ABSTRACT
It is an often repeated claim that concerns with material remains are central to archaeological practices (Preucel and Mrozowski 2010, 13; Weiner 2010, 1; Thomas 2004, 202), but material presence is an unstable condition never free of encroachment from its other: the void, the disappeared, the absent. Archaeological evidence is inevitably incomplete (Thomas 1993, 73). This chapter is about visual reconstruction, restoration and the conversion of absence into two-dimensional presence. Discussions in Chapter Two revealed how wish fulfillment and individual sense-of-self can shape the documentary process and the ordering of the fragmentary remains of the past, whether through assiduous measurement (in the case of Squier) or by means of acquisition and custody (Cesnola). Chapter Three considered the powerful corporeal allusions that inform ways of seeing in archaeological excavation and the documentary recording of stratigraphy. This chapter further investigates subjective insertions by looking specifically at the visual negotiation between voids and solids, the infilling of absences through imagery and how that imagery can set up an alternative materiality.
