ABSTRACT
For the museum visitors considered here, the power of the preconceived evolutionary image is immense. The evolutionary images circulating throughout popular culture – the leopard-draped Flintstone, the hunched Neanderthal (as in this classic image, fi gure 2.1, by Zdenek Burian) – persist in our minds as the iconographic vocabulary we use to access the past. Functioning almost as scientifi c documents, they ultimately limit what we see and what we believe, although they often represent very old and outdated ideas. As Stephanie Moser has commented, “our sense of deep time is inherently a visual one,” so visual renderings of human prehistory are ultimately the most satisfying (Moser, 1998, 2, 173). Human origins imagery collapses millions of years into an isolated frame of reference. In doing so, origins imagery not only seduces visitors, but relieves them of the tedium of esoteric evolutionary jargon. Diane GiffordGonzalez has pointed out that “human origins” depictions construct parallel, visually based narratives of the human past that must, because of their pervasiveness and communicative potency, be taken seriously. Through their wide use in museums and popular literature, they literally construct much of the knowledge that laypersons have of the prehistoric past” (Gifford-Gonzalez,
1993, 24). In the museum, visitors again and again privilege the visual over the textual, thereby allowing the images in exhibitions to converge with images they bring with them to the museum.
