In this chapter I trace the historical connections that situate the scientific practices that are integral to the survey tradition in the archaeology of Greece. I invest in a ‘sociotechnical genealogy’ of archaeological practice by focusing on the counter examples of the military geographer Colonel William Martin Leake and the French Expédition Scientifique de Morée (1829-1831). I attend to these two examples because they had a profound sociotechnical impact upon the modes of documentation adopted by classical archaeology in the Peloponnesus. I contend that these two cases, as military expeditions and part of the familiar processes of European expansionism, were central for not only the establishment of accurate modes of witnessing monuments, landscapes, and even local people, modes that still characterize archaeology today, but also the core instrumental and media mixtures that facilitate survey practice. In the case of Leake I accentuate the heterogeneous networks, the multiple fields that situate his practice, while with the Expédition I detail the act of compiling the first accurate and optically consistent map of the Peloponnesus.

This sociotechnical genealogy of practice accentuates acts of technical delegation where in swapping properties with things programs of action shift from one entity to another (Latour 1994 and 1999; 185-190). In this way, the instruments and media enlisted in 19th century engagements with the Greek countryside, which are now folded into our contemporary survey practices, have a role to play in the co-constitution of archaeological knowledge. Once a standardized baseline for documenting archaeological sites and landscapes was set, future topographers and archaeologists could continue to build upon the topographical work of Leake and the French through further innovation and refinement.

In the second half of this chapter I attend to a detailed case study of this innovation and refinement with the media and instruments of professionalization in the later 19th century. Here I center my discussion upon the impact of photography, both the instruments and photographic print, in archaeological knowledge construction. Photography as a rapid, faithful and detailed witness was critical both to the showing of the material world and the shaping of archaeological practice. Through these examples I demonstrate how contemporary modes of documentation are still folded into acts of delegation that occurred in the 19th and early twentieth centuries. In this endeavor I also want to simultaneously complicate the ways in which archaeologists have come to discuss and understand concepts such as ‘field’, ‘data’, ‘site’, etc; that is as stand-ins for the material world that are often played off as creating negative splits through a situated binary logic (refer to Hodder 1999 and 2001; Lucas 2001b) by detailing the modes of inscription.

Return to Chapter 1: A brief symmetrical example from Çatalhöyük

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