ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Amedee Forestier's reconstructions of the Glastonbury Lake Village created an image of prehistoric life. It examines the wider associations the images have with the archaeology of Glastonbury, traditions of pictorial reconstruction, and the historical context of their production and consumption. Their story begins with the discovery of a prehistoric settlement at Glastonbury in the late nineteenth century. The chapter explores some of the ways that a detailed study of archaeological reconstructions can tell us how ideas about the past are created and disseminated. The presence of a number of severed heads stuck on poles at the entrance to the village is a curiously incongruous image in an illustration that is designed to convey an impression of civilization. A great area of dispute over the findings at Glastonbury, and a source of tension between Arthur Bulleid and William Boyd Dawkins, was over the interpretation of the human bones.
