Summary: | <p class="p1">This article explores some of the ways in which
photographs and their archives establish archaeological knowledge. It draws upon
histories of photography and archaeology within South Asia to create focus upon
archaeology’s evidentiary regimes. The aims are to: a) demonstrate the importance of
engaging with photographs and their archives as objects for reckoning archaeology’s
evidentiary terrains, b) draw attention to multiple social biographies a photograph or
photographic archive acquires, c) highlight the visual as a force of archaeology’s
historiography, and d) impress upon the necessity of attending to historiographical
issues. The aims allow us in seeing some of the ways in which field sciences create
their evidentiary frames, and have a special resonance within the context of South Asian
archaeology where professional and amateur archaeologists continue to promote the belief
that archaeological facts exist out there, and that archaeological research produces
better and more robust sources for the past than scholarship based on texts. Visual
histories also highlight the mutation of the so-called ‘colonialist’ historiography
within the post-colonial histories of archaeology’s developments, and encourage us to go
beyond the hackneyed formulations of colonial legacies and the hagiographic literature
of individual practitioners.
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