Photographing Dura-Europos, 1928–1937: An Archaeology of the Archive

Abstract

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Racial Discourses in Aegean Prehistory c. 1900: The Case of the Cupbearer Fresco at Knossos

“…Indeed, these attitudes were an even more widespread phenomenon in early twentieth-century archaeology conducted by European and American scholars in the Mediterranean and Middle East. As Baird has demonstrated (2011: 430) in analysing the archival photographs of the excavations of Dura-Europos in Syria during the late 1920s–1930s, locals and workmen were often placed by the excavators within the ancient structures as ‘passive props or mere scales’, visually signalling that they were at once ‘analogous’ to the ancient past but also disconnected from it by means of their objectification. Such a practice, as Baird also notes, underlines how photographs taken with a seemingly scientific purpose were not in fact objective, as the intent of the composer of the photograph was significant to their meaning (Baird, 2011: 431–32).…”

Listening to Dura Europos: An Experiment in Archaeological Image Sonification

“…1.3 What should we be listening for? Baird (2011) discusses photography as an act, as a practice, that interferes with time and constructs multiple times, including the moment the shutter clicked, the moment when the images would be looked at, and in the composition of the photograph itself, 'timeless' times that create an othering. The composition of the images create a 'particular past', but are themselves items with a history too.…”

“…What can we hear, if we extend our senses through digital prostheses to extend our ability to sense the world? In this article we present an experiment in sonifying the archaeological imagery analysed by Baird (2011) as a way of enhancing our engagement with these archival photographs. By remediating digital copies of archival images through sound, sonification adds duration to them and, with duration, a linear kind of narrative structure emerges (on the potential of narrative emergence in digital media, see Copplestone and Dunne 2017).…”

The Ruination of Dura-Europos

“…10 Just as the Romans transformed the city with the garrison and rampart, the Yale teams moved earth on an industrial scale using the industrial methods of mining and backbreaking labour-methods that are usually blurred, in the background (Figure 11). We as archaeologists are trained not to see the people in these pictures as humans but as scales (Baird 2011) (Figure 12). We are trained to accept that it was the Yale excavators who ' discovered' the archaeology, when it was never lost to local knowledge, and those American hands were never themselves dirtied with the earth that had covered the objects (Figure 13).…”