Crafting Knowledge with (Digital) Visual Media in Archaeology Sara Perry
Archaeologists have long drawn on the skill of visual producers to enable and extend their expert practice. The success of these alliances is debateable, as visualisers have often been consigned to the discipline’s sidelines, their epistemic credibility and relevance challenged even by the visual community. Such tension is apparent with digital graphic producers whose craft skills, contributions to knowledge, and reliance on new technologies are not uncommonly subject to suspicion and misunderstanding. This chapter presents examples of digital reconstruction in which practitioners are changing the nature of thinking. I aim to demystify this process and to speak both to best practice in the application of visual technologies and theory, and to the epistemic productivity of visualisation in archaeology overall.
