Excerpts from Ruth Van Dyke's "Seeing the Past: Visual Media in Archaeology" American Anthropologist 108 (2): 370–384.

Ashish Avikunthak’s Performing Death (2002) was shown in Douglass Bailey and Michael Shanks’s “Creative Heresies” session at the meetings of the European Association of Archaeologists on September 28, 2002. Droning music, fragmentary images, and whirling, blurred, handheld camera work induce a trancelike feeling of vertigo meant to evoke the disorientations of 18th-century British imperial power in Calcutta.

Another Avikunthak film, Rummaging for Pasts: Excavating Sicily, Digging Bombay (2001), juxtaposes interviews with excavators at Monte Polizzo, Sicily, against found footage of 1970s middle-class Indian family events in Bombay. At Monte Polizzo, scholars expound on their research issues and students discuss their social concerns. Although the excavators explain that they are attempting to reconstruct past ethnic interactions and relationships, the social and political interests of both the professionals and the students are clearly situated in the present. Images of Indian rituals and dancing play out against this narrative. The format resembles a documentary, but the unexpected combinations of images, sounds, and information are disorienting and lay bare the processes by which we assemble meaning. For a Euro-American viewer unfamiliar with Indian culture, the juxtapositions of archaeological and Indian footage evoke the unbridgeable chasm that separates the material remains of the present from a complicated, lively, but ultimately unknowable past. In liner notes, Avikunthak explains the Indian footage was unearthed at a Bombay flea market, thus representing an interest in social memory parallel to the archaeologists’ activities at Monte Polizzo and creating connections, rather than disjunctures, between two disparate times and places. The Indian footage signifies the filmmaker’s personal engagement with the transnational nature of the Monte Polizzo project. [page 374]