The Pyramids on the Giza Plateau represent perhaps the most famous archaeological site in the world, capturing on tomb walls frozen moments from almost every aspect of life in ancient Egypt. This book, by one of the foremost experts on the history of Giza, explores new approaches to “cataloging” the site, highlighting efforts at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and Harvard University.

The site experienced its first “golden age” as the burial place of three pharaohs of the Egyptian Old Kingdom (Dynasty 4, ca. 2640–2510 BCE). A second golden age came almost five millennia later, when the first modern excavators applied their newly devised archaeological craft to the Giza Plateau. Now, with the advent of many new technologies in the twenty-first century, the Giza Necropolis is available in two, three, and even four dimensions. Children and specialized scholars alike may study the material culture of this ancient civilization from afar, often with greater access than could be achieved in person. However, these new approaches do raise questions: Does 3-D modeling and animation truly improve scholarly comprehension and interpretation? Can interacting with animations still be called scholarship? Where is the border between academic knowledge and mere entertainment?

Through specific case studies and an in-depth history of this important project, Peter Der Manuelian provides an excellent model for other digital visualization initiatives. He also offers more general philosophical reflection on the nature of visualization in archaeology and speculates about emerging technologies and how they may be useful in the future.

Analyzing how artists reimagine migrant disappearance and visibility at the US–Mexico border.

In the mid-1990s, the US government implemented Prevention through Deterrence, a major buildup of troops, walls, and surveillance around El Paso and San Diego. Cut off from these crucial urban crossings, migrants flowed into the dangerous surrounding deserts, where some ten thousand have since died. This is all according to plan: Pentagon documents describe the strategy of funneling migrants toward “mortal danger.”

In this bracing critique, China Medel explores the aesthetics enabling and resisting the crisis of migrant death. The nation-state’s performance of sovereignty along the border, predicated on mass casualties, is tolerated and even celebrated, thanks to the images in our heads of racialized and therefore criminal bodies, made invisible as they disintegrate in the baking sand. Spectral Aesthetics shows how state officials and mainstream media, relying on postracial ideologies and white-supremacist agendas, collectively foster this picture of a brown body so abject that it is disposable. In close readings of artworks contesting this murderous visual regime, Medel discovers an alternative kind of sight, one emphasizing the ghostly traces of the dead. These are images not of the individual “alien” but of life itself, indisposable.

The prehistoric native peoples of the Mississippi River Valley and other areas of the Eastern Woodlands of the United States shared a complex set of symbols and motifs that constituted one of the greatest artistic traditions of the pre-Columbian Americas. Traditionally known as the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, these artifacts of copper, shell, stone, clay, and wood were the subject of the groundbreaking 2007 book Ancient Objects and Sacred Realms: Interpretations of Mississippian Iconography, which presented a major reconstruction of the rituals, cosmology, ideology, and political structures of the Mississippian peoples.

Visualizing the Sacred advances the study of Mississippian iconography by delving into the regional variations within what is now known as the Mississippian Iconographic Interaction Sphere (MIIS). Bringing archaeological, ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and iconographic perspectives to the analysis of Mississippian art, contributors from several disciplines discuss variations in symbols and motifs among major sites and regions across a wide span of time and also consider what visual symbols reveal about elite status in diverse political environments. These findings represent the first formal identification of style regions within the Mississippian Iconographic Interaction Sphere and call for a new understanding of the MIIS as a network of localized, yet interrelated religious systems that experienced both continuity and change over time.

This volume presents in-depth and contextualized analyses of a wealth of visual materials. These documents provide viewers with a mesmerizing and informative glimpse into how the early modern world was interpreted by image-makers and presented to viewers during a period that spans from manuscript culture to the age of caricature. The premise of this collection responds to a fundamental question: how are early modern texts, objects, and systems of knowledge imaged and consumed through bimodal, hybrid, or intermedial products that rely on both words and pictures to convey meaning? The twelve contributors to this collection go beyond traditional lines of inquiry into word-and-image interaction to deconstruct visual dynamics and politics—to show how images were shaped, manipulated, displayed, and distributed to represent the material world, to propagate official and commercial messages, to support religious practice and ideology, or to embody relations of power. These chapters are anchored in various theoretical and disciplinary points of departure, such as the history of collections and collecting, literary theory and criticism, the histories of science, art history and visual culture, word-and-image studies, as well as print culture and book illustration. Authors draw upon a wide range of visual material hitherto insufficiently explored and placed in context, in some cases hidden in museums and archives, or previously assessed only from a disciplinary standpoint that favored either the image or the text but not both in relation to each other. They include manuscript illuminations representing compilers and collections, frontispieces and other accompanying plates published in catalogues and museographies, astronomical diagrams, mixed pictographic-alphabetic accounting documents, Spanish baroque paintings, illustrative frontispieces or series inspired by or designed for single novels or anthologies, anatomical drawings featured in encyclopedic publications, visual patterns of volcanic formations, engravings representing the New World that accompany non-fictional travelogues, commonplace books that interlace text and images, and graphic satire. Geographically, the collection covers imperial centers (Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Spain), as well as their colonial periphery (New France; Mexico; Central America; South America, in particular Brazil; parts of Africa; and the island of Ceylon). Emblematic and thought-provoking, these images are only fragments of the multifaceted and comprehensive visual mosaic created during the early modern period, but their consideration has far reaching implications.