Artifact Reconstruction, Archaeological Theory, and Toddler Tantrums: Centring early childhood...
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2023-06-20

Rosemary Hanson (Reconsider Illustration)

The applications of artifact illustration and reconstruction in archaeology tend to facilitate a limited number of theoretical goals. They generally serve diagrammatic or practical reconstructive purposes: highlighting specific typological or use-wear elements or returning a damaged artifact to a hypothetical prior state. Though these goals are essential to archaeological practice, it is also possible to ask more of the images we produce by centring different theoretical frameworks, questions, and interests. Indeed, image production can be exploited not only to visualize the results of theoretical study, but to enrich and deepen the practice of it. This image-led paper presents and discusses a series of object illustrations which specifically centre the archaeology of childhood, foregrounding the sensorial, emotional, and developmental experiences of the very young in the representation of archaeological material. It outlines several techniques and approaches for integrating children and childhood into archaeological image production and discusses the pitfalls and complexities of these representations. In doing so, this paper seeks to provide a practical framework for producing and assessing artifact illustrations that are nuanced, targeted, and explicitly theoretical, both within and beyond standard representational practice. This paper further seeks to demonstrate the ways in which theory can be informed by this practice of image production. Centring the experiences of early childhood in artifact representation not only provides visibility to an underrepresented demographic in archaeology, but it also opens a space in which to explore and complicate theoretical frameworks such as object use-life, perfect rationality, affectivity, and play.