BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

What Is Archaeological Illustration?

BAS Dig Scholarship winner illustrates Cyprus’s past

The Hellenistic fortified settlement of Pyla-Vigla near Larnaca, Cyprus.
Photo courtesy James Gold.

On the western side of Larnaka Bay in Cyprus, overlooking the Mediterranean, lies an imposing plateau known as Vigla. This fortified settlement, occupied briefly during the years when Alexander the Great controlled the area in the late fourth century BCE, has yielded a rich array of finds, including metal projectiles, ceramics, carved figurines, and molds for casting and producing weaponry. Last summer, I traveled to Cyprus as a BAS Dig Scholarship winner, offering my artistic skills to help excavate the site, which is being studied under the auspices of the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project (PKAP).

What Is Archaeological Illustration?

I spent most of my time working on drawings in the Larnaka Archaeological Museum, where all of the PKAP finds are safely kept in labeled boxes. Holding each artifact in my gloved hand, I would rotate it under the lamp, examining subtle details, like scratches and carved patterns.

Using a Staedtler pen, I created my drawings with a stippling technique, slowly adding dots to build up texture and shadow. This method allowed me to capture details that might otherwise go unnoticed, ensuring that each artifact was represented as accurately as possible. Every drawing was a focused effort to faithfully document these ancient objects.

Although PKAP began in 2003, the project had never involved an artist, resulting in a backlog of special finds and metal objects to be illustrated. The museum staff provided invaluable support, retrieving trays of artifacts from previous excavation years based on a list provided by the PKAP directors. I would then identify which items needed to be drawn.

The tools of the archaeological illustrator’s trade.
Photo courtesy James Gold.

I began each drawing by carefully measuring the artifact’s dimensions using digital calipers. Then, on millimeter-grid paper, I used a pencil to sketch the outlines of the object at a 1:1 scale. I positioned a lamp to shine from the upper left—a standard in archaeological illustration—to highlight the texture and contours. Typically, I illustrated each object from several significant angles, including a frontal view, a side view, and a section.

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Other archaeological illustrators I’ve met have emphasized that these technical drawings should always be done from life, never from photos. During my time at the museum, I appreciated being able to hold the objects and rotate them, understanding how they were constructed and carved. This hands-on approach allowed me to better capture and emphasize their form in my drawings.

Why Not Just Take Photographs?

In archaeology, objects are routinely photographed for inventory purposes, yet illustrations are preferred in publications for their greater clarity and ability to reveal texture and details often lost in a photograph. Drawings are carefully measured, usually created at 1:1 scale with the artifact directly in front of the illustrator, ensuring more accurate proportions than a photograph, where the lens curvature can distort contours. For some objects I illustrated, the faintly carved imagery was only visible under extreme raking light, making it almost invisible in a regular photograph.

Illustrators can choose to emphasize particular features of an artifact that are important for analysis, such as decorative patterns, manufacturing techniques, or damage that indicates usage. Drawings also provide a standardized way of depicting artifacts, which can be easily compared across different sites and publications. This helps in identifying similarities, differences, and broader cultural patterns. Below are just a few examples of what I mean.

Excavation photograph of bread stamp. Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project, courtesy James Gold.

Illustration of bread stamp. Courtesy James Gold.

One of my favorite objects to illustrate was a small limestone “bread stamp” with a decorative floral motif carved into its surface, used to make designs on fresh loaves of bread, perhaps for special ritual purposes. Above, at left is the excavation photo showing the original find-spot of the “bread stamp,” before cleaning, while at right is my illustration of the piece. The limestone surface doesn’t show any staining or smoky marks from being in an oven, and archaeologists aren’t quite sure how these stamps were utilized in antiquity.

“Eastern Figurine” found at Pyla-Vigla

My illustration of the “Eastern Figurine.” Courtesy James Gold.

Another object I particularly enjoyed drawing was a fragmentary torso of a man, dubbed the “Eastern Figurine” by PKAP due to the figure’s long, textured beard, reminiscent of styles popular in the ancient Near East. The figure was carved from the warm-toned, finely grained limestone commonly used for carving in Cyprus.

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Finally, one of the more exciting challenges of the project involved creating reconstruction drawings of the site’s Hellenistic fortifications. After visiting the dig site, where the directors highlighted certain topographical features, I used pen, brush, and India ink to create renderings of the site as it might have looked around 300 BCE, with mudbrick walls atop fieldstone foundations.

Illustration of Pyla-Vigla’s fortifications in 300 BCE. Courtesy James Gold.

Holding objects that were crafted more than 2,000 years ago has deeply influenced the way I think about making art. These objects, created by anonymous artisans, carry an immediacy and intimacy that I aspire to in my own work. Their surfaces—worn, scratched, or still bearing faint tool marks—tell stories about the hands that shaped them, the lives they passed through, and the environments they endured. I’ve begun to see my paintings as fragments of an imagined archaeology, echoing these qualities of transformation and survival over time.

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As I worked on drawings in the Larnaka Museum, tracing the contours of a limestone figurine or mapping the intricate details of a bread stamp, I felt a quiet connection to the ancient maker. The care and precision I put into each drawing reflected my personal way of honoring their craftsmanship.

Many thanks to PKAP, the Biblical Archaeology Society, Cathy Alexander, and Professor Andrea Berlin for their essential support, which allowed me to join the Summer 2024 dig season at Pyla-Vigla. This Bible History Daily article is adapted from a longer post that appeared on my blog site, www.jamesgold.com.

James Gold is a New York-based artist whose paintings blend traditional techniques with digital-inspired hyperreality to explore fragments of hypothetical archaeology. A recipient of a Fulbright Painting Fellowship to Italy, he participated in archaeological fieldwork in Cyprus as a 2024 BAS Dig Scholarship winner. He was also recently an artist-in-residence at MASS MoCA, and will present a solo exhibition at Morgan Lehman Gallery in Fall 2025.

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