The Work of a Dilettante or a Grand Amateur?: The Visual Productions of a 19th-Century Gentleman Archaeologist

• Nathalie Richard ^[1] ; Hadrien Viraben
  1. [1] Le Mans Université, Le Mans, France
• Localización: Nuncius: annali di storia della scienza, ISSN 0394-7394, Vol. 39, Nº. 1, 2024, págs. 51-75
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
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• Resumen

  • From 1873 onwards, Scottish antiquarian James Miln (1819–1881) undertook an uninterrupted series of excavations in Carnac, for which he used his skills as a draughtsman and a photographer. The archives and printed sources conserving the traces of his activities thus contain an extensive array of images: sketches drawn in his excavation notebooks; watercolour landscapes; engraved illustrations for his books; models sculpted from his surveys of archaeological sites. Through this visual production, Miln embodied successive and overlaying types of amateurism, from a gentleman dilettante to a grand amateur, closely resembling a specialist while being able to establish working conditions comparable to those of the (few) contemporary professionals.