ABSTRACT
The idea of evidence intersects with the physical reenactment both before and after the performance itself. The theoretical pivot point for a consideration of what constitutes evidence and what are the conditions and the manner in which it is produced in relationship to reenactment, is the work of philosopher and archaeologist, R. G. Collingwood. Fictional detectives and actual criminal investigators alike resort to reenactment to produce evidence. Based on the concept of context-dependent memory, reenactments have long been firmly established in the field of crime detection. Exponential advances in computer-generated imagery used to recreate scenarios in three-dimensional virtual reality mean that the production of evidence by living history is migrating to hyper-reality. However, the process is the same: generating evidence by reenacting past events. A capacious definition was stultified early in the 19th century when Leopold von Ranke’s assertion that mining the archive for sources would shackle evidence to empirical data and present it as historical truth.
