The influence of conventions and mental stereo-types on the reproduction of landscape-images
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2015-10-07

Thomas van den Brink
WAGENINGEN UNIVERSITY

There are innumerable landscape-images in circulation. Pictures which historical geographers, landscape researchers and
archaeologists eagerly use for their research. Normally they analyse them by using the methods of realism or symbolism. Both
are based on the assumption that pictures represent or refer to a world outside the picture, respectively physical or mental.
Otherwise, they are merely illustrations.
On the other hand, pictures can be seen in relation to other pictures, which possess the question: can pictures be seen as
reproductions of mental-stereotypes of certain concepts? Because this inquiry switches the attention from the “real-world phenomena” to the corpus of pictures, this method is not used much in archaeological and landscape research fields.
Nevertheless, this research aims to do a first inquiry into the matter by analysing hunebed-pictures.It is revealed that in the
corpus of hunebed-pictures a pattern exists: most of them have important similarities, while others are not recognized as a
‘good’ picture of a hunebed. This implies that these pictures are not made randomly, but that their makers shared a mentalstereotype. This stereo-type can be seen as a subconscious, cultural-determined convention. Although this might sound simple, it is rather not. One can only unravel this when a lot of pictures are compared. Furthermore the issue becomes more complex when the different image-production-techniques are taken into account.

Thus, this session proposes an alternative way of analysing landscape picture’s without the need to refer to an external
“reality”. It does so by applying a theory of the famous art historian Gombrich.