ABSTRACT
Archaeological knowledge is represented through a variety of media including scholarly discourse, museum displays, literature, film, television, popular scientific writing, and computerized multimedia. Most of these draw heavily on the use of visual imagery to communicate key points and arguments. In this chapter we will be concerned with the visual representation of archaeological knowledge, and in particular, the role of illustration in the study of the Palaeolithic. While our general aim is to explore the ways in which a visual discourse about the prehistoric past has been constructed, we will be more specifically concerned with the pictorial reconstructions of our earliest ancestors and the sources from which they were derived. We argue that by the end of the nineteenth century, three distinct visual traditions of representing life in the prehistoric past were established: the Romantic tradition, the archaeological tradition, and the comic tradition. All were characterized by a common set or suite of attributes that have been developed and recycled since Classical times. While the archaeological tradition came to prevail as the more authoritative visual discourse on the past, it drew heavily on former traditions of representation. In the following discussion we outline the common attributes or visual icons that characterized images of human antiquity. We then look at the ways in which these icons were used to present distinct visions of the past. Finally, we investigate from where these visual traditions or visions drew their inspiration. We conclude that there is a very restricted iconic vocabulary for depicting the past, and that archaeology has done little in the way of challenging this or in creating a new vocabulary.
