Just a very quick post to advertise the session that the wonderful Cat Cooper and I are organising at the Theoretical Archaeology Group USA conference in Chicago – 9 – 11 May 2013. The Call for Papers is below. We hope you’ll consider contributing to it or forwarding details to your interested colleagues.
We are in the unique situation of being able to stream the session through 4 sites: from Chicago itself, from the University of Victoria (Canada), from the University of Southampton (UK), and from the University of York (UK); so there are various intercontinental options for where to join the session. This means we welcome papers from anyone who is interested in participating remotely from one of these sites.
Deadline for submission of abstracts to Cat & myself is 1 March 2013. Don’t hesitate to contact us with queries.
Research tends to begin with a series of observations on a site, object, monument or related space as it stands in the present, and leads to the construction of narratives which aim to craft a dialogue between that experience of the real today and the experience of the real in the recent and distant past. Visualisation is a critical methodology in such narrative creation—extending far beyond mere presentation of results into the actual constitution of data and the working and reworking of archaeological ideas. It is a key player, then, in the process of mediating the real. The visual tools we use (both new and old), their interactions with our ways of seeing, and the relationships between these interactions and our experiences on-the-ground — with collaborators, spaces, and other sensory engagements — affect how we do archaeology and conceive of the past. In other words, visual practices are intimately connected to different ways of thinking, and such connections can be (and have long been) exploited to productive effect.This session seeks to explore such ideas via a session linked across two continents, broadcast online in the form of a series of ten minute papers followed by roundtable discussion. The discussion will be accessible to participants in Chicago, Victoria (Canada), and in the UK at both the University of York and University of Southampton. We welcome short papers introducing different methods of visualisation (including illustration, photography, survey, creative media or computer graphics) or different modes of collaborating visually. Our intention is to nurture a discussion around how vision and imaging impact upon archaeological knowledge creation, shaping our research and the future of our practice.
SARA PERRY 
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