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Art history and archaeology have a long history as companion disciplines extending from Vasari’s accounts of Michelangelo’s excavations through the creation of the modern iterations of each discipline. In the late 1960s Michel Foucault reinvented the activities of the archaeologist in his early histories and then theorized a practice that he named archaeology. Art historians, eager to reinvent their discipline as one open to theoretical and political transformations of the 1960s and 1970s, invoked the post-structuralist deconstruction laid out by Foucault, and expanded his brand of archaeology into the present. Today, the challenge posed is that archaeology as Foucault described it had little, if anything, to do with archaeology as practiced, thus leading to a chasm between what art historians were coming to think archaeology was, and archaeologists, including peers in art history departments, were actually practicing.

This session seeks to understand the historical relationship between archaeology and art history as well as the valences of the disciplines today with particular concern for how the two fields might collaborate. What do art historians mean when they use the term archaeology? How is archaeology deployed in art history as a concept, as a method, as a practice? To what extent is Foucault’s use of the term archaeology adopted in the field and what is meant by it? What do archaeologists gain from the art historical approach?