Archaeology’s Moving Images

Summary

Ruth Tringham belongs to a small group of archaeologists who engage seriously with the media practices through which archaeology disciplines itself. She has tirelessly worked to place audio-visual media – from film to networked media – at the heart of how we think about and do archaeology. In a 2009 paper about the UC Berkeley Archaeological Film Database, Tringham sought to move debate beyond reductive critiques of archaeological accuracy to explore how it is that we watch films about the past, how we use them in our teaching and in our research, how we create meaning and how we watch critically. By introducing archaeologists to the key questions that structure narrative fiction and documentary, Tringham taught us that screen grammar (cinematography, sound, lighting, editing, mise-en-scène), aesthetics, narrative, production contexts, industry structures and audience all shape how archaeology becomes subject matter, practice and discipline. Where Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley called upon archaeologists to understand media manifestations as rhetorical performances rather than as representations (1992: 95), Tringham has given archaeologists the precise tools required to become reflexive, critical-creative practitioners. In this presentation, I consider Tringham’s engagements with the ‘liveness’ of the moving image and with archaeology’s diverse travels across our screens.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Lithics Cowgirl, Household Archaeologist, Digital Doyenne: A Session Dedicated to Ruth Tringham

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