Archaeologia Islandica - 01.01.2004, Page 131

The Visual Archive in Icelandic Archaeology
hins íslenzka fornleifafélags (hereafter
abbreviated to Arbók) from its inception
in 1881 to the present. Although this does
not cover the whole archaeological cor-
pus, it does cover the larger portion; ref-
erence will moreover be made to other
publications, particularly of major sites
or projects. Some types of paper were
excluded from the survey, such as spe-
cialist palaeoenvironmental studies or
material culture not explicitly connected
to excavation. In the survey, basic infor-
mation was collected for each image that
included four main categories: the media
(e.g. photograph or drawing), subject
(e.g. structure, feature, object), perspec-
tive (e.g. plan or section) and iconic con-
ventions (e.g. scales, contours, limit of
excavation). Only 'contemporary'
imagery was surveyed - i.e. earlier maps
or pictures re-used in a later source were
excluded from consideration. I will begin
by discussing a number of trends identi-
fied in the century and more of archaeo-
logical imagery, before raising questions
of what these trends might mean.
One of the first and most obvious
changes is the integration of images and
text; the first volumes of the Árbók kept
all illustrations at the back, on separate
plates, and it is only with some of - but
not all - Daniel Bruun's papers published
at the tum of the century that the first
integrated images occur. This was also a
key feature of Erlingsson’s work, Ruins
of the Saga Time, published in 1899. By
the early 20th century, this becomes the
norm. Secondly, the average number of
illustrations in any single paper increases
over time (Figure 7). There is a clear and
noticeable dip in this trend in the first
quarter of the century, which generally
corresponds to a dearth of published
archaeological literature. This is the
Fig. 8. Chart showing ratio of photographs to drawings in Arbok by decade.
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