Light and Shadow in Archaeological Images
The essay ‘Modalities of Meaning: Light and Shadow in Archaeological Images’ by Nessa Leibhammer, research fellow of the APC, has been published in The Oxford Handbook of Light in Archaeology, edited by Costas Papadopoulos and Holley Moyes. The book released on 9 December 2021 (see https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-light-in-archaeology-9780198788218?lang=3n&cc=ae) is the first of its kind to address the impact and influence of light in different facets of archaeology, from myth and ritual to houses and museum exhibitions. Leibhammer’s essay makes a series of exciting moves on how light not only allows us to see, articulate the three-dimensionality of objects, and describe space, but also how it communicates powerful emotive, conceptual and metaphysical information in images. Amongst other things this exposes an unrecognised European bias in the conventions of representation that affects the nature of knowledge itself.