Sheelagh Hughes. Illustrating the past: archaeological discoveries on Irish road schemes.

Witcher, Robert

SHEELAGH Hughes. Illustrating the past: archaeological discoveries on Irish road schemes (TII Heritage 1). 2015. vi+122 pages, numerous colour and b&w illustrations. Dublin: Transport Infrastructure Ireland; 978-0-9932315-1-3 hardback.

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We conclude with a volume that moves beyond words and focuses on images. Over the past decade and a half, investment in Ireland's transport infrastructure has resulted in unprecedented archaeological investigations. On the basis of this work, the National Roads Authority--now merged with the Railway Procurement Agency and rebranded as Transport Infrastructure Ireland, or TII--has produced an impressive series of 28 monographs. Illustrating the past by SHEELAGH Hughes draws together some of the work by artists featured in those monographs to explore both the richness of Ireland's past and the diverse ways in which it has been visualised. The result, attractively packaged as an album, includes drawings, paintings and computer reconstructions organised chronologically from the Mesolithic to the early medieval period.

Each image is paired with a page of commentary on the general archaeological significance of each site, explaining the specific scene illustrated; there are also site plans, photographs and info-boxes. We visit a Middle Bronze Age 'sweathouse' and observe a seemingly experimental attempt at iron production at an Early Iron Age site; we witness a Late Neolithic pilgrimage to a timber circle and a night-time ritual at an Iron Age post enclosure; and we imagine how a piece of a Late Bronze Age wheel (the earliest so far discovered in Ireland) is incorporated into a wooden trackway, as well as attending several cremations and inhumations.

The variety of methods and results is extremely interesting: black-ink line drawings, watercolour washes and photo-realistic computer images; full colour palettes, pastel shades and monochrome. Some artists draw by hand, some generate images with software and some blend different media. There are also different perspectives: aerial views and the vantage points of individuals within the landscape; cut-away views allow us to see inside some structures, while others are closed to us.

Juxtaposed in this way, it is difficult not to judge the effectiveness of the different styles. Some of the garishly coloured examples have a cartoonish, computer-game quality that I did not find particularly attractive. The photorealistic images are certainly seductive but somehow not as a compelling as the line drawings and the watercolour washes. But as with the books discussed above, different visualisation techniques are presumably more or less appropriate for different purposes--a display panel on-site or in a museum, on-screen or printed--as well as linked to a specific aim: to evoke a general impression, to capture a specific event or moment, or to depict a wide landscape, a single site or even a single artefact.

These images, we are told, are "not mere conjecture [...] They reflect the limits of the excavated evidence but also seek to imaginatively extend it in a meaningful and plausible fashion" (p. 3). The variety of techniques shows that there is more than one way to do this, and, although there is no extended exploration of this issue, or synthesis crosscutting the individual examples, the book concludes with short profiles of the artists and summaries of their individual working practices and philosophies.

Dave Pollock, for example, notes "Every reconstruction is wrong and to limit my part in the deception I tend to avoid detail" (p. 105). Others strive "to 'recreate' the sites as they may once have looked" (p. 100), adding texture, people and environmental detail. This diversity is reflected in the range of terminology used: reconstructions, visualisations, translations and interpretive creations.

All the artists talk about their collaboration or dialogue with archaeologists, anchoring themselves in the detail of excavation reports, but--as one of the artists, Dan Tietzsch-Tyler, remarks--"After that it is down to my imagination" (p. 106). This is perhaps a fitting note on which to ponder not only this excellent and thought-provoking volume but also the other books reviewed here, each engaging with the evidence and then finding imaginative ways to create narratives about the past.

doi: 10.15184/aqy.2016.24

References

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Wace, A.B. 1940. The Treasury of Atreus. Antiquity 14: 233-49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0003598X00015234.