Visual Archaeologies: Editorial Introduction.

For the last three decades, archaeologists have been trying to develop new ways of telling the past – or manifesting it – through text and new media. Visuality, in particular, has gained much prominence through the development of new forms of digital imagery. At the same time, there has been a call for more aesthetic explorations in archaeology that go beyond the hyperreality of virtual archaeology and deploy both old and new media in creative ways, including photography (Pétursdóttir and Olsen 2014), video (Witmore 2004), drawing (Wickstead 2013; Hale, this volume), performance (Pearson and Shanks 2001), comic strip art (Brate and Hanberger 2012; Kiddey et al. 2016; Starzmann and Papoli, this issue; Zarankin, this issue), art installation, collage and other artistic work (Bailey 2014, 2017). In fact, archaeologists (and antiquarians before them) have always been experimenting with different forms of visual discourse, from early engravings and watercolours to digital photogrammetry. There is no doubt that the visual has a dark history of domination in modernity, and archaeology is part of this (Thomas 2008; Wickstead 2009); but the visual can also be a tool to explore aspects that often fall outside the realm of conventional scientific practice, such as the self (Harrison and Schofield 2009), as in the work by Starzmann and Papoli and by Zarankin (this issue), marginalized lives (Kiddey et al. 2016); archaeological practices outside academia (Finlay, this issue), the process of knowledge production and sharing (Brate and Hanberger 2012; Hale, this issue) and, more generally, everything that is outside the focus of mainstream research.

Contemporary archaeology. Aesthetics. Art. Photography. Drawing. Comic.