ABSTRACT
Archaeological visual media have a crucial but, until now, often unspoken relationship to disciplinary theory. Arguably, practitioners' negotiations with such media presage larger archaeological philosophical trends, and in so doing, they provide an important mechanism for gauging nascent intellectual approaches. Running alongside these tendencies has been a far more pervasive and long-lasting inclination to ignore, disparages, or otherwise forgets both the epistemological and the ontological implications of the discipline's visual methods and outputs. Three-dimensional physical models of archaeological and paleontological subjects in establishing one of the earliest academic departments of archaeology in Britain: the University College London's Institute of Archaeology (IoA). The IoA made explicit that its model-making activities were a purposeful and bankable institutional function: The technical staffs of most museums are so fully occupied with work on their own material that their services are not available to outside bodies.
