ABSTRACT
Mortimer Wheeler's Archaeology in South Asia and its Visual Presentation
Sudeshna Guha
This paper presents an analysis of Sir Mortimer Wheeler's archaeological work in British India. The objective is to demonstrate that the long impact of Wheeler's short spell with the archaeology of the sub-continent was largely due to the palpable visibility he could successfully establish for his own, supposedly flawless, fieldwork. Wheeler often drew sharp contrasts between his rational and scientific practice, and that which was followed by his predecessors. Yet he did not establish any different methods for analyzing his excavated remains. Drawing on Wheeler's rich photographic archive, now in the collection of the Archaeological Survey of India in New Delhi, the focus here is on the ways in which Wheeler created and presented an impression that his analytical tools were different. The basic premise of this text is that photographs absorbed within 'archaeological' archives reveal clearly, and at times more extensively than written texts, the trajectories involved in the professionalisation of archaeology during the early twentieth century, and that the successful launching of an empirical science was largely achieved through manipulations in the visible profile of field work.