This website has minimal text, concentrating instead on displaying a selection of drawings and paintings produced on location at ancient sites and in major museum collections around the world. The display is cumulative and images will increase in number and variety over time. All the artwork is by Roger Balm, and each picture reflects an attraction to a particular place or artefact that is visually striking or notable in some way. The header image, for example, is a watercolour sketch of ancient fortifications in Cadiz, Spain. To paint and draw on location is a great privilege and connects back to the artist-travellers to foreign lands in the past who contributed much to our understanding of antiquity and the arts of different cultures. Today, it is an ideal form of slow travel particularly applicable to the study of ancient places and objects or the creation of a visual journal.

A substantial number of images on this site were produced in Mediterranean locales, a region extraordinarily rich in archaeological remains. In addition to Mediterranean sites, pictures produced in Latin America, the Middle East, North Africa and Scotland will be represented as the content of the website grows. The illustrations within the various geographic groups initially appear as overlapping thumbnails but clicking on any particular image will show it full-screen.

For discussion of how pictorial imagery has been applied in archaeology, see Archaeology’s Visual Culture (Balm 2016) and Pictorial Archaeology (Balm 2024). Both books are published by Routledge.