In order to begin to understand how we move between the material world and our modes of documentation, I examine a case from a few decades prior to the professionalization of archaeology in Greece, when practices involving the mobilization of the archaeological landscape, both in terms of engagement and articulation, were inconsistent and varied. First, I scrutinize the locus of the field in relation to the process of knowledge construction at a historical moment when no division between the ‘field’ and the ‘cabinet’ had yet solidified (for an excellent account of the earlier roots of this relationship refer to Schnapp 1997). Second, I employ a few strategies from the sociology of science to situate how knowledge of the Greek countryside was made and how that process was interwoven with other ‘fields’ of practice. Third, I emphasize the action of instruments and media in that process. My contention is that in the case of Greece the military geographer William Martin Leake was part of a network that separated him from his contemporaries and situated his modes of engagement and articulation as a standard for how topographical fieldwork and documentation would come to be undertaken in the archaeology of Greece.

As a young military officer, William Martin Leake traveled in Greece in 1802 and again, more widely, between 1804 and 1810. It was in 1804 that the British government, alarmed by the possibility of French invasion, sent Leake into the Morea (as the Peloponnesus was then known). As an emissary behind a British national imperative to check French expansion in Greece (Wagstaff 2001a, 191; 1992), the Colonel was charged with coordinating among local Ottoman authorities, assessing the defenses, determining the potential for local support of French forces should invasion occur, and gathering geographical information of the relatively unknown interior (Marsden 1864, 16-18; also refer to Curtius 1876, 242-243; Wagstaff 2001a, 191). Therefore, the competing interests of Britain and France are critical to an understanding of Leake’s antiquarian practice (here refer to Pratt 1992). Nevertheless, Leake was also a surveyor and topographer. In fact, his contemporaries regarded him as a ‘model geographer’ (de Grey and Rippon 1860, cxv). In addition, Leake was an avid collector, especially of Greek and Roman coins, and possessed a great knowledge of Greek and Roman geographical literature.

Leake published ten substantial volumes based upon his travels in Greece: Topography of Athens (1821), Travels in the Morea (1830), Travels in Northern Greece (1835), and Peloponnesiaca (1846). These works set an authoritative topographical standard for both fieldwork and documentation in classical archaeology (Clark 1858, ix; Curtius 1876, 247-249; Lolling 1889, cxv; cf. Pearson and Shanks 2001, 39; Shanks 1996, 72 and 165). Moreover, given his thoroughness and attention to detail, subsequent topographical work by archaeologists was often, and in certain areas exclusively, in dialogue with Leake’s (e.g. Clark 1858, viii; Curtius 1851 and 1852; Forster 1907; Grundy 1896; Pritchett 1965; Ramsay 1890). Whether he is complimented on venturing into the Peloponnesus just prior to the Greek Revolution, or on being the first to identify a particular site, scholars hold Leake in high regard as a topographer of Greece (Curtius 1876; Eisner 1991, 103-105; Lolling 1889 cxv; Stoneman 1987, 155-164; Wagstaff 2001a; 2001b; 1992). For example, the classical historian and topographer R.W. Ramsay, in his The Historical Geography of Asia Minor, characterized Leake as ‘the greatest of modern Topographers’ who ‘has done more to make a real understanding of Greek life possible than any other Englishman’ (1890 IV, 98; quoted in Ferguson 2001, 32). More recently, Leake has been regarded as peerless among other topographers of classical Greece, deserving a place alongside Pausanias (Eliot 1996, 666). Another scholar has described him as ‘the leading British authority on topography of ancient Greece in the second quarter of the 19th century’ (Wagstaff 1992, 277).

Rather than add to the annals of the singular figures, the ‘great men,’ in the history of classical archaeology, I aim to break down the divides between Leake’s topographical and scholarly work and the military, political, and social aspects of his modes of engagement in Greece. In fact, while maneuvering around the modernist notion of ‘the field,’ I prefer to leave the ‘knowing individual’ entangled within a collective network that encompasses not only military institutions, discipline, and knowledge, but also, survey instruments, aristocratic social groups, and media (text, plans, maps, illustrations, etc.). Let us, then, begin with a day in the course of Leake’s 1805 journey in the Peloponnesus.

On April 3, Leake passed by Paleópoli where he identified the site as ancient Gythium (for a subsequent topographical treatment of the area following in the topographical tradition associated with Leake, refer to Forster 1907). Of interest were the remains of a theater ninety yards distant from the shore (‘of a semi-transparent kind of white marble, of a very coarse grain, and marked with broad parallel streaks of brown’ 1830 I, 244), the masses of Roman ruins further inland, large foundations projecting into the sea, and sundry materials, including an alleged architrave with a Latin inscription, which had been reused in the construction of the village of Marathonísi. Leake was astonished that none of the Roman structures piqued the interest of the ancient author Pausanias (regarding Pausanias’ ambivalence toward Roman structures refer to Alcock 1993, 27-29). The narrative moves freely between what is seen by Leake and literary descriptions by the Greek geographer, Strabo, or quotations from Pausanias (most of the literary work was the product of subsequent study). The juxtaposition of ancient description and contemporary observation, albeit in a more structured comparative form, would later become a standard topographical means of dealing with such sites (e.g. Curtius 1851 and 1852; Forster 1907; Grundy 1896; Pritchett 1965).

On April 3, 1805, Leake was en route from Monemvasia where he stayed for a few days as the guest of Hassán Bey, the Turkish governor of the area and captain of the Sultan’s galley, to the Laconian peninsula known as the Mani. Leake stopped off in the village of Marathonisi. Here he liaised with a local corvette commander and government deputy, Andón Bey (‘bey’ is a Turkish title of authority and respect given to Ottoman officials). Leake stayed for a short period at the house of Tzanét Bey, who had been banished and had subsequently fled to the area, for conspiring with the French and receiving a shipment of gunpowder from them. Leake discussed local sympathies for the opposition and skirmishes that had taken place over French influence. Names, locations, and the ties of potential threats were discussed. He detailed the economic base of the region and conjectured the probable yearly regional output of the Mani in pounds sterling (1830 I, 243). After estimating of the local population (in case the French should sway the Greeks), Leake immediately segued into his discussion of ancient Gythium.

How should we understand these events that occurred in Leake’s day? As an archaeologist, do I separate out his ancient topographical endeavors and treat them as isolated from his military duties? The political mission for the solemn and stern military historian, the ancient topography for the eager and eclectic practitioner concerned with the history of archaeology? Far from it, for to draw such divisions can only bring us more misunderstanding. On the contrary, the links that crisscross between military strategy, politics, geographies, social groups, emotions, theodolites, sextants, timepieces, and media in fact serve to situate Leake’s mobilization of the Greek countryside. In accentuating this point, I focus on the connections between military discipline, skills, and ways of seeing with organized knowledge, its production, and its manifestation in particular media (Foucault 1995; also Chadha 2002 and Dubbini 2002).

Although there are many different modes by which one could write regarding the land, Leake’s Travels in the Morea takes the form of a travelogue. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries the travelogue was a mixed genre that appealed simultaneously to a more general readership and to a more demanding scientific society. Even though the day-by-day narrative of potential danger, toil, and intrigue was popular among a wider audience, the form was also conducive to laying out what was deemed worthy of observation and record in the course of one’s travels (Driver 2001, 24). In fact, the reviewers of Travels in the Morea in the Monthly Review regarded the very word ‘Travels’ as a misnomer. These ‘Travels,’ according to the reviewers, ‘instead of answering the too generally light and unsubstantial character of that description of writing, will be found to be in effect a most elaborate and important topography, ancient and modern, of the once renowned, and now doubly interesting peninsula, the Peleponnessus’ (Monthly Review 1830, 1). Leake himself shared this view having remarked in the critique of another travelogue that a romantic and poetic style was ‘not so well suited to a statement of facts’ (1826, 203).

If Leake’s ‘critical acumen’ lay in his scientific observations during his travels, his ‘erudition’ lay in the links to ancient texts and inscriptions which he established during the years of subsequent research and study (adjectival accolade borrowed from de Grey and Rippon 1860, cxiv). Leake centers his discussions of ancient topography on Pausanias’ Periegesis. Similarly, many ancient sites are considered in respect to the connections formulated between Leake’s observation of archaeological remains and his reading of the textual accounts of those structures as described in the Periegesis. Yet Leake does not confine himself solely to Pausanias; rather he pulls in every ancient author at his disposal—Strabo, Herodotus, Ptolemy, Livy, Thucydides, Xenophon, Plutarch, Ovid, and many more. He also links his work to contemporary oral histories. In estimating the total number of villages and towns in the Mani, for example, he cites a contemporary poetical enumeration, which confirms the names of all 117 villages (1830 I, 263). Throughout Travels, the narrative moves back and forth between issues of ancient topography, contemporary chorography, and aspects of military interest.

The Travels do not represent the mere peregrinations of a gentleman scholar at leisure. Despite being at times a romantic, Leake is precise and well disciplined (given geographical standards at the time) in his observation. And so the reviewers from the Monthly Review were reluctant to indulge in anything more than sheer praise for the Travels because the text transgressed the lines of popular literature. ‘The display of vast erudition, of great industry well and aptly applied, immense perseverance in enquiry, as well as ingenuity in speculation where opportunity is given for doubt, and above all a degree of precision in his geographical computations,’ according to the reviewers (Monthly Review 1830, 1), placed Travels in a category of its own.

Through Leake’s work the lines between dilettantism and scholarship in Greek topographical studies were drawn. Beyond his knowledge of ancient geographical literature and his apt comparisons with the contemporary archaeological landscape, what other factors separated Leake from his contemporaries? According to the famed ‘father of classical archaeology’ and excavator of Olympia, Ernst Curtius, Leake ‘distinguished himself among all his contemporaries by the great, thorough cohesion of his projects, by the methodological and expansive nature of his travels, by his sense for history as well as by the technique/skill, which he brought to his projects from his training as an engineer artillery officer and military topographer’ (1876, 245). Pace Curtius, this precision is due to common underlying practices between military survey and that of the geographer/antiquary. In this respect, the very term ‘field’ takes on a dual valence in Leake’s work invoking both the military and the archaeological.

As a future founding fellow and once vice-president (1830-1835) of the Royal Geographical Society, Leake was by the time of the publication of Travels, without doubt familiar with the often-heated controversies concerning the sites of geographical knowledge production. These controversies were often manifest in what historians of geography have identified as 18th and early 19th century distinctions between the scholarly work of the cabinet and the more adventurous work of the cartographic explorer or military surveyor (Driver 2001, 13). But as Felix Driver has pointed out, these boundaries were by no means fixed. One of the ways through which individuals attempted to reconcile these differences was by the publication of instructional literature. How, for instance, did the traveler know what to observe? Driver reminds us in Geography Militant:

Observation was more than a matter of simply looking: in order to see properly, one had to observe methodically, to follow a rule. This applied especially to the observation of the traveller. In What to Observe (1841), for example, Colonel Julian Jackson (the newly appointed secretary of the RGS (Royal Geographical Society)) represented travel as a necessary but insufficient means of acquiring geographical knowledge; it would become truly useful, he insisted ‘only when travellers shall have learnt how and what to observe’ (2001, 51).

Jackson, like Leake a member of the RGS, was a colonel, and many of the solutions concerning questions of how and what to observe were derived from the military. Indeed, the RGS was an association largely comprised of career diplomats and military personnel. Of its 460 founding members in 1830, ‘army and naval officers constituted around one-fifth and this proportion was to remain remarkably stable throughout the next seventy years’ (Driver 2001, 41). While instructional literature for travelers dates much earlier (e.g. Tucher 1757), one of the most important manuals on ‘field’ observation in the 19th century was published by the RGS as Hints to travellers in 1854. Five of the six contributing authors were military officers and surveyors. Beyond their emphasis on expertise born of experience, the authors share the conviction that precise observation depends upon the character and quality of the instruments one carries, while good maps and plans require the immediate notation of measurements and descriptions ‘written with the objects in view’ (Fitzroy and Raper 1854, 330). Hints to travellers even includes lists by category of questions concerning what geographical information to collect (Fitzroy and Raper 1854, 353-358). One could get lost in the minutiae of these instructional texts, but the point I emphasize here is that military geographical knowledge, through such instructional literature, played a major role in shaping the outlines of the field and was based on a recognition of the importance of instruments and particular media. Let us trace this link further.

Interspersed within Leake’s itinerary are references to the location and descriptions of potential military material resources. These include resources of general importance, for instance sources of fresh water (1830 I, 251), or those more specific to military interest, such as saltpetre (potassium nitrate, a constituent of gunpowder (1830 I, 200)). In descriptions of topography he is careful to mention the best harbors or, likewise, points of difficult navigation (both important in determining likely landing points for French forces), the depth of rivers at their crossing points, and road conditions. Leake also includes examinations of towers, areas of potential defense, and vulnerability.

Such points of interest were specified in his deployment orders, while archaeological materials fell under the rubric of valuable resources (Marsden 1864, 16-18). In this way, Leake’s 1805 and 1806 itineraries in the Peloponnesus were structured by his military responsibilities. While en route, Leake traveled with Turkish officials or armed Greeks and stayed in the houses of various figures within the Ottoman socio-political network. Indeed, during his mission in the Peloponnesus, Leake’s position as an officer in the British army allowed him to ‘mobilize allies,’ to use the Latourian vocabulary, in a very direct sense and thus facilitated his ability to journey into areas dangerous to most foreign travelers. To take one example, on April 11, 1805, when Leake travelled in the area of the Mani known notoriously as Kakavoulia or the land of ‘Evil Council,’ one of the ‘chieftains,’ Tubáki, ordered by the bey to conduct the colonel through the region, confides in one of Leake’s servants that, ‘If the bey had not given such precise orders concerning you, how nicely we should have stripped you of all your baggage’ (1830 I, 268). Many of these individuals in this socio-political network also double as archaeological and geographical informants and guides. Leake’s excursions to ancient sites throughout the Peloponnesus are structured by these liaison responsibilities and concomitant access to local topographical knowledge.

Leake’s daily narrative begins with the hour he sets out from his lodgings. While en route, Leake records the time it takes to move between his destinations by marking the moment at which he reaches a turn in the road or the edge of a village or any other prominent feature. On March 15, 1806, for example, Leake records while traveling from Argos to Anapli: ‘Leave the house of Kyr V— at 1.51: at 2.3, the last houses of the town; —2.11, cross the river Bánitza; —2.31, pass through Delamanára, at 3.1 I arrive at Paleó-Anápli, as the ruins of Tiryns are called’ (1830 II, 349). This to-the-minute precision in the breakdown of distances imposes temporal regulation and segmentation on the countryside. This was, of course, a form of military measurement, a chronometric control (refer to Foucault 1995, 149-152 on the connection between the ‘time-table’ and the military). Exact measurement of time was also the key to accurate mapping. Consider, that the undeniable utility of John Harrison’s chronometer in marine mapping and navigation—in calculating longitude—was only established through James Cook’s 1776 voyage to the Pacific (Wilford 2002, 152-62; Sobel 1996). Nevertheless, by the beginning of the 19th century the military timetable had been well integrated and established as a regulatory base in pedagogy, factory production, and prisons (Foucault 1995). It had also come to structure many travel itineraries. Both Edward Dodwell and Sir William Gell, two of Leake’s contemporaries, use time as a convenient means of establishing distances for travelers (Dodwell 1819; Gell 1817).

When Leake first set foot into the Peloponnese he was a captain in the Royal Artillery. Trigonometry, triangulation, computation of distance—for the artilleryman, exact calculation meant the difference between victory and defeat. For the surveyor, the geographer, these forms of numerical calculation provided modes of delineating and ordering space (cf. Godlewska 1995). Leake’s orders specified that he was to ‘take surveys, and lay down plans whenever such operation can be conducted without the fear of exciting jealousy and displeasure in the people of the country’ (Marsden 1864, 16). To this end, Leake (despite having to do without the aid of the military surveyor and draftsman he had requested (Wagstaff 1992, 283) and yet presumably with the aid of a ‘valet’ whom he almost never mentions (Wagstaff personal communication)) derived over fifteen hundred measurements toward the mapping of the interior (1830 I, vii). Bearings in degrees when combined with distances measured through a combination of time and measured paces served as a basis for the triangulation with which he constructed his maps. Of course, Leake could not accomplish this without the help of other actors—sextant (‘a sextant of 4 inches radius made by Bergen’ (Leake 1805)), theodolite, pocket watch (it is unlikely that Leake carried a chronometer; Wagstaff personal communication), tape and notebook at prominent geographical stations (for discussions of material actors in the context of contemporary archaeology refer to Olsen 2003 and Yarrow 2003). These instruments and media establish regularity to practice, a ‘template to standardization’ (Foucault 1995; also Bourguet et al 2002). Given the same instrumental mixture (machinic assemblage), transforming ramparts of a citadel into a series of grid coordinates involves a similarly structured engagement, a routine, whether one is at the site of Roman Gythium or the Bronze Age citadel of Tiryns. In addition, Leake’s survey work was clandestine and low-key in contrast to the huge state-sponsored military missions of the French—Egypt, the Morea, and Algeria. It was also feasible and repeatable on a small scale without great expense. Landscape studies on the scale of the French missions, consisting of large collaborative bodies of artists, antiquarians, botanists, draftsmen, geologists, epigraphers, etc., would not be emulated in Greece for well over 120 years (McDonald 1972, 10-11).

The time it would take to move military resources, the course and condition of overland routes, areas of offensive and defensive superiority, details of agricultural production and local economy—there are fundamental crossovers between issues of ancient topography and these aspects of military interest. The British military was after such information and especially better maps (Marsden 1864; de Grey and Rippon 1860). One could not effectively establish and control an empire without the ability to grasp the coastline or understand the potential difficulties posed by the overland movement of supplies, troops, and guns. Here we should bear in mind that this was the period when mapping became an ongoing national enterprise. Large flows of funding from the governments of Britain and France led to a substantial amplification in geographical research and technological innovations such as John Harrison’s timepiece (in the French context refer to Godlewski 1999, 148-190). In all this, accuracy was becoming more critical. We may recall that ‘the first sustained effort to map Great Britain in its entirety began in 1791’ (Harris 2002, 229) under the auspices of the Trigonometric Survey of the Board of Ordnance, later to be known as the Ordnance Survey. The product of this endeavor was not published till 1801 (the year Leake crossed over into Egypt as part of the general British survey, in the company of then private secretary to Lord Elgin, William Richard Hamilton, the rescuer of the Rosetta Stone from the French and Elgin’s Marbles from the sea—they were shipwrecked for a short time (de Grey and Rippon 1860, cix-cx)).

Furthermore, Leake’s scholarly success lies not only in his literary and survey work but also in what Latour calls ‘immutable mobiles’—his other media. Here specifically, I define media as the modes of articulation through which knowledge is mobilized, manifested, and materialized. I use the term ‘media’ mainly to refer to two-dimensional, fungible, and superimposable inscriptions such as text, plans, maps, illustrations, etc. (Latour 1986, 1999). Likewise, inscription ‘refers to all the types of transformations through which an entity becomes materialized into a sign, an archive, a document, a piece of paper, a trace’ (Latour 1999, 306). However, in the two case studies presented in this article, media also include both archives and collections. The point here is that neither geography, nor botany, nor archaeology ‘can describe what they talk about with text alone; they need to show the things’ (Latour 1986, 13). In Travels Leake doesn’t publish the more popular picturesque views or idealized ruins (e.g. Dodwell 1819; Gell 1823). He publishes maps. Compare, for example, Dodwell’s map of Greece to that of Leake’s from ''Travels''. The student of Dodwell’s map had no way of determining what was and wasn’t actually physically surveyed. In contrast, the ‘model geographer’ attends to details of what are known (through both topographical and nautical survey) and unknown through the use of set conventions—thicker lines are used in areas of more certainty, thinner ones in areas of less, while a dotted line is used to denote an area completely unknown, such as the south coast of Hydra. Perhaps more importantly, interior geographical features, routes, and ancient sites are located for the first time with a degree of measured accuracy. Leake’s map, however, was soon to be overshadowed by a map produced during the huge state-sponsored collaborative mission of the French Expédition Scientifique de Morée in 1833 (1829-1831). I will return to this point in the next section.

Leake also publishes, at various points in the text, two-dimensional plans of structures, as well as detailed and exact planimetric drawings of inscriptions. Of course, Leake does not include plans with consistency. His ability to map structures was connected to the amount of time he was able to spend at a particular site. Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind, as Latour points out, that this showing of the things was utterly impossible before the mixture of ‘graven images’ and the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century. Before that ‘a text could be copied only with some adulteration, but not so with a diagram, an anatomical plate, or map’ (Latour 1986, 13). And again it was some time before a plan could be mobilized with a level of ‘optical consistency’ and standardization in map and drawing, which was easily legible, combinable, and verifiable. Compare, for instance, George Wheler’s late seventeenth century map of Athens to Leake’s topographical map of the Bronze Age citadel of Tiryns. In Travels, maps, scaled diagrams, and measured plans are placed directly into the text (Figure 2.5). This combination of media is part of geography’s answer to the problem of description in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, both in Britain and in France (Godlewska 1995, 11). It also makes Leake’s work easily legible, fungible (future archaeologists can build on it), and verifiable.

Thus, Leake was not only able to link the Greek countryside to ancient texts and inscriptions with the thoroughness that would come to be expected of subsequent scholars, but he also mobilized space and time in a way that sets him apart from earlier travelers and antiquarians in Greece. The modes of topographical documentation in Greece were beginning to take shape. Again, it is not enough to focus exclusively on the media, for tape, theodolite, sextant, timepiece, writing, and drawing utensils come together in this visual culture. Without these corporeal actors the material world could not have been transformed into the three volumes of Travels in the Morea or the subsequent Peloponnesiaca, both accompanied by ‘valuable maps’ (de Grey and Rippon 1860, cxv).

Leake must convince people as well. Once again we must note that the ‘model geographer’ made significant strides toward standardization and compatibility. Furthermore, Leake had at his disposal a different combination of skills (military, geographical), materials (survey instruments), texts (Pausanias), etc., than anyone had hitherto been able to make use of. But, even these cannot function independently in the 19th century. What of trust and authority? Leake’s membership (subsequent to his military career) in the most learned societies of the period linked him to a social, political, and intellectual network that legitimated his authority and reinforced his distinction as a topographer and scholar. Among these were the Society of the Dilettanti (Leake was second on the list after Lord Aberdeen), the Royal Society Club, the Royal Geographical Society (in which, as mentioned, Leake was a founding member and vice-president), vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature, ‘an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Berlin, and a correspondent of the Royal Institute of France’ (de Grey and Rippon 1860, cxvi). Leake’s authority as a member, a lettered and educated man, helped solidify his credibility and situate his work at the center of a network out of which classical archaeology would emerge as an academic profession.

Where, in all of this, is the field? Do we still believe it to be out there separated, solitary, and static in the Greek countryside, near Marathonísi, in ancient Gythium? Is it on the plain of potential battle? Or near a point of ambush should the French invade? The problem with stating that all of these are the field is that all of these are also complex networks of interaction. The Greek countryside is not free from the workings of national politics, social groups, institutional interests, avid collectors, or any multitude of instrumental mixtures and media. It was this unique collective of allies—the military institutions, discipline (in the Foucauldian sense), and knowledge, the instruments, social groups, and media—that set Leake apart from his contemporaries and oriented his modes of engagement and articulation as a base for how topographical practice would come to be undertaken in the archaeology of Greece. Even though I have focused more on the military and media aspects of Leake’s work (because they are largely neglected), each of these links is a field that conditioned Leake’s practice. There were no hard and fast boundaries. Instead these broader and diverse linkages are comprised of multiple fields. Just as these multiple fields—military infrastructures and skills, political interests and alliances, ancient literature, learned societies, instruments, materialities, and media—come together in Leake’s practice, so too do they situate archaeological production today.

And even at this point, after very briefly following the links out from Leake’s engagement and articulation of the Greek countryside and back again, I must confess, that these multiple fields are far more nuanced than I have suggested. These links can be broken down further and traced farther. And so far what I have said of multiple fields does not yet account for the clear divide, the ‘Great Divide,’ that exists between the material world and the ideas Leake wrote down in his study, now inscribed in his text, Travels in the Morea. This issue, the very idea of a singular divide between the material world and language, will be further undermined through a complimentary case of multiple fields in the first section of Chapter 3.

Before we move on, however, let us consider once again the field of media—specifically, two-dimensional plans, maps, diagrams, and illustrations. Historical treatments of field practice have overlooked the ‘simple drift from watching confusing three-dimensional objects, to inspecting two-dimensional images, which have been made less confusing’ (Latour 1986, 16; refer, however, to Lucas 2001b, 206-214; Moser and Gamble 1997; Svestad 1994, especially pp. 218-224; also Olsen and Svestad 1994; Webmoor 2005(in press); in relation to photographic media refer to Shanks 1997). This point has, strangely enough, eluded archaeologists who have placed emphasis on the act of writing, on narration (this criticism extends to some of my own work; Jackman and Witmore 2002).

Hodder, for instance, in detailing how writing styles in archaeological site reports changed in Britain between the 18th and 20th century, concentrates solely on the language of the reports without acknowledging the potential impact the use of maps, plans, illustrations, diagrams, or photographs might have had upon these narratives (Hodder 1989). Text or images or maps, when incorporated together in archaeological publication, do not work in isolation: they are juxtaposed. Meaning is contingent upon the exchange between these disparate modes of documentation. It is only in the context of the exchange between text and other modes of two-dimensional inscription that we can situate archaeological media.

In this I hold that it is critical that we recognize how our media allow us to speak with a degree of confidence. These less confusing media come to shape our engagements with the material world. They shape our fields and define our fieldwork. It is not coincidental that a media standard, the unique combination of plan, map, illustration, and text, is established at a moment when modernist definitions of the field are being formulated. Of course, these media do not work in isolation (contrary to McLuhan (1994) and some post-structuralist thought (e.g. Welsh 1997, 176-177))—they are ‘the fine edge and the final stage of a whole process of mobilization’ (Latour 1986, 17). Twenty years passed between the end of Leake’s journeys in the Peloponnesus and the publication of Travels in the Morea. What developments took place in the interim? How did Leake’s intermediates, his immutable mobiles—notebooks, lists of measurements, sketches, etc.—factor into the process of publication? Leake also possessed collections of coins, sculpture, and artifacts, and these too have a part to play in this process. These questions will be taken up in the context of AEP survey practice in Chapter 3. Placing aside the issue of multiple fields, let us now turn directly to an act of delegation through a case dealing with the medium of the map.

Return to “Instrumental mixtures”: a sociotechnical genealogy of survey practice in Greece

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