields—military knowledge, skill and infrastructure, media, engineering, architecture, chemistry, mathematics, optics, Ottoman administrators, the permission of local landowners and so on—distant in both time and space and occupied by both humans and nonhumans had to coalesce in order for this new collective to be formed.
By the 1870’s archaeology in Greece took a turn toward large-scale state sponsored excavations (cf. Marchand, 1996; Morris 1994 and 2000, 37-76; Shanks 1996; Stoneman 1987). With the now canonized excavations of Alexander Conze, Ernst Curtius, and Heinrich Schliemann, archaeology in Greece underwent a period of rapid innovation and refinement in terms of the instruments and media of this new collective. But while excavation methods were developing on these big digs, one of the greatest impacts would be felt through the further integration of photography into the most routine of excavation practices.
At Hissarlik, Schliemann employed a professional photographer to take some 10,000 photographs of the artifacts excavated from 1871 to 1873 (Deuel 1977, 194). Translated from the choice finds, that were filtered out of some 250,000 cubic meters of the tell site, these photographs were further reduced into a large proportion of the more or less 1800 illustrations in his Ilios (Schliemann, 1880). These were either engraved or transferred to woodcuts, which could be inserted directly into the text for immediate association, and like Newton, could be published as dual-tones (Figure 2.14). But such modes failed translate the full potential of the photograph in the final document.
Although photographs, as an alternative to photoengraving, had been matted directly into some books from the 1850’s (Evans 1956, 292), it was only with the Samothrace volumes that the actual photographs were placed directly into publication volumes from an excavation (Conze, Hauser and Niemann 1875 and Conze, Hauser and Benndorf 1880). Incorporation of the actual photographic print into the final publication of archaeological sites was significant (Figures 2.15 and 2.16). First, there was no need for the intermediate step of transforming the photograph through etching, engraving or lithography, as with Newton and Schliemann’s publications. Second, and most importantly, an unparalleled degree of detail was maintained in the final publication. It was important for publishers to remove the intermediary step involved with hand engraving photographs in order to remove any direct human transformation of the image and therefore any possible image corruption. This brought the fine edge of the end publication directly into the documentation of the field through complete mechanical reproduction.
As the minute detail captured in the photographic emulsion could not be replicated through the process of engraving or etching, the quality, specificity and detail of a photographic print was only limited by the quality of the silver bromide or silver halide emulsion utilized. From pick to publication the transformation of things through a visual intermediary—the photograph—was accomplished by nonhumans. Of course, humans were also involved but not in the direct manipulation of the image. As such, this ‘mechanical’ mediation created a sense of immediacy and intimacy, which would have ramifications in terms of perceptions of photographs as object and transparent media (cf. Shanks 1997). This would have consequences for field practice that were media driven. But these changes were slow to come.
With the Conze volumes, photographs were matted individually as plates. There was as of yet no means by which to transfer a photograph to a printed surface and maintain its level of continuous detail. But the issue was not only one of mobilizing and translating a scene, a site, an architectural feature, or a pot form a particular point of view, it was also an issue of multiplying the image. Photo matting could be undertaken for small print runs, but at the time of the Samothrace volumes, it was both expensive and impractical for large quantity publications. In contrast, most publications went with either photolithography, ‘collotypes’ (also called phototypes), or, as with the Olympia volumes, ‘Lichtdrucks’ (Curtius 1876 and 1877).
In the photolithography of the years after the mid 19th century a photosensitive coating is applied to a lithographic stone and exposed to light under a negative. Once the coating is washed away, the image that remained was etched with acid and inked. Because the remaining image contained an acid inhibitor such as bitumen it would attain relief in respect to the uncovered areas (Gernsheim 1969, 545-546). While photolithography was both quick and inexpensive it could not replicate the detail of the photograph. It could not render halftones (Petrie 1904, 117). Halftones were critical to the translation of a photograph into a plate. Prior to halftone publication, the rich detail of photographs was reduced into lines and dots (they were ‘pixelated’). Halftones dropped the relief transformation of the things seen below the threshold of human vision (Ivins 1953, 128).
By 1860, halftones could be created through a process known as the collotype (Gernsheim 1969, 538). But this process was not fully refined until 1868. Over two decades later the collotype would have an impact upon archaeology through the Olympia publications and a hybrid process called ‘Lichtdruck.’ With the Lichtdruck the collotype process is applied to either glass or stone (Geinsheim 1969, 548). Despite the additional step required for the intermediate stage of transformation, the Lichtdruck was enrolled in because of its ability to render halftones. This fineness of detail in the showing of things was an important aspect of the large plate folios which accompanied the Olympia volumes (Figures 2.17 and 2.18). Moreover, the Lichtdruck process allowed for much larger, more rapid and cheaper printing runs.
The ability to observe through the intermediary of the photograph was critical to the practices of contemporary archaeology. What is given over in experience is never the same as that which is related after the long processes of analysis, research and study. No matter what we attempt to bring to the moment of excavation or walking a survey transect, we will always understand a feature, a freshly plowed field covered in ceramics or a floor level in a trench differently after several days, several weeks or several seasons into a project. In this respect, a photograph was not simply regarded as a transparent window to the things-in-themselves in a final publication volume. Rather the photograph also mediates something of the ambiguity of the material world and thereby, as a visualized manifestation of an event, allows the archaeologist to return to the inscribed moment and understand it from another standpoint, at another time, and in another place. A photograph, to be sure, is only a transparent medium so long as we have the accompanying text (the associated reference) to tell us so (Shanks 1997)—e.g. ‘Site of Temple of Mars’ as the thing, ‘looking East,’ denoting the point of view.
Today, slightly over half a century has passed since William M. Ivins wrote about the impact of photography upon visual communication. For Ivins the photograph captured a scene with ‘greater accuracy and fullness of detail’ than previous illustrated views (1953, 137). But, because it also brought forth so much of the complexity, the photograph would not dislodge the plans, maps and diagrams, as I have detailed in the work of Leake and the Expédition, that reduce such complexity in favor of standardized compatible, legible and fungible modes. These modes complimented each other. So the drawing, as Ivins points out, ‘maintained its place as a means of making abstractions while it lost its place as a means of representing concretions’ (1953, 137). Illustrations of landscapes and monuments common to publications of the early 19th century were by the end of the same century replaced with photographs. The further development of illustration from the end of the 19th century can only be understood in respect to the photograph.
The profound impact photography would have upon other media in archaeology was summed up by Stuart Piggott in the context of draftsmanship and illustration. According to Piggott:
From the beginning of printing all illustration (save in the exceptional circumstances where the original draftsman also made his engraving) interposed two interpreters between reality and the reader—the primary artist, and the craftsman who cut a block of soft wood across the grain, or engraved the end-grain of a hard one, or engraved, etched, mezzotinted, aquatinted or lithographed on metal or stone. With the introduction of the photographic processes, especially those of black-and-white line blocks, the original drawing could be transmitted in facsimile, or at most reduced in size, without passing through another person’s mind (1965; 172).
Mechanical reproduction removed another transformative step from the chain of translation behind other modes of documentation as well. In this way, the introduction of both the instrument of the camera and, only subsequently, the photographic medium in publication set off a series of delegations which brought about shifts, not only in how archaeology was visualized, but also practiced.
So, by the turn of the 20th century, the new practices mediated by the photographic media were numerous. Schliemann, the architect of the Grand Canyon through the mound of Hissarlik in 1871, would later benefit from the sound practice exercised by William Dörpfeld. Through the young German archaeologist, photography would come to directly mediate the pace and character of excavation at Troy. But, at times, such practice frustrated Schliemann. During the later excavations of Troy Schliemann maintained that ‘much precious time is lost on the houses of the five settlements successive to the second burnt city, because we cannot dismantle before cleaning and photographing them’ (quoted in note 31 of Deuel 1977, 380-381). Later, Flinders Petrie, in another example suggested that any sunken carving or inscription, depending on color, be packed with charcoal dust or powder to provide a strong contrast within the photograph (1904, 76) (Figure 2.20). Such treatment was extended to the presentation of materials in the course of fieldwork. Petrie, in perhaps the first guide to field practice, further recommended:
Reliefs upon weathered stones should be dusted over with sand, and then lightly wiped until just the wrought relief is cleared, and the ground is left smoothed with sand. Stones in building should be brushed or scraped clean, so as to contrast with the earth. Joints in walls should be picked out or brushed so as to show clearly. Sometimes, as in a flooring of wood, the whole should be entirely brushed clean, and then the joints packed with the lightest colored sand so as to contrast well. A grave needs hand-picking, and then every bone brushing clean, and the ground between packing with dark earth to give contrast. All pottery and objects should be entirely cleaned around, and lifted so as to show a clear outline (1904, 76-77).
The photograph as a mediator of excavation practice would aid in making the hygienic treatment of features during excavation routine.
Illustration and drawing did not require a surface to necessarily be cleaned. But if something is to be mobilized and transferred through the photograph the surface could be viewed and therefore it was not long before the photograph began to have a stake in the preparation of the surface. Indeed, we today are familiar with the lengths archaeologists will go for a photograph, from meticulously sweeping a floor surface to trimming every blade of grass to neatly cutting and delineating a stratigraphic sequence. Such practices are mediated by the humble context photograph. Indeed, by the mid 20th century, M.B. Cookson in Photography for Archaeologists (1954) regarded cleanliness as a virtue to be held above all others. He continues:
no matter how correct the exposure and the development of the negative, no matter how carefully a print is made, a wall with mud still clinging to it, a floor poorly brushed, a pavement insufficiently washed, the badly-trimmed edge of a cut can completely ruin the finest of photographs from an archaeological standpoint. From experience, I know how heart-breaking it can be to scrape a stone floor hour after hour, or to wash the metalling of a Roman road pebble by pebble until I hoped that every stone would come loose and there would be an end to any photograph – but I know the pleasure the ultimate result has brought when the photograph of the finished work is seen. Some of the words on cleanliness will appear again; they cannot be over-emphasized. ALWAYS KEEP THE SITE CLEAN! Cleaned stone and caulk glisten in the light, their shapes sharp and clean when the earth on which they lie is undercut and they are well brushed. (13-14: emphasis in original).
What is now regarded as a common emphasis upon hygienic practice in excavation should be understood as common articulation connected with photographic media.
By the end of the 19th century, our relations with the stuff of classical archaeology had become mediated by an evermore complex collective of plans, maps, photographs, text, theodolites, notebooks, cameras, trowels, and so on. And yet beyond this we still had some way to go before further delegations and innovations would occur with O.G.S Crawford and aerial photography, Sir Mortimer Wheeler and the stratigraphic profile, Edward Harris and statigraphic units, and so on.
Newton enrolls a new technology. Conze enrolls a new medium. Curtius and Schliemann multiply the things displaced by their excavations (mobilize their sites). Photography provided a rapid, dependable and faithful witness that allowed something of the stuff of archaeology to travel via an immutable and mobile form that could be infinitely multiplied. Moreover, it is with the enrollment of photography that we witness the birth of the collective associated with a professional archaeology. But this development occurred in step with the slow accretion of photographic and publication processes as well as equipment. Other modes of documentation such as text, map, plans, and illustrations had by the turn of the 20th century developed in combination with the photograph. The scenographies mobilized and the collectives involved in this process are present in the Argolid Exploration Project.
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