Archaeology And The Politics Of Vision In A Post-Modern Context

Product DescriptionArcheology is intimately connected to the modern regime of vision. A concern with optics was fundamental to the Scientific Revolution, and informed the moral theories of the Enlightenment. And from its inception, archeology was concerned with practices of depiction and classification that were profoundly scopic in character. Drawing on both the visual arts and the depictive practices of the sciences, employing conventionalized forms of illustration, photography, and spatial technologies, archeology presents a paradigm of visualized knowledge. However, a number of thinkers from Jean-Paul Sartre onwards have cautioned that vision presents at once a partial and a politicized way of apprehending the world. In this volume, authors from archeology and other disciplines address the problems that face the study of the past in an era in which realist modes of representation and the philosophies in which they are grounded in are increasingly open to question.About the AuthorVitor Oliveira Jorge Professor of Archaeology and Cultural Heritage at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Porto, Portugal. With Julian Thomas, he has edited the book Overcoming the Modern Invention of Material Culture (Porto, ADECAP, 2006/2007), a special issue of the Journal of Iberian Archaeology, that he edits since 1998. E-mail: vojorge@clix.pt Julian Thomas Professor of Archaeology at the University of Manchester. Publications include 'Understanding the Neolithic' (Routledge 1999) and 'Archaeology and Modernity' (Routledge 2004). Prof. Thomas is currently one of the Directors of the Stonehenge Riverside Project, and is Vice President of the Royal Anthropological Institute. E-mail: julian.thomas@manchester.ac.uk