Picturing the Past, Art and Analogy in New Zealand Archaeological Reports.

Garry Law

This paper was originally presented to the New Zealand Archaeological Association conference in Picton, in April, 1998. It has been slightly modified since that date but remains in a non-academic mode. Acknowledgement of use is requested.

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Introduction
Art From Archaeology
Some Pictures
As a Summary
Envoi
References

Introduction - Some Different Sorts of Pictures

Maori occupation of New Zealand has left us a rich inheritance of things from the past and a culture linked to that past which is living today. However unlike some cultures, the representations of people left to us from the prehistoric past give little direct view of people about their daily activities. The only prehistoric representation I can think of which gives this direct view is the well known rock drawing of two people navigating a stream in a bundle raft (Figure 1) .  

 
Figure 1.  Raincliff, South Canterbury. Trotter and McCulloch, 1971: 75.

It is perhaps because the figure is so stylised and because it is so often reused in other media, to me, it does not speak very strongly. Interestingly it is usually captioned “men poling a mokihi”. The gender is a modern assumption.

While even this is more than many other cultures have, we look in some envy to those which have left a corpus of art showing people in the sorts of activities we as archaeologists would like to think we can reconstruct (Figure 2).    

 
Figure 2. Egyptian wall painting.

Once Europeans and their traditions of illustration and art came into contact with Maori, then a long and continuing tradition of illustrating contemporary Maori and Maori life commenced. The art forms introduced from elsewhere have more latterly been adapted into the Maori tradition of art. Of course that illustration has been through the eyes and minds of the artists, sometimes unknowingly, but at other times strongly directed, descending into what we today would call propaganda. While it is a broad field I will leave it as a single group of contemporary illustration. Representations purporting to show the Maori past are far from uncommon. By this broad grouping I mean that the artist was at the time consciously attempting to represent something earlier than that time he or she was working.

These have arisen from a variety of motivations. The most western of these has been the desire to create art of the sort idealised in public collections in galleries. The great 19th Century theme of narrative art; of art telling an uplifting story, went in search of stories to tell and combined with the great New Zealand 19th Century story of the arrival of the Maori. Outputs such as the Goldie / Steele picture (Figure 3) and the sculpture that once graced the Wellington Railway Station are well known.    

 
Figure 3. The Arrival of the Maoris in New Zealand, Collection Auckland Art Gallery. C.F. Goldie and L.J. Steele.

The origins in European art of the Arrival of the Maori are of course well known. Other outputs relate more to illustrating the Maori as he (and sometimes she) was. The images which come quickly to mind are those of Lindauer but there are others. A related group are the pictures, principally by Goldie, which are looking back to the past from the present with pictures, usually of elderly people in reflective mode (Figure 4). 

 
Figure 4

These, as a group, often relate to the assumption so prevalent at the turn of the century that Maori were a doomed race. The group are often thought of as portraits but it is clear many were painted in multiples and after the death of the subjects, with the imposition of the artist's view over the personality of the subjects. This means to me they are a particular representation of the past in that they are backward looking. A large group of pictures is simply illustrative, relating to some written word, where an author has been unable to find some historical illustration of an activity or event and has had a view created .

Sometimes this has been by posed photographic images (Figure 5) but more often through drawn illustration.  

 
 Figure 5. "The Maori as a digger. Using the ko or digging stick". Best 1924:179.

The posed row of cultivators with ko, working in unison, is one to remember. It comes from the much re-printed Elsdon Best book: "The Maori as He Was" (Best 1924). It was not the earliest use of this composition. There is a similar photograph of the same group in Hamilton's "Maori Art" (Hamilton 1896:413) and a painted image by Lindauer in the Auckland Art Gallery of similar age.  I have to acknowledge one group of drawn images as being influential in my coming to have an interest in Maori history. These were the illustrations which went with a two set school reader of the 1950’s when I was at primary school. Titled “Life in the Pa”, written by Ray Chapman-Taylor and illustrated by Russell Clark and E Mervyn Taylor it had artistically competent and exciting images. They also had a remarkable virtue of being very well researched. I have illustrated just one image from that book, by Russell Clark. The canoe on its way to the South Island is beset by a storm between the islands (Figure 6).  

 
Figure 6. Russell Clark. Chapman-Taylor, n.d.: 7.

Just a hint of the "Arrival of the Maoris" in this picture in the perspective on the canoe and the animation of the voyagers?

There is a much larger group where I want to concentrate, that where prehistorians have engaged artists to give drawn representations of how some specific evidence might be visualised. This is a subset of a much broader group as shown in the table below.

It is the last category of archaeologically derived material that this paper is more particularly about.

Art from Archaeology

Illustration of archaeologically derived material is quite a recent phenomenon in New Zealand. Indeed the first century of archaeology in New Zealand seems to have elicited very few examples. Perhaps the excavators saw themselves as doing little but add to the contemporary illustration that they could leave to others to pursue. More likely though is a more purist view of what they were about - the scientific investigation and factual representation of the past which did not leave room for such populist extravagances. It was of course, a strongly academic strain of archaeology which was grafted in here in the 1950’s and 60’s. The Starr Carr report contains no illustrations of Mesolithic man. The academic texts used in teaching were much illustrated, but by artefacts, plans, diagrams, not people. There were of course other strains of archaeology at work elsewhere which were not so purist. In Britain the extensive corpus of work of Alan Sorrell (e.g. Figure 7) was developed while he worked in close association with contemporary archaeologists.  

 
Figure 7. "The fortress of Buhen as it must have appeared in 1900 BC; a masterpiece of Egyptian military  architecture. ......"  Alan Sorrell. Drower 1970: 29. 

He and they were working to a market which welcomed the popularisation of archaeology. It was showing local history to people who saw themselves as the descendants of the people of the past. Perhaps there were some other forces at work in the absence of such illustration in later archaeological work, until the 1970’s. The avant garde art of the 1950’s and 60’s was non-representational. It was at that time that the status of the narrative art epitomised by the Goldie / Steele picture was at its lowest ebb.

The fashionable art of the day was the international styles of abstract expressionism and a later touch of pop art. Popular craft work of the day eschewed any representation in its decoration. Pottery for instance was in the Leach studio tradition of concentrating on textures and glazes. Portraiture was a weak tradition in recent New Zealand art, unlike Australia. If one wished to find an artist skilled in representation of people going about some activity, they were far more numerous working in advertising than in contemporary art. Perhaps this had a spin off to archaeologists of the day. There were certainly some links from the archaeologists of the time to the contemporary arts scene. Les Groube came to archaeology from a start in an arts career. Colin Smart made the reverse transition. Representational art as a tool may have been quite uncomfortable for them for this reason as well. Apart from this they may well have been quite isolated socially from artists with representation skills who worked outside the academic and contemporary arts scenes.

Use of photographic models by archaeologists is I think entirely limited to the illustrations in Duff where he showed some of the Wairau Bar ornaments on a model. The photographs used were trimmed to show little of the model and concentrate on the artefacts. We have Michael Trotter to thank for showing us the uncut image of one (Figure 8).  

 
Figure 8  "Necklace of reel shaped moa bone units and sperm whale tooth found with Burial Two, Wairau Bar (Canterbury Museum)" Trotter 1982:93. 

  
Figure 9 "Necklace of large ’reels’ as probably worn; note size and awkwardness." (Photo): Albion Wright. Duff 1956: Plate 8.

The full image is a powerful one. The model is a handsome and confident young Maori man. The combination of the individual and the necklace work well together. This is a man from the past looking at us. It creates something quite foreign to 1940’s science. One can understand why Duff trimmed the photographs (Figure 9). They were more art than science.

Another form of representation sparsely used is that of dioramas in museum displays. A lot of these have slight linkage to actual sites. The major exception is the fine Canterbury Museum diorama based on Duff’s investigation of an argillite quarry site (Figure 10).  

 
Figure 10  Diorama, Canterbury Museum. Whangamoa argillite quarry near Nelson. Duff 1946.

It represents a major investment of time and money and it is not surprising that other examples are few. It is a fine achievement of a convincing bush clad landscape and a sculptured group of men, the left hand group of which is more than somewhat reminiscent of the famous war time photograph by Joe Rosenthal of the US marines erecting the stars and stripes on Iwo Jima (Figure 11).  

 
Figure 11 Raising the flag on Iwo Jima (Posed photograph). J Rosenthal

This is more than a mere industrial activity. We are shown a heroic activity.

Aileen Fox was probably the first off-shore archaeologist to work here who was inured to thinking of artistic representation. Accessible interpretations were basic to her. Interestingly she had worked with Alan Sorrell on illustrations of some of British Roman archaeology (Fox and Sorrell 1961). Her published work here certainly extended well into illustrated reconstruction. I can recall being a little miffed when she reconstructed a cross-section of a pit from Taniwha Pa, from the archaeological report that I had published with Roger Green. Where was her evidence for some of what she had drawn, I thought? Her reconstruction has of course been much republished, the original archaeological cross-section not.

The more recent explosion here then, of archaeologically derived illustration is something of a surprise given the way archaeology was perceived by its practitioners in the 1950’s and 60’s. A motivation is not hard to surmise. The expansion of archaeology as a profession beyond the universities and museums and more recently its fight to retain a place within those institutions, has required the relevance of the discipline to be demonstrated in more accessible forms than time charts, artefact typologies and seriations. There is indeed a praiseworthy tradition of popularising the results of archaeology in New Zealand. There are many documents available as teaching sources. However the recent more frequent use of illustration is not just about popularising archaeology. I think it is clear in looking through the publications that the researchers gained some satisfaction in bringing their research to a point where people and places could be illustrated, rather than just things.

But images are powerful. The ones we are producing today to illustrate our view of the Maori past are going to shape New Zealanders’ views of their history. If we treat them casually we may reap some new New Zealand myths. How careful are we being in these depictions? We have been educated as archaeologists to take care in the use of analogy in using it to interpret the prehistoric past. There is quite a large literature on the subject. One view is that each use of an analogy must be brought forward explicitly and tested as a piece of scientific theory against the evidence to which it is being applied. An alternative view is that analogy is so central to the way we think that it is almost impossible for us to be aware of how often we use it. The paradigm shift view of the development of scientific knowledge takes in this concept of assumptions unknown and untested until a new stage of understanding exposes them. Nevertheless this view argues that we should still struggle and attempt to extract fact from presumption through making theories explicit and testing them through taking new views and tests of the facts, but it recognises we may for a long time fail. Earlier I referred to the vast corpus of contemporary illustration of Maori. It is very easy to fall into this “world view” of late 18th and early 19th Century Maori life and project this back into the past. Some of the artists we work with may indeed think this a quite legitimate way to proceed. This could well happen without our being aware of it. What may arise is to give representations the slightly dismissive expression of an artist’s interpretation. I do not believe we can put ourselves at arm’s length from such illustrations as by implying the interpretation is that of an artist rather than the researchers.

Pictures are too powerful for us to do that with any legitimacy. If we incorporate reconstructions in our work we must be prepared to stand by them. That has some consequences: The artist should be part of the research team, not a late appendage. Further, critical appreciation of reports including reconstructive representations must include consideration of the pictures as well as the words and conventional illustrations. We sometimes dismiss past attempts at representation of the past as dated because the artistic style is dated. But sometimes we use style as a cover for other aspects. The other way this dismissal emerges is if we are seeing in the pictures incorporations of values that we now find irrelevant, distasteful, disproved or simply dated. Are we so much superior that our new images will be timeless representations of pure fact? Almost certainly not. Such is not the nature of art. It is a warning to us to tread carefully. In developing an image of the past based on material in a written scientific source, one might expect to find in the associated literature some careful discussion of the sources of the image.

Surprisingly there is almost none in our contemporary archaeological literature. This gap leaves endless room for speculation, which I will willingly take up. It is though a warning that we are either treating illustration as a populist add-on or at least something we would rather not debate the sources of. Pictures are models that we can test. Word pictures are testable models but visualisations can be more challenging in that they have to be more complete. Archaeologists almost always deal with some physical reality of the past, rather than the mental constructs of past people. Hence the realities can be visualised into a picture. Being trained in a different academic tradition I am sometimes puzzled by the way archaeologists set models up as very top end theory and expect them to be highly integrated, “all singing all dancing”.

It may come as a surprise that technologists such as engineers often use quite disparate and loosely connected models in tackling designs. Picturing is quite central. Engineers will often seek to sketch something based on “rule of thumb” sizing to see if it fits in the landscape - to see it “looks right” before they will seek some numerical exploration of its exact sizing and performance. Models then need not be abstruse. They can be as seemingly simple as pictures.

Some Pictures

The simplest of picturing of the past are reconstructions of structures. We can start with some illustrations of reconstructions of pits (Figures 12,13).  

 
Figure 12 Pari Whakatau reconstruction. Duff 1961: -  

 
Figure 13 "Kumara storage pit, Type 2, with two rows of posts. Taniwha pa, Te Kauwhata. ...... ".  Fox 1976: 43. 

The reconstruction of the large pit at Pariwhakatau by Bell and Duff is I think the first of these published in New Zealand. Both illustrations beg some questions about detail and the difference in the detail between the two. These are not matters gone into in any detail in their original publications. Reconstructions of houses are another group (Figures 14-17).  

 
Figure 14 "Mangakaware 2, Reconstruction of the trench Y house." Karel Peters. Bellwood 1978: 24.  
 

 
Figure 15 "This 'artist’s impression' of house 9, Pa Bay Village is based on the post hole pattern .. which was produced from Murray Thacker’s excavation. ......", Brailsford 1981: 169.  

 
Figure 16 "Te Awanga - House Reconstruction."  Fox 1978: 25.  

 
Figure 17 "An artist’s reconstruction of a rectangular frame built house at Katiki. ...... " Richard Newell, Anderson 1983:34 

The Bellwood one is I think the first   from New Zealand The detail has considerable support from actual timbers found adjacent to the site. But notice the difference in detail between the reconstructions.

The Managakaware house has no plates on the side of end walls whereas the others have. In some house reconstructions the side wall top plates sit on the posts, in others outside them. Some top plates are lying flat, others on edge. A rich field for discussion here, but the literature is relatively thin overall (but see Prickett 1982 for a good start). If we look at the illustrations to date we are dealing with quite simple line drawings, illustrating material things with no people at all. There is little here which is an appeal to the emotions, little we can call art. However people appearing in pictures were not far behind. I have not included here any illustrations purely of reconstructions of excavated fortifications, though several exist. The one shown (Figure 18) is interesting and different because we have a human figure for scale - noticeably a Maori figure if crudely drawn.  

 
Figure 18 "Mangakaware 2, Trench C. A reconstruction of palisades and entrance." Karel Peters. Bellwood 1978: 18. 

This serves as an introduction to a large corpus of illustrations where whole sites are shown complete with human figures.

The first of these published in New Zealand was not in fact of a New Zealand site but of one in Western Samoa, a site studied by Stuart Scott as part of Roger Green’s research there (Figure 19). 

 
Figure 19 "Perspective view of fortification, Uliamoa" Naetzker Scott, 1969:44 

It was published in 1969. I have reason to believe it was seminal in starting the now well established tradition of illustration in New Zealand archaeology. The first illustration of a New Zealand site was I think by Leahy in 1972 of one of the Station Bay sites (Figure 20).  

 
Figure 20 Site N38/30, Station Bay Motutapu. John McCaw,  Leahy, 1972. 

Having worked as an excavator on that site I can remember seeing the illustration for the first time with a mild shock of recognition. The most profuse output of illustration in the 1970’s came with the 1979 Wairarapa volume. It starts with depictions of sites where the people are small, giving a scale but a bit more than that. We can see different activities (Figures 21,22).
 
 

 
Figure 21 "The Cross site in the Washpool Valley (N168/29) ......" Linden Cowell, Leach and Leach 1979:265  
 

 
Figure 22 "The Washpool River Mouth (N168/20-25) during the 12th century. ......" Linden Cowell, Leach and Leach 1979:259 

In one we have two ko users working in unison. In other illustrations we zoom in on villages and places and then much detail emerges of activities and people (Figures 23,24).  

 
Figure 23 "The Moikau Village (N165/9) during the 12th century. ......" Linden Cowell ,Leach and Leach 1979:259  

 
Figure 24 A group of early Palliser Bay men engaged in fishing. ...... Linden Cowell, Leach and Leach 1979:260 

The image of people fishing shows different methods argued for in the text, shows ornaments found in the sites and hints at tattooing of which we cannot know the detail but which we can be sure occurred.

We can look directly at the people in illustrations too. Duff gave us an image of a moa-hunter (Figure 25).  

 
Figure 25 Russell Clark, Duff 1951:19

This is a man, fit and in the prime of life, in a stance while relaxed is ready for action, firm chin, set gaze, spear held as if it was a permanent part of his attire, ready to tackle the land and climate of New Zealand with a minimum of clothing, and no footwear. We can find this figure elsewhere in European art, particularly Greek classical art. It would not be out of place on a temple pediment. The topknot, necklace and maro adapt it to New Zealand, but let us not be fooled that it is a reconstruction. The lack of tattooing is interesting. Let’s contrast the cover illustration from the Wairarapa volume (Figure 26).  

 
Figure 26  (Cover): "Reconstruction of a scene at the Washpool about AD 1500. The man is based on individual M3(1) at site N168/27 who died about age 45. At this age most prehistoric people were in ‘old age’, had advanced osteo-arthritis and few if any teeth." Linden Cowell, Leach and Leach: 1979. 

This is based on a real person - an individual recovered from a cleft burial. Life here is not so heroic. Its not the greatest illustration when it comes to draftsmanship but it certainly is more real in another sense. Life here is hard, short, has episodes of ill health and the prospect of an early old age. As regards the draftsmanship don't be mislead by the strange seeming bodily proportions. They are based on the usual body proportions of Maori (H. Leach pers. com. 1998). All the same I can't help but have a sneaking suspicion that this is a conscious anti-hero to the Duff hunter, master of all surveyed.

Less value ridden is the couple from Trotter and McCulloch (Figure 27), the pack and sandals drawn from archaeological material.  

 
Figure 27 "An artists impression of the Canterbury back pack and flax sandals in use." Geoffrey Cox/BM, Trotter and McCulloch 1989: 71. 

Helen Leach has given us some fine illustrations reconstructing the Wiri field shelters (Figures 28, 29).  

 
Figure 28 

 
Figure 29 "From the sixteenth century, periods of conflict saw the gardeners of Wiri building temporary shelters in their gardens, while maintaining permanent houses and food stores on the fortified volcanic cones nearby." ...... Nancy Tichborne,  Leach 1984: 44. 

By the 1990’s we have reached a point where very skilled illustrators are being used. What is also changing is that these illustrations are being used in publications intended for a mass market and with high production values. No doubt this has lead to more funds being available for illustrators. However the trend of more art being in the pictures has gone hand in hand with less discussion and justification of the detail therein. Figures 30 and 31 for instance showing economic activities, are reconstructions full of analogy from 19th century ethnography on tools and gender roles. We might at this point note Nichol's criticism of the pictures from "From the Beginning", that "rather too much gets put in, and the resulting rather crowded scenes never really happened." (Nichol, 1989:249)  

 
Figure 30 "An artist’s impression of women and children foraging on a rocky shore. ...... " Chris Gaskin, Wilson 1987: 48.  

 
Figure 31 "An artist’s reconstruction of a garden at Makotukutuku, Palliser Bay, based on an archaeological excavation of the site. ...... " Chris Gaskin, Wilson 1987: 49.

We might note in passing the ko wielders working in unison in Figure 32. Artistic activities are pictured. Being an archaeological resource, rock shelter drawing is shown in a couple of cases.  

 
Figure 32 "An artist’s reconstruction of how Maori groups may have used rock shelters at the time the drawings were done at South Island sites." Chris Gaskin, Wilson 1987: 135.

Carved wood being an archaeological resource in New Zealand, it’s absence in depiction of artists at work is interesting. There are of course far more images in European art of cavemen painting than there are of other prehistoric crafts which have left no record. Are we a little lead here from Europe?. In any event the artists are men and the women in the pictures are about other subsistence activities. Figure 33 to me has more than an echo of an advertiser's idealised nuclear family.  

 
Figure 33 “ They spent their time hunting and eating, sleeping and drawing ....” Quentin MacFarlane, Trotter and McCulloch 1971: 81. 

The artist seems to have been in somewhat of a dilemma in needing to show the male as both the artist and the hunter/provider, and had to compromise as showing the moa carcass in proximity to the man, as if dropped on return from the hunt for the wife to deal with, while he went on with manly pursuits.

I can't leave hunting without a couple more moa hunting images. A photographic one is figure 34, famously including Peter Buck (on the left). The mounting base of the moa reconstruction is rather obvious.  

 
Figure 34 "Stalking the moa..." Condliffe 1971: Plate 12

Figure 35 is an odd mixture of moa fleeing while the hunters and their dog are in stationary poses despite being in the act of delivering coup de grace. Thigh tattooing is obvious but none on the faces. 

 
Figure 35 "Hunting moa." Dexter Fry, Rowntree 1983: 23. 

Figure 36 is again the fit young men (decently posed) with spears to hand and no tattoos to be seen. 

 
Figure 36 "A moa hunting scene as envisaged by artist Bernard Clark." Bernard Clark, McCulloch 1884: 14 

In figure 37 we have at least moved beyond spearing everything and can bludgeon a few things as well. The idea that harpoons were used for moa hunting might be worth some more discussion perhaps, but this illustration is a little on the bizarre side. I can't see much value of a harpoon head in the flesh of a moa when it has simultaneously had its head smashed. Again no tattooing. 

 
Figure 37 "Euryapteryx geranoides was the species of moa most extensively hunted. Possibly a harpoon with a bone point was used. .... " Geoffrey J. Cox, McCulloch 1992: 58.

Even more bizarre is an illustration in a British school magazine of a moa (with wings) being speared by Maori with metal tipped spears (P. Petchey, pers. com, 1998) and a stamp with a moa being felled by a boomerang. Cumberland gives us another image and this time builds in his thesis of burning the New Zealand vegetation being a part of moa-hunting Figure 38). 

 
Figure 38  "Fire drove the moa to riverbeds and shingle spits, or into swamps from which there was no retreat." Conrad Frieboe, Cumberland 1965:14

The participants are Duff's hunters, without tattoos.
Surely some hunting and gathering activities other than moa hunting are worth a picture or two? After all moas are not really quite as dramatic as woolly mammoths are they?

We have now a good few illustrations of gardening. Figure 39 is a further example showing land clearance, borrow pits and rock wall building. 

 
Figure 39 "An artists reconstruction of the preparation of ground for horticulture - the bush is being cleared, stones are piled up in a boundary wall and the area is being made ready for planting kumaras. ......" Geoffrey Cox/BM, Trotter and McCulloch 1989: 58-59. 

Obviously full of analogy on gender roles and implements and dress but none the worse for that. I particularly like the woman on the right stretching a sore back muscles. Tattooing hinted at here. Note on the left again the ubiquitous "males wielding ko in unison".

I have mentioned the power of pictures. The power of the Best illustration to influence later generations of artists makes the point admirably. To be fair I need to include one illustration, of Pouerua, (Figure 40) where two ko users are not in line.  

 
Figure 40 Dexter Fry, Rowntree 1984:23 

Illustrations of burial rituals are a matter on which some sensitivity is needed. I particularly like the one of Wairau Bar in Trotter and McCulloch (Figure 41).  

 
Figure 41 "Artists reconstruction of the burial of a moa hunter at Wairau Bar, based on he evidence of archaeological research. ......" Geoffrey Cox/BM, Trotter and McCulloch 1989:95 

It is full of detail on gender roles, tools and ornament. Details like the huia feathers are well worthy of more discussion. Would agricultural tools get used in a burial? The food that we have taken as burial offerings are in marked contrast to more modern Maori practice in relation to food at burials. The illustration brings that out startlingly. I particularly like the feeling of community and involvement of different generations in the life and work which comes out in some illustrations. Figures 42, 43 and 44 especially show this.  

 
Figure 42 "This reconstruction depicts a moa-hunter settlement at the mouth of the Waingongoro River in the thirteenth of fourteenth century. ......." Chris Gaskin, Prickett 1990: 18-19 

 
Figure 43 (Cover): "Reconstruction S131/4 Lee Island." Chris Gaskin, Anderson and McGovern-Wilson: 1991.  

 
Figure 44 "Te Rau-o-te-Huia. ......" Chris Gaskin, Prickett 1990: 23. 

 
Figure 45 "Te Kawau. ......" Chris Gaskin, Prickett 1990: 31.

These are very rich pictures. It is evident that much thought has gone into them. They are connected to the archaeology, most evidently in the canoe prow cover in the Waingongoro picture. It is a shame I think that the connections are not always argued out.

Let us not doubt that the most recent productions of archaeological illustration are powerful images. They are art.

As a summary:

Envoi

An output of this might be that some of us become reluctant to include reconstruction illustrations in our reports, papers and books. If that were to happen I would regard it as entirely unfortunate. Such illustration is in my view entirely legitimate, as well as needed. What is needed is some commentary on what in the picture is, in your view, fact, what is deduction (and how you got there), what is analogy (and where that derives from) and what is imagination. There is nothing wrong with the last. Getting to a picture will almost always require it. This is not a dry exercise. If you can get those categories clear it will in my view mean that you have a better understanding of what you have found than if you had not attempted the exercise. It is only by attempting to be explicit that science moves on. Picturing is powerful. We can use it as a modelling tool, not just an add-on. While it might make a fine cover illustration to a publication it is just as worthy inside the covers as a formal part of the report.

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References

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Anderson, A. and R. McGovern-Wilson, 1991: Beech Forest Hunters. New Zealand Archaeological Association Monograph 18.

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Best, E, 1924: The Maori as He Was. Government Printer, Wellington.

Brailsford, B. 1981: The Tattooed Land. A.H. and A.W. Reed, Wellington.

Chapman-Taylor, R. n.d.: Life in the Pa. Primary School Bulletin, Government Print, Wellington.

Condliffe, J.B. 1971: Te Rangi Hiroa, The Life of Sir Peter Buck, Whitcombe and Tombs, Christchurch.

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Drower, M 1970: Nubia: A Drowning Land. Longmans, London.

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Scott, S.D, 1969: “Reconnaissance and Some Detailed Site Plans of Major Monuments of Savai’i”, in R. C. Green and J.M Davidson, Archeology in Western Samoa, Vol. 1, Bulletin of the Auckland Institute and Museum, Number 6, p.69-95.

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Otago thesis Joanna Dickson

Update May 09, 2013