This article uses Egyptian burials of the Roman period as an entry point for considering aesthetics in relation to archaeology, ancient art, and human remains. Although some archaeologists and Egyptologists reject or ignore the concept of aesthetics, this article argues that it complements questions of ontology, materiality, and social practice that concern much contemporary archaeological thought. Moreover, engaging with aesthetics in the study of the ancient world requires archaeologists to reflect critically on the relationship between disciplinary histories and knowledge production, (...) and to recognize the influence that earlier aesthetic models, such as racial science, continue to exert in current aesthetic encounters with ancient Egypt and its dead. (shrink)

Photographing archaeological labor was routine on Egyptian and other Middle Eastern sites during the colonial period and interwar years. Yet why and how such photographs were taken is rarely discussed in literature concerned with the history of archaeology, which tends to take photography as given if it considers it at all. This paper uses photographs from the first two seasons of work at the tomb of Tutankhamun to show that photography contributed to discursive strategies that positioned archaeology as a scientific (...) practice – both in the public presentation of well-known sites and in the self-presentation of archaeologists to themselves and each other. Since the subjects of such photographs are often indigenous laborers working together or with foreign excavators, I argue that the representation of fieldwork through photography allows us to theorize colonial archaeology as a collective activity, albeit one inherently based on asymmetrical power relationships. Through photographs, we can access the affective and embodied experiences that collective effort in a colonial context involved, bringing into question standard narratives of the history and epistemology of archaeology. (shrink)