The New World's Old World: Photographic Views of Ancient America

This book showcases the remarkable work of photographers who have captured the archaeological landscapes of ancient American cultures from the dawn of photography to the current day. Through essays and descriptive entries on specific sites, the volume demonstrates how photography serves science by conserving structures and masterpieces of the Americas' past, in addition to being an independent artistic medium. Most of the places shown here have been inhabited continuously since contact or rebuilt over ancient sites. Where some nineteenth-century photographers uncovered jumbles of stone smothered in vegetation, their successors contemplated sites altered by excavation, restoration, earthquakes and floods, vandalism, and the encroachment of settlements that obscure or obliterate ancient structures.