I have a seven-year-old son who, like many children his age today, is obsessed with comics and graphic novels. This art form is seeing a bit of a resurgence at the moment, thanks in part to the growing popularity of The Phoenix comic magazine, which features best-selling artists Neill Cameron of Donut Squad fame and Jamie Smart, who draws the successful Bunny vs Monkey series. Looking through this lens, I can see how this book by Agostino Sotgia is well-timed. It has the potential to be a great way to get younger audiences into what might otherwise be seen as a very boring learn-to-draw manual. In fact, while I was reading it, my son was interested in what I was looking at for the first time – perhaps I’ll make an archaeologist of him yet!
By appealing to the younger generation, Sotgia is hoping to keep archaeological drawing alive. Both the preface and the book itself acknowledge how this process can be seen perhaps as a dying artform in the wake of new technologies such as photogrammetry, 3D scanning, digital modelling, and particularly, more recently, with the advent of artificial intelligence. But Sotgia convincingly makes the case that archaeological drawing is not just about perfectly reproducing artefacts – or, in this case, specifically pottery sherds – but about capturing the essence of the object, something that a mere digital replica cannot convey, and offering the opportunity for the artist/archaeologist to interpret its significance. More significantly, as Sotgia argues, it is important to keep this part of the profession ‘because it’s one of the most fun activities in archaeology and because it’s time to bring a little bit of Luddism back into fashion’. This is a point that I think it becoming increasingly lost in modern times – we do not have to replace a way of doing something simply because a computer can do it faster.
The manual’s instructions are very simple and easy to follow, designed so that anyone can use them and learn how to draw. It also provides a brief but engaging introduction to different typologies of pottery. Overall, this book is a fun and creative way to get people into archaeological drawing, and I hope the author continues in this vein, creating future books on how to draw other types of artefact.
