Ambrus and Aston "Recreating the Past"

• Landscape and architectural reconstruction in images can be done quite accurately, thanks to scientific technology (pollen analysis, snail analysis, etc.); but artists have to depend on their imaginations when it comes to depicting everyday life routines (clothing, social norms, etc.)
• Archaeological illustrators collaborate with archaeologists, pathologists (skeletal analysis leads to an accurate reconstruction of physical features of a dead person), and sometimes re-enactors (history "enthusiasts" (15)) to get some tips!
• "Feedback mechanism" (15): Artists can pose a new light on how archaeologists should interpret their excavated sites; in their process of drawing, they must come up with questions that have traditionally been neglected by pedantic archaeologists and therefore stimulates the development of the field.

~Art History~

• The encounter with the New World's native Americans ==> 16th century artist John White marks the beginning of art's association with the past.

Article "John White and Britis antiquity: Savage origins in the context of Tudor historiography" by Sam Smiles:

http://www.britishmuseum.org/pdf/4-Smiles-JW%20and%20British%20Antiquity.pdf

• William Bell Scott's Victorian painting ==> Inaccurate, romanticised depiction of a certain "event" (10)
• A. Forestier's early attempt of "artistic reconstruction" (11) in the late 19th century
• Alan Sorrell - the most prominent artist who accurately reconstructed the past in collaboration with archaeologists. *And there are links to other recent artists.

Victor Ambrus:

http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/T/timeteam/biog_victor.html

Peter Connolly:

http://www.akg-images.com/akg_couk/_customer/london/collections/connolly.html

Peter Dunn:

http://westarch.ning.com/profile/PeterDunn

Judith Dobie:

This link is of Association of Archaeological Illustrators and Surveyors; it might be interesting to look inside.

http://www.aais.org.uk/html/portfolio/portfolio-view.asp?ID=2

http://www.wessexarch.co.uk/files/Learning/avebury_teachers_kit/investigate_avebury_henge_and_west_kennet_avenue.pdf

Frank Gardiner:

http://frankgardner.blogspot.com/

Ivan Lapper:

http://www.selectideas.co.uk/ivanlapper/index.htm

http://www.ospreypublishing.com/authors/ivan_lapper/

http://www.selectideas.co.uk/ivanlapper/about.htm

http://www.john-noott.com/artist/lapper%20arsma~ivan/lapper-arsma~ivan.php

Jane Brayne:

www.somersetartworks.org.uk/artists/jane-brayne

http://www.somerset.gov.uk/countryside/quantockhills/library/pdf/HistoricLandscape.pdf

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pondyacht/3871093821/

Something relevant:

Re-Creations: Visualizing Our Past

http://books.google.com/books?id=DAwPUqHbVh0C&pg=PA18&lpg=PA18&dq=chris+jones-jenkins+artist&source=bl&ots=zFSKLPHAl0&sig=fT2Gun2115urhDB3nKdacHStC9M&hl=ja&ei=Cdy_Stn_CY-m8AbTsZGdAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#v=onepage&q=chris%20jones-jenkins%20artist&f=false

New Vocab:

• "there do not appear to be any attempts to take an archaeological sites ... and show what it might have been like in its heyday drawing on artist's imagination" (10) ==> during its peak, the most glorious time.
• "The Illustrated London News commissioned the picture as they had for the other sites" (11) ==> ordered the picture to be published in the magazine.
• "However, the draughtsmanship and attention to detail is impressive and the reconstructions are real works of art" (11) ==> the skill of an artist who makes a technical drawing of a building, etc. In Japanese, "seizusha".
• pedantic, donnish ==> Japanese: "Gakushahada-no"; characterized by a narrow, often ostentatious concern for book learning and formal rules. http://www.answers.com/topic/pedantic

Bauer's Sacred Landscape of the Inca Chapt. 1

Like Tiwanaku's Akapana (see my notes on Kolata's book), Cuzco had its own monumental ritual center, Coricancha (Templo del Sol), but the city also embraced a complex of minor shrines and huacas which together formed a highly sophisticated subterranean recreation of a cosmic order. Bauer unveils the complexity of the system, which he terms "Cusco ceque system", and unfolds the question how "sacred items and locations [huacas] held critical roles in defining the topography of the Andes and the lives of the indigenous people" (p.4 =>relevant to my essay).

• Ceque system: distribution of and complex of shrines and ritual lines surrounding Cusco
• Huacas: sacred objects and places which surrounded the city of Cusco (4; and especially those prayers and offerings are made (5)) or "anything in nature that is out of the ordinary" (4). The cosmological power gets transmitted to the huacas to "imbue them with sacredness"; huacas, in short, is a microcosm of the universe.
• Pachamama: the collective body of huacas ("earth matrix" (4)) which, as a whole, produces the power that endows world an order.

==> matrix: "The womb; A situation or surrounding substance within which something else originates, develos or contained. (Ex.) Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every form of freedom"

• Tahantinsuyu: Inca Empire in their native language, literally meaning "four parts together" (3).

13 dynastic rulers

My Response:
The idea of huacas are so like Japanese Shinto definition of kami (deities), that it can signify anything extraordinary. The space and time is classified by definitions hare and ke, the former meaning the extraordinary and the latter the ordinary; villages belongs to ke while the outer forests are the realm of hare; festive seasons are the period of hare when people wear their hare-gi (clothes for special occasions) and invite, interact and merge with extraordinariness. During the festival, a semi-kami being may sometimes appear in the form of a begger from the land overseas (the land of the dead) and sneak in a house where men have all cleared out; the foreignness and a notion about a begger ivokes some kind of fear against the unknown, but the creature is still defined as a semi-kami being, not a devil. Also, as kami likes to hide inside the pillars, stones, trees, temples, etc., those objects are sometimes called kami as well.

My individual project essay:

***********************************************************

I am planning to write an essay that has to do with the elements of performance in Inca culture, either about rituals or public enactment of a civic life, that focuses specifically on urbanity of Cuzco and Tiwanaku. I'm thinking of focusing on those two cities, because Tiwanaku is the source and backbone of the Empire's social dignity while the capital city Cuzco is the social hub of indigenous living as well as being the political, geographical, and religious center of the Empire.

Preliminary thesis: In archaic Inca, cosmic order was made palpable by its reproduction through rituals and architecture while such strategic environment facilitated the public's corporate inactment of ideal civic body. (But I have done so little readings, and this hypothesis might turn out to be entirely wrong!!)

Today's reading's relevance to my topic:

I read a really small portion of a book about urban planning, "The image of the city" by Lynch, K and thought there's something that relates to what Bauer is saying in his book, so...

Well, Lynch sees landscape and human experience as one integral dynamic force which mutually influences both. City, as consisted of both "stationary physical parts" (Lynch, 1970, p.2) of buildings, paths, public spaces, etc. and human activities, by no means, is homogeneously elegant but always involves some repulsive elements. The idea links back to the definition of huacas given by Bauer that they can refer to anything extraordinary including those with ugly features; the nature of huacas and urbanity might have some underlying similarity; it might be possible for me to interpret that by redefining repulsiveness as sacredness, the people of the Inca tried to cast away any pollution to sanctify their city, mentally, if not physically (like excecuting sinners). This hypothesis about the role of huacas within the Cusco ceque system enforces the focal point of Lynch's book: how a city's "visual quality" (viz. physical quality as opposed to mental) interrelates to the "mental image of that city which is held by citizens" (p.2).

**********************************************************
New Vocab:

• [Ceque system] came under scruitiny during the Spanish campaigns against autochthonous religions [of idolatry] in the 1560 and 1570s ... = indigenous (* if it were autochtonous with missing "h" after "t", it would mean "of one's self"!)
• Collocation: yield new information
• meticulous Jesuit scholar (1): thorough and precise
• "Human destinies are in part determined by chthonian (=chthonic) powers, in the spirits of mountain, rocks, springs, rivers, and other topographic features, and generalized in earth matrix, Pachamama" (Sallnow qtd. in Bauer 4) ==> In Japanese, "sezoku", earthly. Also, chthonic can mean underground, which is synonymous to the adjectisuve subterranean. (see "Our recent excavation at Akapana revealed an unexpected, sophisticated, and monumental system of interlinked surface and subterranean drains" (Kolata 111); drain is "haisuikan" in Japanese)
• "Soon after the initial contact, the pan-Andean pattern of huaca worship and its pivotal role in indigenous worldviews drew the attention of Spaniards" (5) ==> Involving all of or the union of a specified group; whole, all

Something irrelevant that I have wondered today:

It would be wonderful if we could reconstruct how children played.