Scale

It is often quite difficult to judge how big objects are from their representations in archeological literature. Even though they have accurate scales, these measurements are difficult to fit into our embodied understanding of the world. Even though human bodies vary in size and shape, including them in representations helps us better intuitively understand the size of things.

Moreover, we can begin to understand the way they were experienced when we depict them with a human body as a reference. I encourage you to hold your hands in the same position that the model below is holding hers. Suddenly, you tap into your own muscle memory of how it feels to hold objects of that size. Though it is impossible to produce a 2D image that allows you to touch an object, we can nevertheless produce images that evoke this experience, and doing so allows us to begin to think differently about archeological material.