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TIL archaeologists used to sketch everything by hand before digital photos
Honestly, I was reading about the 1922 Tutankhamun excavation and they had artists drawing every single artifact. Compared to today where I can snap 200 photos of a pottery shard in five minutes. Those old illustrations were incredibly detailed though, took weeks per piece. Has anyone here tried doing field sketches the old way just to see how it feels?
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ryan_carr591mo ago
You changed my mind @hall.ruby, never saw it that way before.
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hall.ruby1mo ago
The old school illustrators had to really understand what they were looking at, not just copy it. When you sketch something by hand, you notice every single imperfection and detail way more than when you're just clicking a shutter button. Someone like Howard Carter's team had to literally sit there and interpret the object's texture and lighting themselves, which probably made them better archaeologists in the long run. I actually tried doing a field sketch of a flint arrowhead once and it took me like 45 minutes, but by the end I could have picked that exact arrowhead out of a pile of a hundred. Digital photos are convenient but you lose that deep, almost obsessive relationship with the object.
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