Study of visual representations of the first human colonisations of new territories offers evidence of archaeology's continued complicity in the production of ideologically-loaded imagery. Despite years of theorising about the slippery and powerful nature of visualisation, the practice of colouring scholarly and popular archaeological texts with supposedly objective pictures (e.g., maps, photographs, tables, illustrations and drawings) has yet to be disrupted. This thesis uses depictions of the first peopling of North America, Australia and Oceania to show that even our most scientific renderings of the past are often little more than reflections of the status quo. As archaeological images move between scientific and popular culture (through academic journals, texts, encyclopedias, popular magazines, websites and children's books), it is argued that they feed back on one another in such a way as to turn present-day socio-political circumstances into the prehistoric "realities" of first peoples. Using a mixed methodology of semiological, discourse, content and compositional analysis, this thesis speaks critically about archaeological engagements with imagery in an attempt to encourage closer looks at how contemporary visual artefacts have enabled us to find ourselves in the record of prehistory.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/1899 |
| Date | 26 November 2009 |
| Creators | Perry, Sara Elizabeth |
| Contributors | Mackie, Quentin, Walsh, Andrea N. |
| Source Sets | University of Victoria |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | Available to the World Wide Web |
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