Visual representation plays an important role in the construction of archaeological reality.
It is often the primary means by which a site is presented to the world beyond the site itself. Museums, popular books and magazines, as well as specialist archaeological texts and journals all depend on visual images of sites to present them to their audiences. The importance therefore, of illustrations and reconstructions in the shaping and moulding of wider perceptions of an excavation should not be underestimated. This season, for the first time since the 1960s, new reconstructions of the buildings and activities represented in the archaeological record at atalh y k have been produced. These images draw upon the wide range of data produced by the new methods of excavation, recording and interpretation now used at the site.