The professionalization of archaeology is often linked to a key moment of transformation associated with the broader processes triggered by the rise of modernity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Morris 1994 and 2000 37-76; Olsen and Svestad 1994; Shanks 1996; Trigger 1989; Thomas 2004b). My genealogy has been less grandiose than those histories that focus exclusively on the disciplinary technologies of the academy or museum (e.g. Dyson 1998), less mystical than those of large-scale processes (e.g. Trigger 1989) and much more mundane. I have chosen to focus in on how flat paper inscriptions, the concomitant instruments and associated practices have mediated the constitution of knowledge on the ground.

But this is not to plot a course back toward asymmetrical ‘materialist’ explanations. Rather I have endeavored to zoom in on inscription practices. I have chosen to ask how many fields come together to facilitate an engagement with the countryside which is then transformed over the course of two decades into several volumes which set the mark for subsequent scholars. I have endeavored to understand how a flat projection of a region, based upon the tremendous resources of the French state, could be so central to how subsequent scholars approach areas within it. I have also chosen to plot out the transformations which were occurring in relation to the developing photographic image. Knowing what to observe and how to connect these observations with other media, measuring and collating information on the basis of a Cartesian grid system (X, Y, Z), and the addition of a faithful and accurate witness are fundamental to archaeological practice today and our modes of communication. These shifts in how we communicate are wrapped up with our practice, our arguments, our authority, our knowledge. But the shifts I have chosen are the ones associated with precise and faithful witnessing—the construction of harder facts. These shifts were mediated by mundane media and instruments and were critical to the creation of a discipline. What is more, these shifts are still with us today. Our modes of documentation continue to be wrapped up with scenographies developed throughout the 19th century.

Whether acts of delegation or further refinement and innovation, shifts that occurred in the context of 19th century issues of how to best deal with landscape are part of our contemporary collectives. They are folded into our modes of engagement today. A 19th century combination of text, map, and image and the concomitant instruments and practices continue to have a stake in even the most recent approaches to landscapes and sites. At last, by the very end of the 19th century the ‘archaeologist’ was recognizable to his/her 20th and 21st century brethren. But alongside the ‘thinking’ humans of archaeology’s past are mundane actants, in this case, media and the instruments, which came together in the articulation of the Greek countryside.

With this awareness, we can, at last, begin to sufficiently mobilize our 21st century collective potential through new media in our practices without calling back almost exclusively to 19th century scenographic modes. This should not be cause for alarm, ‘few people and even fewer thoughts are completely congruent with the date of their times’ (Serres with Latour 1995, 61). If modernism simultaneously denies the action of things while perpetuating the myth of the singularity of man (cf. Thomas 2004b) then it fails to keep pace with how we operate in real-time, on the ground, in archaeological practice. It is to the ontology of contemporary practice that I now turn in the next chapter.

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