From the Field to the Collection:
Photography, the South Etruria Survey, and the British School at Rome, 1955-1974

Abstract

Between 1954 and 1974, researchers at the British School at Rome (BSR) surveyed some 1,000 square kilometres of land immediately north of Rome and recorded more than 2,000 archaeological sites. This pioneering project – the South Etruria Survey – played a central role in the post-war development of both landscape archaeology and the BSR as a research institution.
While research has so far focused primarily on the Survey’s archaeological finds, this thesis examines its photographic record, a collection of over 7,000 images housed at the BSR. Despite forming a central component of the original project and a cornerstone of the BSR’s photographic collections today, these images have received little scholarly attention. This thesis intends to close the gap. Putting photography to the fore, it will ask why the Survey’s photographs were taken, why they were taken in their specific way and how their meaning has changed through the process of archiving.
To address these questions, this thesis examines the photographic practices employed during the survey and the history of the subsequent photographic collection. Different types of photographs will be shown to result from different practices and contexts. Aerial photographs, acquired by the BSR after the Second World War, not only provided the basis for the survey, but also aligned it with contemporaneous archaeological research in Britain and established a point of contrast with earlier topographical studies in Italy.
Photographs taken from the ground, depicting landscape features, archaeological sites, and excavations, reflect the ambition to conform with scientific standards set out in archaeological manuals; yet they also reveal improvisation and innovation due to the lack of best practice for survey photography, varying expertise amongst surveyors and a preference for efficient documentation over careful composition.
In addition to documentation of surveyed fields and landscapes, the collection includes photographs of religious processions, populated streets and everyday village life that appear to diverge from archaeological objectives. These photographs are argued to link the South Etruria Survey to a longstanding ‘ethnographic’ interest of British travellers and topographers in Italy. Furthermore, both the ‘archaeological’ and ‘ethnographic’ photographs are united by the objective of documenting a world on the cusp of disappearing due to rapid societal and economic changes of the post-war years. More generally, they show how the concept of landscape underlying the survey is embedded in ‘ideas of Italy’ in the British imagination.
As well as field practices, the thesis tracks how the original photographs were gathered into an institutional archive, from its original organisation using prints, labels and card mounts to its recent (partial) digitisation. These processes have influenced the ways in which the photographs are experienced, used, and interpreted, at times preserving and at times obscuring the diversity and context of the images.
The outcomes demonstrate that the complex visual language of the photographs results from differing and sometimes conflicting influences and priorities: scientific ideals, practical necessities, romantic traditions and institutional afterlives. Building on other scholarship, this thesis extends studies on archaeological photography to the post-war period, highlights the importance of survey photographs for understanding ideas of landscape, and reflects about gains and problems of archival digitisation.