100 years of auteur archaeologists
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2017-05-01

In discussions about archaeology’s representation in film and television some archaeologists have expressed a desire to “take back” their discipline from the media (eg. Cline 2008), but this view ignores the historical and current roles of archaeologists doubling as media creators and practitioners. In the film and television industries in particular, UK archaeologists have an impressive but little-acknowledged history of undertaking key roles as writers, presenters, producers and directors, in productions over the past 100 years. Paralleling the gradual professionalization of archaeology as a discipline over the 20th century is a comparable narrative of archaeologists developing from amateur to professional filmmakers in their own right and on their own terms, with distinct filmic voices and approaches to filmmaking. In this setting archaeologists have navigated and adapted their voices to changes in technologies, media laws, audience demographics, funding strategies, production and distribution structures and storytelling conventions. Arguably this form of authorship can at times be seen to be an auteur-style approach to film and television. This paper presents a selection of these historical archaeologist-auteur voices as a rebuttal to the notion that archaeologists need to ‘take back’ their discipline from the media, arguing that we have always been members of the media, with the rights and responsibilities of media practitioners. The question can then become this: if we have a filmic voice, or even an auteur’s voice, how should we use it?

Kate Rogers, University of Southampton