‘To See is to Have Seen'

Clive Gamble (1992) has observed an interesting tendency in the archaeological literature. The more theoretical the contents of any book or paper, the fewer the illustrations. Radical archaeology, it seems, is a specifically verbal medium, and drawings or photographs have little place amidst so much abstraction. The emphasis is on the problems of writing and on the possibilities of ‘reading’ the past. Yet the textual metaphor is actually applied less to the writings of archaeologists than to the study of material culture. Thus Christopher Tilley’s book Material Culture and Text is actually a study of visual images, the prehistoric rock art of Scandinavia (Tilley 1991).