The Uber Archaeologist

Abstract

This article emerges from collaboration with visual artist Janet Hodgson on excavations around Stonehenge. Experiencing Hodgson at work led me to re-examine how archaeologists think about visuality, particularly in criticism of the male gaze. Ideas of the gaze have significantly influenced the directions taken in studies of landscape and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) over the last 15 years. In this article I expand on and develop theoretical debate surrounding the gaze, using Hodgson's practice to illustrate my argument. I argue for a renewed critique of the politics of vision and cartographic method that assimilates recent theoretical developments. I review accounts of the gaze, and discuss recent theories of knowledge as applied to mapping and GIS. I suggest that new theories have the potential to move the gaze critique towards further exploration of the contextual complexities of visualities. I use Hodgson's artistic projects at Stonehenge to illustrate this complexity.

(Re)framing built heritage through the machinic gaze

“…The gaze, often with attached qualifiers ('male', 'colonial'), has an extensive history in heritage and adjacent fields of cultural studies (Wickstead, 2009). A common thread to distinct conceptualisations, from Mulvey's (2013) seminal essay on the male gaze to Urry and Larsen's (2011) discussion of the tourist gaze, is that seeing is never only a perceptual act, but is always informed by background assumptions, desires, prejudices, and power relations that inform interpretation of what is seen.…”

“…The discussions around the ‘gaze’ in heritage have encompassed multiple ways of seeing. Chadha (2002: 380) suggests, for instance, with reference to the disciplinary project of archaeological photography in India, that multiple gazes are in operation simultaneously—the colonial, scientific, anthropological, and voyeuristic—while Wickstead (2009) considers the possibilities of moving beyond ideas of the male gaze and the Western gaze in archaeology, and instead approaching the gaze as diffused and ambiguous. For the purposes of our examination, however, we focus primarily on two established forms of viewing heritage—the tourist and expert gaze.…”

“…The expert gaze is similarly polyvalent, informed by disciplinary regimes ranging from archaeology and anthropology to architecture and conservation. The desire to document, authenticate, evaluate, and structure the object is central to this gaze, as is the construction of distance and objectivity (Beck and Sorensen, 2017; Bohrer, 2011; Wickstead, 2009). As other scholars have argued in relation to recent practice, this ‘distance’ is itself a multilayered phenomenon: one form of archaeological gaze reprises a positivist, scientific, and masculinist view of heritage observed, for instance, via top-down satellite imagery and GIS maps, while another—characterised as ‘critical GIS’ (Hacιgüzeller, 2012) or even ‘gaze-critical’ (Wickstead, 2009)—looks back reflexively on the techniques of archaeological production.…”

“…The desire to document, authenticate, evaluate, and structure the object is central to this gaze, as is the construction of distance and objectivity (Beck and Sorensen, 2017; Bohrer, 2011; Wickstead, 2009). As other scholars have argued in relation to recent practice, this ‘distance’ is itself a multilayered phenomenon: one form of archaeological gaze reprises a positivist, scientific, and masculinist view of heritage observed, for instance, via top-down satellite imagery and GIS maps, while another—characterised as ‘critical GIS’ (Hacιgüzeller, 2012) or even ‘gaze-critical’ (Wickstead, 2009)—looks back reflexively on the techniques of archaeological production. In discussing the ‘Europeanness’ of heritage, Niklasson (2017) suggests a similar, more politically inflected distinction between past-preserving conservation and a present-oriented openness towards flexible interpretation.…”

Regional Ways of Seeing: A Big-Data Approach for Measuring Ancient Visualscapes

“…Used separately, either avenue will pose methodological challenges. Some scholars criticize digital landscape models for presenting a Cartesian or God's-eye perspective (Brück 2005:54; Thomas 1993:25, 2004:198–201; Wickstead 2009:250). Other scholars contend that phenomenology will inaccurately substitute an archaeologist's experiences for the ancient worshiper's (De Reu et al 2011:3435).…”