Figure 2 - available via license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Content may be subject to copyright.
Harry Burton, View of the Royal Cemetery with its Guardian Peak Above, ca. 1910. From Howard Carter and A. C. Mace, The Tomb of Tut.ankh. Amen, London: Cassell 1923, pl. V. Reproduced with permission of the Griffith Institute, University of Oxford.
Source publication
A single glass plate negative formerly in the collection of Howard Carter (most famously the excavator of Tutankhamun’s tomb) and now in the archives of the Griffith Institute, Oxford University raises a number of questions about photography, archaeological practice, and the creation and use of excavation archives. By following this negative, known...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... of the plates not anchored to a specific passage in the text reproduces the same image captured in Negative VIII. Inserted opposite page 58, and seen here in figure 2, Plate IV bears the caption quoted earlier, 'View of the Royal Cemetery with its Guardian Peak Above'. It forms a short sequence with the plates inserted a few pages before and ahead of it: Plate III, 'Road to the Tombs of the Kings', showing a rock-lined path with al-Gurn in the far distance; and Plate V, 'Entrance to the Tomb of Ramses VI', showing the above-ground doorway of the tomb next to Tutankhamun's, here with a metal security barrier across it, the gate open, and an Egyptian man in white turban and dark garment standing in front, facing the camera. ...
Citations
... Some captions preserve names of individual workers (Berman 2018.) 350 Baird 2011, 430-80;Riggs 2016;Baird 2017, 176-80;Riggs 2017bRiggs , 2019aRiggs , 2019bRiggs , 2020 when discussing the Seleucia excavation photographs in Chapter 7. Here, I merely recognize a common method, in this body of scholarship, of seeking to identify individual workers in field photographs. This search for individuals is largely undertaken, first, by correlating personal names in captions with photographic subjects and searching for identifiable individuals who reoccur across photographs and documents; secondly, by reflecting on the dearth of identifiable individuals in photographic archives and on what representations such images construct. ...
Ancient Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, located in modern Iraq, was a multiethnic imperial capital city in Mesopotamia. Founded by Seleucus I Nicator in the late fourth century BCE, the city was conquered by the Parthians in 141 BCE and eventually superseded by nearby Ctesiphon. An excavation sponsored by the University of Michigan, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the Cleveland Museum of Art explored the site over six seasons from 1927 to 1937. Per antiquities laws instituted under British Mandate rule, finds from the excavation were dispersed between those U.S. institutions and the Iraq Museum. This dissertation examines this excavation—and the collection and archive it produced—as a legacy collection. It probes three frames for the Seleucia excavation: the colonial context of British control of Iraq between World Wars I and II; the excavation’s approach to artifacts (consequential for object recovery and documentation); and the history of and discourse around “nonexpert” labor on the excavation in Iraq and on the collection in Detroit. These frames are prerequisites to understanding the excavated corpus—its contours and its limitations—and thus the site, and to advancing a more equitable archaeological practice. Chapter 1 offers a backdrop discussion of legacy collections and archaeological archives, with particular attention to archival practice. A description of extant archival resources offers a window into archival process and a resource for future Seleucia researchers. The context of the British Mandate in Iraq is presented in Chapter 2, which outlines intertwined political and archaeological developments in interwar Iraq. The consequences of British rule on interwar archaeology in Iraq were not limited to antiquities laws: a case study of British Royal Air Force involvement at Seleucia illustrates British colonial facilitation of foreign archaeological practice. The results from the Michigan excavation at Seleucia remain under-published and under-incorporated into knowledge about Seleucid and Parthian Mesopotamia. Partially due to ruptures of 20th century global events, this is also a consequence of excavation practices. Chapter 3 identifies a view of finds as objects—not contextualized artifacts—dually rooted in the project’s initial Biblical goals and its practice of acquiring objects under division for sponsoring institutions. The second half of the dissertation considers “nonexpert” labor as a key aspect of knowledge production about Seleucia. A review of previous scholarship on archaeological labor in the Middle East and Africa (Chapter 4) offers frameworks drawn from history/sociology of science and critical histories of archaeology. These frameworks are applied to Seleucia in Chapters 5 to 7, which examine the (in)visibility of and discourse around Iraqi excavation workers in Seleucia’s publications, archival texts, and archival photographs. Details about excavation roles and individual excavation workers are also offered from archival evidence. This discussion recognizes the decisions of individual workers, made within the excavation’s overall object orientation and recovery strategy, as shaping the extant artifactual corpus. The lens of “nonexpert” labor shifts to the U.S. in Chapter 8, which is focused on a Works Progress Administration project in Detroit, contextualized by other New Deal archaeological projects. Political necessity made the WPA lab workers highly visible, in contrast to the Iraqi workers. These newly presented histories of Iraqi and American contributors to knowledge about Seleucia offer a more robust view into the biography of the Seleucia collections at Michigan, as well as a fuller set of stakeholders.
Among the most notable categories within the whole photographic production belong “duplicates”, or series of photographs printed from one negative. This rather unexploited research area offers a whole range of insights into histories of specific photographic objects, the broad system of the photographic production, as well as methodological shifts and turns within the humanities. Supported by an example of eight, seemingly identical prints depicting the Old Town Hall in Prague, which were produced in the 1850s–1860s by Viennese photographer Andreas Groll (1812–1872), the paper aims to demonstrate how far our thorough knowledge of such material may contribute to our better understanding of the complex history of photography. It looks at various aspects and characteristics of the photographs, such as their origin, content, or material qualities, including the technique, the format, the inscriptions, the mounting and the layout, as well as retouching, damages, or deterioration. The duplicates represent not only a unique, fully-fledged – though always fragmentary – photographic collection which may provide information about specific works or their makers. More importantly, they mirror a whole economy of photographic objects and draw our attention closer to the network of all persons involved – including us – in the processes of production and application. In case of the Prague collection, the duplicates’ value evinced itself particularly in 2009 when they became a subject of cataloguing, research and digitization.
Among the most notable categories within the whole photographic production belong “duplicates”, or series of photographs printed from one negative. This rather unexploited research area offers a whole range of insights into histories of specific photographic objects, the broad system of the photographic production, as well as methodological shifts and turns within the humanities. Supported by an example of eight, seemingly identical prints depicting the Old Town Hall in Prague, which were produced in the 1850s–1860s by Viennese photographer Andreas Groll (1812–1872), the paper aims to demonstrate how far our thorough knowledge of such material may contribute to our better understanding of the complex history of photography. It looks at various aspects and characteristics of the photographs, such as their origin, content, or material qualities, including the technique, the format, the inscriptions, the mounting and the layout, as well as retouching, damages, or deterioration. The duplicates represent not only a unique, fully-fledged – though always fragmentary – photographic collection which may provide information about specific works or their makers. More importantly, they mirror a whole economy of photographic objects and draw our attention closer to the network of all persons involved – including us – in the processes of production and application. In case of the Prague collection, the duplicates’ value evinced itself particularly in 2009 when they became a subject of cataloguing, research and digitization.
This article presents three case studies from an ongoing research project on the statues and sculptural fragments from Tebtynis, discovered by Carlo Anti in the years 1930-1936 in the temple dedicated to the god Soknebtynis. Specifically, it examines the following three statues: Alexandria, Graeco-Roman Museum inv. no. 22979, Turin, Museo Egizio S. 18176, and a non-royal statue which one of the authors has recently identified as Turin, Museo Egizio S. 19400+S. 19400/1. The authors combine stylistic analysis with a study of relevant archival records currently kept in Padua and Venice, Italy, to shed light on these sculptures and retrace their post-excavation history.
ملخص البحث:
يقدم هذا المقال دراسات حالة على ثلاثة قطع آثرية من المشروع البحثى المستمر لتماثيل وبقايا المنحوتات من مدينة تبتونيس "أم البريجات"، التى أكتشفت بواسطة كارلو أنتى خلال أعوام 1930-1936م بالمعبد المكرس للمعبود سوبك نبتونيس. تحديداً ومن خلال فحص التماثيل الثلاث التالية: تمثال من المتحف اليونانى الرومانى بالأسكندرية ويحمل رقم 22979، وأخر من المتحف المصرى بتورينو ويحمل أرقام . S. 18176، وتمثال غير ملكى والذى تم تحديدة مؤخراً من قبل أحد المؤلفين وهو محفوظ أيضاً بالمتحف المصرى بتورينو ويحمل رقم S. 19400+S. 19400/1.
تجمع دراسة المؤلفين تضامن التحليل الأسلوبي مع دراسة السجلات الأرشيفية ذات الصلة المحفوظة حاليا في بادوا، إيطاليا، لتسليط الضوء على هذه المنحوتات وتتبع تاريخ ما بعد الحفائر.
