Filming through the Mists of Time.

Representations of anthropological and archaeological knowledge in non-academic arenas have attracted much critical attention in recent years. Anthropological film, in particular, with its stereo-typed tradition of presenting images of black people for white audiences, has been problematised. Yet the most accessible interface between the academic archaeologist and the public psyche, archaeo-historical documentary film, remains untheorised. This paper explores the televisual articulations of one of the more persistent popular images of the presented past, the Celtic warrior/ druid/artist. Like any delineated and labeled ethnic or cultural grouping, however, Celts are a contingent, multilayered cultural construct. When taken as a seamless whole and used as an archaeological model, this construct simply reproduces the British Iron Age as an always-already-ahistoric romantic image. Why, then, are the makers of English-language documentaries that deal with all things ‘Celtic’ so resistant to the newer critical approaches within both archaeology and documentary film making? Who and what is at stake? What does this say about the role and scope of archaeological practice and knowledge in a wider context? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]