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The Effect of Aerial Photography as a Structured Perception Upon Terrestrial Archaeological Survey

Erin Stepney

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The foregoing pages are a reproduction of Plate 70 and page 571 of the 1907 issue of Archeologia, a journal published by London’s Society of Antiquaries. The image was produced not by an archaeologist or an historian, but by the army engineer Lt. Sharpe out on an exercise, who took the photograph when the winds happened to blow his balloon over Salisbury Plain directly above Stonehenge. This image is the first known aerial photograph of what can be considered an archaeological site; despite that fact, Capper’s eight terse lines of text comprise what is probably the most sustained comment ever offered on the subject. Published by an academic journal of early professional archaeology, but produced apparently incidentally in the context of an aerial reconnaissance exercise, the photograph stands as an aesthetic curiosity rather than as a purposive object that invites analysis. It is inscribed as an interesting footnote, an original but freak conjunction of the then-diverse practices of photography, flight, military surveillance, and archaeology: a fleeting, wayward focussing, on an unintended subject, of a fledgling aerial gaze. It has been called an “accident”.

The accident, perhaps, was the publication of this image and its companion Plate 69 in Archaeologia. Aerial photographs at this time were sufficiently rare as to be considered curiosities , and Capper’s text suggests that the decision to bring the photographs to the attention of archaeologists was based on their simple novelty – that the images should be considered interesting because they reveal Stonehenge, a site of archaeological interest, “from a point of view from which it had probably never before been photographed.” Capper’s words have the brevity of a non-expert guest in a house of gentlemen scholars: his description of the images does not attempt to encompass what might be considered ‘archaeological’ information, and his reference to Stonehenge as “that famous monument” is more enthusiastic than incisive. The photographs are presented, in part, as the lucky snapshots of an accidental tourist, rather than recognized as archaeological evidence.

However, the analytic priorities of Capper’s perspective would come, in the ensuing decades, to prefigure the structure of aerial photography’s eventual inclusion into accepted categories of archaeological knowledge. Those features of the photographed landscape to which he chooses to draw attention – the stone circles, the earthworks, and the pathways – construct a view of the site as a composition of structures, barriers and channels of access: it is a strategic assessment, an approach in which a royal Engineer of the British army would reliably be well-versed. The emphasis placed upon the relative positions of these topographical elements, to the exclusion of any other descriptive details, suggests that the primary significance of such elements emerges from their abstraction as a structured distribution of spatial interrelationships. Capper’s commentary directs a reading of the photograph that is predicated upon the capabilities of aerial photography to capture and reproduce views of the landscape which mimic that of a map. At the point of the Stonehenge image the production of maps from photographs was not strictly possible; however, rapid refinement of avian and photographic technologies precipitated by the world wars would result in an explosion of map production, drawn from eventually massive archives of aerial photographs. Archaeology is not herein being introduced to the concept of space as a network of relations; disciplinary archaeology has always been predicated upon an inherently spatial rationality. The critically important aspect of this small publication is that aerial photography itself is offered as a particular form of representation of an ‘archaeological’ landscape. The breadth of scope afforded by the aerial vantage point, combined with the semiotic properties unique to the photographic image, converge in a document which is presented here as specifically valuable to archaeology: the temporal arrest of the photographic “record” as pertinent to an archaeological concern with time, and the “very complete”-ness of that record as suggestive of the rational exhaustiveness of hard science. Though at this point seemingly just “remarkable and unique”, this image of Stonehenge intimates the potential for a much more densely inscribed status as a document of objective proof.

However, though this aerial photograph is presented on the strength of its logic as a fait accompli, aerial photography as a practice of representation would develop in the context of military reconnaissance and, later, surveillance. What this paper will attempt to explore is the path by which the unique semiotics of photographic representation, embedded within military aerial reconnaissance, constructs a specific complex perception of landscape. Further, this paper will outline how this perception of landscape as constructed by aerial photography has arguably come, by way of a historical connectedness between institutions, to prefigure, particular approaches to landscape within disciplinary archaeology. I will suggest that archaeology has ‘inherited’ an idea of landscape that can be traced back to military applications of aerial photography, and that the aerial photographic gaze actually haunts particular terrestrial perceptions of landscape within archaeological research.

Current approaches to the conceptualization of landscape involve an emphasis upon “the realization that landscape is something which is experienced, and as such, its knowledgeable existence is seen as being contextualized with regard to … perception”. Aerial photography, along with its descendent techniques of remote sensing, technologizes the structure of perception in a specific manner; it constructs a view of landscape that is entrenched not in a “dwelling perspective”, but in the practice of distancing. While landscape itself, difficult as it is to define, is “in the broadest sense … contextual”, a represented landscape is an object. Landscape as an aerial photographic object, in particular, is characterized by a totalization of apprehension: the aerial perspective commands broad swaths of the earth’s surface that can only be perceived by achieving a technologically-enabled physical disengagement, and photographic representation fixes the traces of that perspective on fragments that are then reassembled to (re)produce a ‘very complete record’ of landscape on a scale inaccessible to direct perception. The consequence is the structuring of the experience of landscape: the way landscape becomes ‘known’ through aerial photographs results in a view of landscape as a total object whose characteristics, it will be argued, are directly determined by the nature of the representation through which it is perceived.

Rather than seek to elaborate further on ‘landscape’ as an interpretive concept, what I seek to address is that which lies behind particular approaches to the basic elements from which the construct of landscape is built. This inquiry primarily is focussed upon a specific means by which landscape is appropriated to perception, anterior to any analysis of the object(s) of that perception.

However, the question necessarily cannot remain thus restricted. As Latour states, “In the debates around perception, what is always forgotten is this simple drift from watching confusing three-dimensional objects, to inspecting two-dimensional images which have been made less confusing his emphasis.” The ‘drift’ in question here is twofold: it is both the transformation of landscape into aerial photograph in the production of military maps, and the transmission of this transformed entity into the field of archaeological mapping survey. This shift in representation of landscape-surface has impacted archaeology, historically predicated upon site-depth, in specific ways which have been implicated in turn with a range of conceptual and methodological effects. The broad reach of the aerial perspective, in combination with the interpretive conventions surrounding the photographs which fix and disseminate that perspective, form the basis of a visual code which, I contend, laid the foundation for a deep change in the archaeological interrogation of landscape. It is a transference which aligns closely with the status of photographic images in their relation to spatiality, temporality and the material – spheres hardly unique to archaeology, but nevertheless definitive of it.

The exactitude with which spatial relationships are revealed in the Stonehenge photograph depends upon the fact of the aerial perspective from which it is produced. In 1906, terrestrial survey was well known to be more than sufficient, by a lengthy series of interconnected measurements, to generate an accurate schematic of, say, the Salisbury plain; indeed it had already been done, and repeatedly, over the span of several centuries. However, the multiple advantages of aerial photography over terrestrial survey are here made manifest: a single image, produced by the work of a moment, appears to take the place of a far more labour-intensive ground survey. The assumption of an elevated perspective allows for the entire site to be apprehended at once, in its totality. Further, the mechanical nature of photographic reproduction has foreclosed on the possibility of human measurement error or oversight. Thus the aerial photograph is a ‘very complete’ document which may function as a basis of objective proof; the aerial perspective provides the dispassionate confirmation, in a single stroke, for the fragmented terrestrial assessment of the landscape.

While this view of Stonehenge may be the first aerial photograph of something considered an archaeological site, the first aerial photograph of anything at all predates this image by almost fifty years, when Felix Tournachon (Nadar) photographed the village of Petit-Bicetre from a balloon in 1858. Nadar’s aerials were far from accidental; a professional photographic artist, his prior innovative experiments with photographic technique through portraiture were supplanted by a near-obsession with the aerial view. Nadar’s Petit-Bicetre photos constitute the ‘first aerial’ images only insofar as one discounts the photographs taken by the engineer colonel Aime Laussedat, in the same year, of Paris from various high rooftops. Nadir was the first to successfully combine the technologies of flight and photography, but photography was already approaching the aerial perspective at that time.

By the moment of the Stonehenge image, was balloons had been equipped with cameras for decades. Nadar was approached by the French army almost immediately after Petit-Bicetre to ‘make his skills available’ to the military, then engaged in the Franco-Austrian war, but he refused to do so. He did, however, command an observation balloon corps during the siege of Paris in 1870, and may have taken actual aerial photographs then. Likely the army’s early consideration of Nadar’s consent was due to the fact that he had, with considerable foresight, applied for a patent just months after Petit-Bicetre for the use of aerial photographs in the production of maps. It would be another four decades, however, before Laussedat, himself in pursuit of the aerial perspective since 1849, would publish his 1898 paper on photogrammetry, demonstrating the geometry of converting overlapping perspective photographs into an orthographic planar projection: a map. In the interim, the military production of aerial photographs was overwhelmingly limited to single, discrete images.

The production of the Stonehenge photograph, then, required not a lucky accident, but only a slight refocusing of an already established gaze. The image is not an unadulterated point of pure origin; it represents, instead, a specific transition of a complex way of seeing, produced by the combinative layering of modern technologies, from one institution of knowledge production – military prospection of topographic features – into another institution: archaeology. By the time of the production of the 1906 Stonehenge images, aerial photographs were established as objective documents, the product of a single mechanically regulated act. They were ‘very complete records’ of prospection, claims of visuality that, because they were photographic in form, were already their own proof.

Aerial images are not, in themselves, maps; the basic geometry is not the same, not to mention the system of symbolic intelligibility. However, aerial photographs are constructed in such a way that they lend themselves to the body of interpretive conventions within which maps are read. While a map represents landscape as a consciously selective schematic of reductive symbols – which a photograph manifestly does not do – nonetheless an aerial photograph invites itself to be read as a map because it does represent landscape, as do maps, from the aerial perspective. It should not be taken for granted that representing landscape from the aerial perspective is the definitive characteristic of ‘the map’, and has been so for literally millennia, despite the fact that human flight, and thus the phenomenological assumption of the aerial view, has been possible for only a little more than two centuries. Thus, not only was the Stonehenge image a translation of an established technologically structured gaze from one sphere of inquiry into another, but aerial photography itself was merely the modern technologizing of an even more anterior mode of conceptualizing landscape. It converted what had already long been visualized, via the terrestrially-measured map, into something that was now seen.

From the moment of its initial invention, photography was immediately linked to cartography. Shortly after Daguerre developed the daguerrotypic process of fixing photographic images in 1839, his contemporary and friend François Arago, a physicist of the French Academy of Sciences and one of the country’s leading authorities in the field of optics, had commented on the “rapid method” which photography could confer upon the study of topography. Given the contemporary awareness of aerial photography’s potential to revolutionize cartography, it is unsurprising that the French military would be avid to take up aerial photography, and that the national armies of Europe would soon follow suit. Aside from periodic exceptions in which a national scientific society had been commissioned for the work, the survey of landscapes for the creation of maps had been under the jurisdiction of armies since the trend began with a joint Anglo-French military project initiated in 1783. Until the early twentieth century, however, surveys were based on triangulation and conducted almost exclusively on the ground. The labour-intensiveness of this process, notwithstanding the orchestration of manpower that was possible within a military institution, was a sever restriction; it is estimated that as of 1885 less than one-ninth of the world’s land surface had been surveyed.

Sharpe’s introduction of aerial photography to archaeology, however, occurred when aerial photography was on the cusp of a major shift, in both its execution and its range of application. The development of sustainable heavier-than-air flight in 1903 would greatly extend the sweep of what aerial photographs were capable of representing. Balloon flight, being subject to fluctuations in altitude and flight path, yielded photographs which manifested the same sort of variation in their scale and composition; individual photographs could be useful, but without fine control over the camera’s vantage point, comparing or conjoining images was virtually impossible. Balloon and kite photographs produced by the military were individual documents of prospection, functioning as records of things found and seen, and to a rough degree as distorted schematics of the layout of isolated framings of the landscape. The airplane, however, enabled the production of photographic images whose persepctival distortions could be rectified through photogrammetric calculation, and which thus could be reduced to a common geometric scale and combined to create photographic maps.

Rapid advances in the development of the photomapping process were precipitated by the First World War. Airplanes were quickly refined over the first decade of the twentieth century; the Wright brothers consciously sought to satisfy military specifications, and signed a supply contract with the U.S. army in 1908. Cameras specifically designed for aerial survey were also under development; the first came out of Russia in 1898, a seven-lens fixed system that took overlapping photographs from horizon to horizon. In 1911 the French army used aerial photography to plan their actions during the Moroccan crisis, and by the beginning of the war the German army was already using cameras in zeppelins. The British Royal Flying Corps did not pick up aerial photography until 1915, but made extensive use of it immediately, within the year British forces attacked Neuve-Chapelle in a manoeuvre based on maps prepared solely from photographic reconnaissance, the first such action ever taken. Germany, shortly after the opening of hostilities, had begun to photograph the entire western fron on a biweekly basis. By the time the war was over, the German army was producing approximately four thousand photographs per day.

The changes in the productive technologies of aerial photography exerted a significant effect on the way in which aerial photographs were read as documents of what they recorded and represented. Single-lens cameras in wind-borne balloons were used to produce, relatively speaking, far fewer photographs, and extremely few areas were ever photographed from the air more than once. Their low number, compounded with the fact that contiguous images could be collated only to a very limited degree, conferred a certain monadic status that distinguished their mode of representation from what was later to come. Early aerials partook of a unified aesthetic convention through the effect of perspective, but their persistent isolation from each other entailed that, within the images, topographical space appeared as a primarily cellular entity, an assemblage of fragments whose interrelations could only be reconstructed through reference to existing terrestrially-derived geographical knowledge. The maplike qualities of single-lens balloon photographs were obvious, but numinous: as photographic records of prospection they could attest to the existence of something, and as broad aerial views they could demonstrate that thing’s or that place’s intrarelational structure, but their ultimate mobilization, their ability to signify beyond themselves, rested upon he establishment of their connection to existing maps drawn on the physical ground.

True reconnaissance aerial photography, however, stood (and still stands) within a much different relation to photographed topographic surfaces. Scanning aerial survey takes photographs in interval-timed series while attempting to keep the plane at a constant elevation and also perfectly level, without the perspectival skewing of either nose-tail tipping or wing tilt. Each image thus produced is only subtly different from those that precede and follow it in the series, and ideally 60% of the content of each image is reproduced in those images on either side of it. Even the truest vertical angle, however, reproduces the vertical perspective only at the centre point of the photograph, directly beneath the camera lens, the remainder of the photograph will represent the landscape from a perspective of radial displacement which increases with distance from the photographic centre point. Overlapping successive photographs allows for ythe measurement and orthogonal correction of this displacement in perspective, called parallax. Earlier aerial photography constructs a view of the topographical landscape that, while acquisitive and broadly encompassing, is also subject to the bounding of the photographic frame; an individual image takes possession of a larger field of view than would otherwise be possible, but simultaneously fragments the landscape into arbitrary rectilinear shapes. Airplane reconnaissance, however, regularizes the aerial perspective such that any and every aerial photograph can be equalized with any other.

Reconnaissance photography, then, allows for the superimposition and combination of photographs to represent whole swaths of landscape, mathematically corrected by virtue of this superimposition to duplicate the perspectival regularity of a map. The point of perspective, the presence of the camera, and the limitations of the photographic frame are all erased by their mechanical pluralization, and by the calibrated reconfiguration of the images produced thereby. Topographical space is opened to representation by photographs in a far more totalized manner – the ‘very complete records’ of individual photographs multiply and cohere into an overlapping, hence layered, reproduction whose boundaries are delimited only by the presence of photographs not yet taken.

Moreover, reconnaissance sorties were conducted repeatedly over areas of strategic importance, particularly front lines of advance, with the intent not solely to establish the situation of enemy forces but also – and more crucially – to track any changes. Fixed photographic images were deployed in the aggregate in order to capture movement. Photomap representations of space, then, constructed an additional layer of movement through space which equated to representing the temporal dimension.

Temporalization of spatial information can be achieved within a map in other ways; incorporating symbolic signs such as arrows or categorizations such as sequential numbers are among the simplest methods. However, military photographic reconnaissance generated repetitive and overlapping whole maps whose internal variation communicated temporal flow. The practice was the hyperextension of the basic photomapping process: instead of single sorties producing a timed-interval series of photographs with a two-thirds overlap, entire sorties were repeated to produce entire photomaps which overlapped each other completely. The crucial characteristic of this process in terms of archaeology, to be elaborated upon below, is that temporal depth is constructed through the sequential, vertical accretion of spatial surfaces, wherein each successive surface refers to a past moment in time.

Following the First World War, photogrammetry was professionalized outside of the military context for the sake of processing the many thousands of photographs produced during the war, and stereophotographic interpretation was refined. Once developed and printed on transparencies, overlapping photographs are aligned alongside each other, framed, and examined through a stereoscope. Since the progress of the plane through the air entails that multiply-photographed features of the landscape are actually photographed from subtly different angles, stereoscopic overlapping of transparent reproductions creates a three-dimensional effect, ultimately reproducing the embodied gaze of the organic eye. Orthostereography, which enabled the production of true orthogonal photomaps, was not strictly possible until 1956; however, once developed, orthostereography produces documents that are both photograph and map with three-dimensional depth, coinciding point for point with the landscape it represents.

In Elements of Logic, first published in 1931, Peirce refers repeatedly to the photographic image in his descriptions of both the iconic and indexical registers of signification. The photograph’s identification as an icon is obvious: a photograph is a sign that resembles the object of its representation. The exactitude of photographic representation is immediately connected to its didactic quality: Peirce describes them as “very instructive” and relates the precision of such a degree of likeness to the reasoning of mathematics. Significantly, he locates the distinctive property of the iconic sign in its ability to reveal “other truths”, “unexpected truth”, in its object; an iconic representation, it can be said, introduces a degree of distance or separation into the act of interpretation which provides insights otherwise unattainable. His illustrative example of this, ironically, is the drawing of a map by means of two photographs.

Aerial photography can be understood in a unique relation to Peirce’s propositions, An iconic signifier in general effects a degree of distance from its referent, inasmuch as the signifier is not the signified. An aerial photograph in particular introduces a degree of distance from the photographed object as a consequence of the elevation of the aerial perspective. The one distancing move is semiotic while the other is phenomenological, but the net result is a compounding of the degree of separation, duplicated on nominally distinct ontological registers but existing in multiplicative interaction in the aerial photograph itself, where the elevated perspective and the semiotic icon combine. If it is a ‘degree of distance’ which produces the revelation of ‘other, unexpected truths’, then the exponential distancing effect of the aerial photograph gives it the status of an extraordinarily powerful truth-claim, complete with inherent didacticism. One could argue that this in fact becomes increasingly the case as the elevation of the camera is increased, and the scope of landscape represented in the photograph exceeds the human scale, consequently becoming a perspective for which few or no contending perspectives exist.

Peirce’s reference to the indexical nature of photographic images is relatively brief but similarly telling. The photograph as index – a sign which signifies its object by virtue of being materially affected by that object – is the source of the photograph as icon, insofar as the iconic properties of a photograph exist solely as a result of the specific character of photographic technology, which “physically forces a photograph to correspond point by point to nature”. This doubling of photographic semiotics renders the photograph, in Peirce’s terminology, a dicisign, a double informational sign which has the qualities of a proposition. A photographic print conveys information on the basis of the fact that it is “virtually a section of rays projected from an object otherwise known his emphasis”; this double-knowing, dicisignification, is a “further determination” and manifests the appearance of both a more total specificity and, further, a self-sustaining proof.

The degrees of separation initiated at the iconic level, then, are retraced and closed off by the material presence which characterizes the index. This is how dicisignification can be said to ‘carry the qualities of a proposition’: the abstractive quality of the icon is supported by the demonstrative quality of the index, and the resulting dicisignification is a self-sufficient statement requiring no immediate refernce to anything outside of itself for the basic validity of its claim to signification. The aerial photograph itself undercuts the distancing of the aerial perspective with its own immediacy, and the consequences of the aerial view of landscape – true vertical angles free of the visual white noise of shadows, reduction of topographical features to structured set of spatial interrelations, and the generalized abstraction that results from the exchange of detail for breadth of scope – are grounded in the apparent obviousness of the photographic image. The fact that landscape as it is represented in aerial photographs is an object not otherwise known goes unproblematized, occluded by the eminent truth of the aerial photograph itself.

Barthes’ attempt to isolate the ‘essence’ of photographic representation leads him to posit the critical importance of the specific relationship between the photograph and the Real, by which he seems to mean the material world. Barthes defines the photographic referent as necessarily, rather than optionally, ‘real’: “in Photography sic I can never deny that the thing has been there his emphasis”. Barthes describes photographic representation as the ‘establishment of fact without method’; as Peirce similarly implies, a photograph is an article of demonstrative proof which, as a sign which carries its referent within itself, requires no context of argument. Unlike Peirce, however, Barthes lays greater emphasis upon the indexical, rather than the iconic, properties of the photograph. The phenomenological certainty of the existence of the photographed object, its specific relation to reality, supersedes the question of the photograph’s exactitude.

That specific relation to reality is formed with reference to time. A photograph represents an object which by necessity was once physically before the camera; therefore, it represents simultaneously reality and the past. Thus again the perception of the photograph is marked bya degree of separation, here identified as temporal separation based on it stsatus as a semiotic index. This quality of temporality inscribes the photographic separation as a deferral: “it has been here, and yet immediately separated”. Like Peirce, Barthes links this property of deferral with the photograph’s evidentiary force, and claims that the primary function of a photograph is not simply to represent, but to authenticate.

Some years before Barthes, Sontag described photography’s unique signification by use of the word trace, “something stencilled directly off the real.” For Derrida, trace is what is retained as primary memory, and thus moves from one phenomenological moment to the next. The movement of the trace is a hermeneutic for understanding pathways of signification, and he contends that sense-making is contingent upon the possibility of the repetition of the trace in the present. The trace is thus the basis for the possibility of signification, and its movement through time is what permits the play of signifiers in the movement of differance, between the retained trace brought into the present, indeed constitutive of the present, and that which it there encounters. Since the repetition of the trace is phenomenologically subject to ‘general openness with exteriority’ – reference to what it is not, to what is outside of itself – the temporalized sense-making of signifying play is a mutually interpenetrative inside/outside relation: a ‘spacing’. “Space’s becoming temporal and time’s becoming spatial”, the phenomenological equivocation between spatial separation and temporal interval, and the irreducible synthetic movement of traces which is the basis of the relation which constitutes presence, is at the heart of Derridean differance.

There is an aspect of the photographic interaction with the concept of trace, however, that does not seem to align unproblematically with Derridean analytics. Sontag’s application of the word ‘trace’ to describe photographs, specifically to refer to photographic representation’s relationship to ‘the real’, is indicative of this apparent disruption. The properties already defined as peculiar to the photograph, its status as a “registering of an emanation … - a material vestige of its subject”, does partake in what Derrida defines as the state of retention within which the trace is constituted as such. A photograph, given its particular indexical relationship to the dynamics of time, can be understood as the materialization of an image of memory, as a representation of a past moment carried into the living present.

However, the material fixity of the photographic image – the apparent direct rigidity of its relationship to its subject, the photographed object – is not specifically consistent with the conceptual fullness of Derrida’s trace. This is not to imply that the significatory biography of any given photograph is fixed; instead, photographic fixity refers to the seemingly irreducible, material relation between the photographic representation and that which it putatively represents. It is this location of the apparent materiality of photographic representation within ‘the irreducible’, and further the equation of ‘the irreducible’ with ‘the real’, as expressed in Sontag, that constitutes a mishandling of Derrida. A trace is an irreducibility, a thing unthought that carries forward into the present to trouble it by remaining in play, but irreducibility does not equate to fixity of form. A photograph is a materially fixed image, but the form of the tarce is mutable.

This fixity of form as an operative idea can in fact be linked to several of Derrida’s statements on ideality. It has been said that the race is constitutive of presence; the trace is itself constituted by the possibility of its ‘re-petition’ in the present moment, in the possibility of its infinite return. What is returned ad infinitum, however, is necessarily ‘the same’; the immanent ideality of the present moment as the now, as presence, is contingent upon the apparent continuity of a fixity, of sameness with previous moments. This ideality of sameness, a possibility inscribed within presence itself, confers a finitude upon the movement of the trace: though theoretically the morphology of the trace is infinite and unrestricted, phenomenologically its path of mutation can be reconstructed backwards through time, and the present can be connected to the past through the ideal sameness which characterizes signifying play and renders it intelligible. This finitude, Derrida states, is the source of primordial truth in the phenomenological sense; it can be thought of as the accomplishment or fulfillment of desire, or will, that differance suspends. Fixity in general, and the apparent material fixity of photographic representation in particular, then, represents the fulfillment of a truth-desire that is ideal despite its appearance – material, mechanical, objective – of actuality.

Aerial photography’s relationship to mapping further reproduces the ideality of sameness on a different level. The point is made above that the definitive characteristic of a map is the representation of landscape from the aerial perspective, and was so long before the development of either human flight or photography. The a priori presence of maps as a signifying form entails that the advent of aerial photography, and its widespread application to map production, was a moment in which the truth-desire of cartography was seemingly fulfilled: photographic fixity, with all of its dicisignificative consequences, offered cartography both modernization of process and, through that, confirmation of the rationality of intent. Maps as a signifying form naturalize aerial photographs, which themselves in turn realize maps. The closed, mutually referential relationship between them echoes the structure of photographic dicisignification itself, and answers the question of how landscape as an aerial photographic object could be otherwise ‘known’: knowledge of it existed though the form of and entirely distinct mode of representation, the map.

Photomapping entails that a map is drawn not from the landscape, but from the photographic representation thereof. The aerial photograph does not merely mediate between landscape and map, but fundamentally supplants landscape for mapping purposes: a two dimensional image that is made less confusing. The signifier collapses into the signified, and the trace becomes the totality as the system of signification closes and ceases to refer to its outside for anything other than more data.

Archaeology has always been characterized by a multivalent slippage between site and landscape as analytical constructs, and the relationship between these two concepts has been in gradual but continual flux since the nineteenth century. At the point of the 1906 Stonehenge photographs, widespread acceptance of the existence of geographical stratigraphy, and the ability to derive chronological information on material culture remains from their stratigraphic matrix, had been in play for less than fifty years. Archaeological methodology at this time was largely focussed on the development of the understanding of individual sites as composed of stratigraphic, hence chronological, layers of physical depth. The antiquarian construction of chronological sequences base don the typology of decontextualized artefacts was slowly giving way to the application of the site – a three-dimensional spatial entity comprised of triangulated measurements which result in an empirically-derived fourth dimension of chronology - as a frame of reference determinative of internal, relational meaning. Archaeology was increasingly basing, as it has at least partly continued to base, its rationally scientific status in the refinement of the metrics of excavated spatial depth.

In the postwar period, however, the increase in empirical data amassed during the second quarter of the century precipitated a significant shift in archaeological research. Binford’s 1962 publication set off a change in the approach to landscape that would define the New Archaeology movement and presage processualists theory: ‘region’ was inserted alongside ‘site’ as a basic unit of analysis, and the archaeological record was gradually reconceptualized as a broader spatial entity, with a greater emphasis on the horizontal rather than the exclusively vertical context. Cultural change and evolution was considered to be a structured process, and the analysis of changing social systems an evidenced in the archaeological record was tied to adaptation to the physical environment, as a systematic mechanism by which such change could be explained, rather than simply observed and described. Methodological developments which resulted from this conceptual shift were subject to a range of contributing factors which will be slightly elaborated below; of the entire processualists research program, the one point which propounded major and lasting effect was the increased application of probability sampling for statistical analysis, and the concomitant rise of regional surface survey as a preferred method of data-gathering.

The argument at hand, however, is the contention that the reconfigured approach to landscape was contingent upon the representation of landscape which aerial photography had already established. Processualist archaeology can be critiqued not simply as a theoretical response to an exponential massing of data, but as an absorption of the theoretical consequences of data as it exists in the specific form of the aerial photograph: in fine, an entire paradigm shift can be arguably connected to a change in the technology of the visual representation of the object(s) of research. Archaeological survey, its research goals and the rationality it attempts to employ in attaining those goals, is historically and structurally related to aerial photographic survey to a degree that is impossible to ignore.

Shortly after the publication of Sharpe’s 1906 Stonehenge photographs, and possibly because of them, the Italian army began to engage in aerial photography of archaeological sites; between 1908 and 1911 the Roman Forum and the port of Ostia were extensively photographed. The outbreak of war set the stage for two particular circumstances to emerge: Firstly, European armies purposefully enlisted individuals with archaeological training into their air corps for their service in photography and mapmaking, and secondly the unprecedented aerial coverage of European, north African and near Eastern territories occasioned the ‘discovery’ of large numbers of sites previously unknown to western archaeology. The German archaeologist Theodor Wiegand was able to work with the German High Command to produce aerial photographs of the late Roman and Byzantine ruins of the Negev and Sinai. The French were producing aerial images of ancient Macedonian sites by 1916. The British army engineer Beazeley, posted in Mesopotamia, photographed remains of entire ancient cities on the Tigris-Euphrates plain and, most famously, produced images of Old Samarra, a ninth-century caliphic city north of Baghdad entirely unknown outside of the Ottoman Empire at that point.

The close of the First World War saw Europe and the United States flooded with a wash of decommissioned aircraft – and, just as critically, decommissioned pilots returning to civilian occupations. Trained in military reconnaissance and photointerpretation, disciplinary archaeology was decisively altered by an influx of professionals who would transport aerial photography’s existing configuration of the visuality of landscape into archaeological practice. Crawford in England and Poidebard in France began in the interwar period to experiment with ‘aerial archaeology’, as it later came to be called; in the United sattes Judd performed an aerial survey of prehistoric canals in Arizona using U.S. Army pilots, while more famously the Lindberghs flew archaeological reconnaissance in Mexico. During and after the Second World War aerial archaeology went relatively dormant in the United States, but in Europe, and particularly Britain, it continued apace, including the formal establishment of many of the interpretive principles still employed.

Aerial survey for archaeological sites generated the perception of landscape as a palimpsest, a surface that has been repeatedly inscribed such that traces of different pasts exist contemporaneously and remain visible, in whole or in part, on the same spatial plane. The problem presented itself to aerial archaeologists as a methodological challenge rather than as a conceptual difficulty, and the methodological response was the proliferation of the photographic record, in combination with a drive to develop the bureaucracy surrounding the management of the image archive. However, to return to Derrida – space’s becoming temporal and time’s becoming spatial – the equivocation of space with time is contingent upon some species of movement, whether thought of as movement in space of movement through time. The archaeological perspective is openly predicated on the measurement of time through a sequencing of defined spatial units, in the construction of relative chronologies. Landscape-as-palimpsest, however, represents the suspension of sequential movement, in that the presence of signs of multiple chronological periods manifest on a single spatial plane dismantles the heretofore inherently layered vertical nature of stratigraphic sequence. Sequential movement through space(s) is exchanged for simultaneity within space, a condition which represents an assault upon archaeological rationality. Aerial photographic survey as a response appears, in light of this analysis, as an attempt to reproduce the landscape within a representation which has the power to reconstruct a vertical spatiotemporal structure of its own.

In particular, intensive aerial archaeological survey was motivated by aerial photography’s capability to reveal to the archaeological record otherwise undetectable sites. Totally buried archaeological remains exert an effect upon the soil that conceals them. Infill is, all other things being equal, relatively looser soil held within a formation comprised of denser soil; infill is characterized by better drainage and moisture than the soil which surrounds it, and a range of cereal crops will correspondingly grow taller and more lushly when sown there. Buried wall foundations can have the opposite effect, obstructing root growth and stunting plant development. The net result is that the shape of what lies underneath the earth expresses in the harvest crops growing above it, reproducing the outline of buried features on the surface of the soil. Under the correct conditions of weather, light, time of day and season of the year, these representations come into being. Such marks are invisible on the ground, but opportunely timed aerial reconnaissance can observe and record them photographically.

The application of aerial reconnaissance to archaeology to this end, then, partook in a certain representation of spatial depth. The elevated perspective upon the surface of the landscape did reveal ‘trace’ expressions of past forms of that surface, and in certain cases indices of what materially still remained beneath it. The phenomenological problem with the study of cropmarks and related phenomena, however, can be located in their specific relationship to the photographs with which they are represented. Experientially, cropmarks do not exist outside of the photographs of them: they are not otherwise visible, and not otherwise knowable. The use of the camera to fix images of cropmark representations is what allows such evidence to enter the archaeological record, and aerial photographs, thereby, came to assume the ontological status of archaeological remains. The visual representation became the phenomenologically real, in a true Baudrillardrian simulacrum: a simulacrum that is internally doubled, as the iconic/indexical properties are reproduced by the same dicisignificative structure of the cropmark as a sign.

In archaeology, then, what had been the military process of producing multiple superimposed photomaps to reconstruct movement in space through time became reducible to a single map of sites, as cropmark and soilmark sites dating from different historical periods were cumulatively perceived and located on the same spatiotemporal plane of the modern landscape surface. The ‘palimpsest’ pf landscape itself, from an archaeological perspective, took on the multiply-inscribed surfacial structure of the layered military photomap. The increasingly widespread assumption that the structured relations of vertical stratigraphic depth could be systematically inferred rather than empirically observed imparted an orbital gravity to the idea that the surface would indexically represent its own depth in a straightforward manner – that the outline of the form would reveal itself to the appropriately technologized gaze, and that this hollow trace was/is sufficient basis for analysis. Aerial photography’s expansion of the access and capture of the horizontal surface, then, underwent a perpendicular abstraction, and the landscape surface as it was represented in photographs was treated as able to represent the vertical depth of historical time. The surface of the landscape came to be read, in a sense, as though it were a photograph itself, or as though the photograph of the landscape came to stand for it: a two-dimensional image which, because it signifies indexically, bears an additional chronological dimension, a direct representation of the past.

The ultimate result has been a direct a determinative effect upon archaeological landscape mapping, both from the air and upon the ground. The consequence of aerial archaeological survey is a reconfiguration of the archaeological map itself, as an end-product document that reproduces the spatiotemporal collapse of the landscape palimpsest regardless of whether the map is drawn from aerial photographs or terrestrial survey. The elision between aerial photograph and map as signifying forms – further, the dominance of the aerial photograph over the map as a document of mechanical accuracy and material verity – is such that the archaeological landscape as represented from above is an entity which dominates the perception of landscape on the ground. Disciplinary archaeology, having already absorbed the interpretive framework of aerial photography from the bed of its military formation, began to view the physical landscape in its phenomenological presence according to its carefully refined photographic and cartographic representation.

In the 1970s, terrestrial fieldwalking survey began to subsume an increasingly large portion of archaeological research of all varieties. Its heightened profile was a product of a combination of factors. Its employment was one of expediency in the salvage or rescue archaeology operations that accompanied development projects resulting from increasing urbanization following the Second World War. Secondly, the development of national cultural resources management institutions created large numbers of opportunities for research, for which survey has long been deemed most suited. Its primary justification as a methodology, though, is economic: as compared to traditional excavation archaeology, survey ‘covers’ exponentially larger areas with less labour power in far less time.

Masses of critical literature attest to the enormity of the problem of how to interpret the information derived from survey: probability sampling of surface area to maximize site detection, lack of agreement over the intensity of artefact concentration required to signal the presence of a definable site, and uncertainty over the systematic intelligibility of the process(es) by which artefacts of multiple historical periods actually become visible on the modern landscape surface are all questions to which standardized answers are debated. Such difficulties, however, are largely methodological. Across al methodological experiments in archaeological survey, there persists a common, basic assumption that what is buried beneath the landscape expresses itself on the surface – the expectation that the archaeological landscape is a palimpsest and, moreover, that this reinscribed surface is systematically decipherable.

Archaeological knowledge, traditionally and as described above, is the product of a specific configuration of rationality wherein historical time is a fourth-dimension derivative the three-dimensional space. Survey archaeology, in contrast, is a practice whereby the third dimension of spatial depth is left unexplored, and the fourth dimension of chronology is tenuously derived through inference from existing knowledge of artefact typology which is felt to be sound. The reduction of space to two dimensions breaks down its relation to historical time: the dynamics of archaeological reasoning are unsprung, and what remains is a provisional process of analysis which produces information that is solely of a spatial nature. The material traces of survey data refer to what is outside of themselves in that analysis of survey data requires reference to established chronological sequences, but the spatial results of survey do not have the logical force to affect or alter accepted chronologies. The mutually interpenetrative relation between space and time – the ability of the trace to enter into signifying play – is thus disrupted, as chronology is treated as fixed across a single spatial plane, and the movement which characterizes the space/time relation is arrested.

The consequence of Latour’s drift, then, is the representation’s ability to dominate the perception of the object even when it is returned to in its physical reality – even when, as in the case of landscape, what is physically returned to is, by virtue of that return, no longer an object. Aerial photograph’s satisfaction of the military goal to surveil, to mark as much space as possible and to capture as much movement through time, has led to the existence of a perception of landscape as an object docile to that goal. Moreover, the compulsive force of the totalizing drive, coupled with the technological refinement which enables its realization, is mobilized by its apparently self-sufficient rationality, such that it migrates into entirely different spheres of knowledge production. The fragmented and the site-specific give way to the broad complete grasp of a particular form of visuality, and the phenomenological embeddedness of a sense of place is ceded to the conceptualization of space as a systematic entity whose relationship to time, and to history, is reducible to a fixed formula.

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