Making Time: The Archaeology of Time Revisited 2020048588, 2020048589, 9780367544775, 9780367544379, 9781003089445

Citation preview

MAKING TIME

Making Time grapples with a range of issues that have crystallized in the wake of 15 years of discussion on time in archaeology, since the author’s seminal volume The Archaeology of Time, synthesizing them for a new generation of scholars. The general understanding of time held by both archaeologists and nonarchaeologists is often very simple: a linear notion where time flows along a single path from the past into the future. This book sets out to complicate this image, to draw out the key problems and issues with time that impact archaeological interpretation. Using concrete examples drawn from different periods and places, the book challenges the reader to think again. Ultimately, the book will suggest that if we want to understand what archaeological time is, then we need to accept that things do not exist in time, they make time. The crucial question then becomes: what kinds of time do archaeological materialities produce? Written for upper level undergraduates and researchers in archaeology, the book is also accessible to non-academics with an interest in the topic. The book is relevant for cognate disciplines, especially history, heritage studies and philosophy. Gavin Lucas is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Iceland. His main interests lie in archaeological method and theory as well as the archaeology of the modern world, with a special focus on the North Atlantic.

MAKING TIME The Archaeology of Time Revisited

Gavin Lucas

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Gavin Lucas The right of Gavin Lucas to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lucas, Gavin, 1965- author. Title: Making time : the archaeology of time revisited / Gavin Lucas. Description: First edition. | New York : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Contents: Prologue: Time after time—Time matters—The archaeological clock—Time scales—The shape of time—The same time—Another time—The archaeological time machine—Epilogue: making history. Identifiers: LCCN 2020048588 (print) | LCCN 2020048589 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367544775 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367544379 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003089445 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Archaeology—Methodology. | Archaeology—Philosophy. | Time. | Time—Philosophy. Classification: LCC CC75.7 .L836 2021 (print) | LCC CC75.7 (ebook) | DDC 930.1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048588 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048589 ISBN: 978-0-367-54477-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-54437-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-08944-5 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books

CONTENTS

List of figures Acknowledgements Prologue: Time after time

vi vii 1

1

Time matters

13

2

The archaeological clock

28

3

Time scales

45

4

The shape of time

64

5

The same time

84

6

Another time

103

7

The archaeological time machine

120

Epilogue: Making history

139

Index

144

FIGURES

2.1 2.2 3.1 4.1 4.2

Extract from the Annals of St Gall The singularization of time: extendability and scalability Optical and digital resolution of time The temporal layers of clock design The disparity between chronological and typological time; a gradient vector analysis of 19th- and early 20th-century miners’ lamps 4.3 Longevity of different structures at the post-medieval site of Skálholt, Iceland 5.1 The main temporal relationships under Allen’s temporal logic; six of them can be inverted, resulting in a total of 13 possible relations 5.2 The multi-temporal dimensions of the Hochdorf grave

35 40 50 69

70 72

86 88

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The book had its origins in a series of four lectures I gave as part of the University of Glasgow’s Dalrymple Lectures series for 2019. I would like to thank the organizers of that series for the invitation, especially Stephen Driscoll at the department of Archaeology, University of Glasgow and Dorothy Gormlie, President of the Glasgow Archaeological Society. For this book, the lectures have been radically transformed and extended and my deepest gratitude goes to Ágústa Edwald and Laurent Olivier who kindly read through a first draft of the whole book, providing much needed feedback. They made me clarify my arguments, improve the flow of the work and without a doubt, made this book a much better one; it goes without saying however, I bear full responsibility for all its remaining shortcomings. I would also like to thank Amare Adebe, Professor of Physics at NWU (North-West University), South Africa for reading over Chapter 1 and making sure my limited understanding of time in physics was not horribly wrong. Finally I would like to thank my copy editor Pamela Bertram for her excellent work on the manuscript and Matt Gibbons at Routledge for supporting the publication of this work and to several anonymous reviewers who gave critical comments on the original proposal. Most of the figures in this book I drafted, but I would like to thank Laurent Olivier for kindly letting me reproduce two of his, one relating to a vector analysis of miners’ lamps from Chapter 4 and the other to the Hochdorf grave in Chapter 5.

PROLOGUE Time after time

Once upon a time … Fifteen years ago I published a book called the Archaeology of Time. 1 It was, in part, a spin-off from my doctoral studies ten years earlier which grappled with the concept of time in archaeology but through a detailed case study on the later prehistory of an area of northern England.2 Truth be told, I did not plan to do my doctoral research on the topic of time but rather on ethnographic analogy; it was a topic that had really grabbed my attention as an undergraduate but in my first meeting with my doctoral supervisor, a gentle suggestion was made that maybe analogy was no longer a hot topic (this was 1991 after all), whereas the concept of time was ripe for exploration. No doubt this was sage advice and as a result, time seems to have stuck to me – or I have stuck with it. It helped that the environment in which I was working during my doctoral studies was in many ways ideal; at Cambridge in the early 1990s, Sander van der Leeuw was working on time and complexity theory along with his PhD student James McGlade, while another of his doctoral students, Laurent Olivier developed his own unique approach to time. My own supervisor, Ian Hodder, was exploring time in a very different way, in relation to narrative, while my advisor was Geoff Bailey who pioneered the theory of time perspectivism. Michael Shanks was also around completing his PhD in my first years there and later, Tim Murray was regularly coming through Cambridge. How could I fail in such excellent company? And yet, ironically, with the exception of my supervisor, my paths only crossed occasionally with these other archaeologists and I cannot say I really took full advantage of their presence or my situation. In large part – and I only blame myself for this – this was due to the fact that I saw my own interest in time being much closer to Ian Hodder’s post-processualism than Geoff Bailey’s time perspectivism or Sander van der Leeuw’s complexity theory. At a time when theoretical pigeon-holing was almost obligatory and being young and full of ambition to be radical, it seemed clear to me at

2 Prologue

the time where I would find the best inspiration. It will come as no surprise if I tell you I was reading Heidegger, Husserl, Bergson and Ricoeur among others; my interest was in how time was being explored within phenomenology and hermeneutics, not thermodynamics or palaeontology. In a nutshell, time for me was a deeply human experience and it was from this perspective I approached it; I saw time as discussed in non-linear dynamics or time perspectivism as a pale shadow of this experiential time. Like Bergson and Heidegger, or Shanks and Tilley, I saw this physical time as a derivation, a reduction or abstraction from ‘real’ time. Fittingly, time has a way of showing you how narrow-minded you can be in your youth. I have since gone on to deeply appreciate the work of these archaeologists I once side-lined. In particular, Tim Murray became a great inspiration postPhD, especially making me aware of the value of time perspectivism and the nature of time in the archaeological record. In many ways, he brought me down to earth and made me see that archaeological problems of time present a very different set of issues to those I had been immersed in during my doctoral studies. In hindsight, I might say this was the bridge for me moving from issues of how time is represented in experience to how time is materialized in things. But I was not quite there yet. The final push came from Laurent Olivier, who was awarded his PhD from Cambridge in the same year as me; his work on the materiality of time and its relation to memory provided a way to re-connect my earlier interest in continental philosophies of time with formation theories of the archaeological record. Suddenly I had a language where I could talk about Bergson and Bailey in the same context. Laurent and I only fully re-connected nearly 20 years after we finished our PhDs and we have since become much closer colleagues than we were during our doctoral studies in the 1990s. And yet such an odd course of events illustrates one of the most significant aspects of time in relation to human affairs: it is all about timing. More on this in the next chapter. My 2005 book was written in the early stages of this transition described above. It was commissioned by Julian Thomas for his Routledge series Themes in Archaeology, as he was also the external examiner on my PhD thesis and whose own work on time in archaeology was to become influential.3 The Archaeology of Time drew heavily on the research and perspectives on my doctoral studies, but it was Tim Murray’s suggestion to add a chapter on the temporality of the archaeological record that signalled the new directions my interests were to take, not least culminating in a book on the archaeological record seven years later.4 Meanwhile in the wake of the 2005 book on time, invitations to talk on the topic or write contributions about it in edited volumes inevitably followed and consequently, as happens with many scholars, a label sticks. That’s fine, and in fact when you do stay with a topic over a career, you are faced with a stark choice: either you end up repeating yourself, re-hashing the same ideas, or you challenge yourself to say something new. I strive toward the latter, but perhaps not always with success. And so we come to this book. Routledge, my publisher, a few years ago suggested I produce a revised version of my book from 2005. Immediately I knew this wouldn’t appeal to me; in fact,

Prologue 3

I said I would rather write a completely new book (which I had no intention of doing) than update the old one and so I declined. Then, in 2019, I was invited to give the Dalrymple Lectures at Glasgow University on a general topic and I chose time. In those lectures, I tried to do something different which in part, drew on papers I had published on time since 2005.5 Being generally happy with the outcome, the idea emerged that maybe these could form the template for a new book. And this is what has happened. The four Dalrymple lectures have been stretched to seven chapters with some new material added, some old material cut – but several chapters of this book are heavily based on those lectures, specifically Chapters 2–5. But, is this a re-hash and updating of old ideas from the 2005 book or is it something new? For those who have not read the 2005 book, perhaps this is irrelevant; for those who have, well, let them judge for themselves. Personally, I think it is a hybrid which reflects its intentions. This book partly aims to introduce the reader to key contemporary issues in the archaeology of time, much like the one from 2005. So at one level, former topics that have remained relevant are discussed anew, such as periodization, narrative, scale and so on, while new ones have been added, such as contemporaneity and materiality. I have tried to write a book that is at once accessible to a new generation but also provocative – not necessarily in the sense of being radical, but merely in making the reader think, even perhaps scholars who have heard it all before. But the book is also a personal take on these issues. This is not a textbook, though it could be mined for information like one, if so desired. I have framed my discussion from particular angles, following specific threads and directions that reflect my own navigational history through the concept of time. And this has changed since 2005. So even though some of the same topics that I discussed in my 2005 book recur, I address them from a very different position and contextualize them in very different ways. In other words, I don’t think about time in quite the same way as I did 15 years ago. In the first chapter, I will set the scene for this book and lay out my argument or at least the ideas which propel the argument offered here. However, by way of concluding this prologue, I want to sketch out what I see as some of the main currents of thought on time in archaeology that have emerged since 2005 and use this also as an opportunity to further elaborate on some of the differences and developments in my own work on time.

A note on recent work on the archaeology of time It can be quite daunting trying to summarize the literature on a topic as not only do you have to try and create some semblance of order for the sake of the reader by parsing the discussion into topics, you also run the risk of marginalizing some topics and scholars and exaggerating the importance of others. When I wrote my first book on time in 2005, this was less daunting because the literature was relatively small; today, the task would be much harder. But such risks come with the territory so with this in mind, let me now run through some themes relating to time which, at

4 Prologue

least to me, appear to have been particularly salient for archaeology since the turn of the millennium. In many ways, these themes could have offered an alternative structure to this book, but since I regard this work as more of an extended essay than a textbook, this will just have to remain an unrealized possibility. Nevertheless, most of these topics are addressed in different chapters of this book but contextualized differently, to fit within its broader argument. My summaries below are just that: very short and concise. I have no intention of going into these topics in any detail, especially since I do engage with many of them later on. Rather the goal here is to simply offer a rough guide or map, providing some key references.

Deep/big history Archaeology has always boasted about its unique access to the long-term and while many archaeologists of the 1980s and 1990s might have privileged the short-term of human experience and life-scale, interest in the long-term never went away. Darwinian archaeologies and historical ecological archaeologies continued their focus on such scales while time perspectivism remained vocal and all of these ‘schools’ continue their work today. But new ideas have also entered, especially those of deep history promoted by Clive Gamble, which shares with Darwinian archaeology the concern to link biology and culture and draw out long-term structures.6 Ian Hodder’s work on the long-term has remained a constant thread throughout much of his career, from his 1980s work drawing on Braudel and Annales history to his current theory of entanglement, which among other things tries to engage with the idea of directionality in human history.7 Certainly, Deep or Big History is now fashionable again, and although it is not without its detractors, for some archaeologists, the issue is not about contesting it but how to mediate such big histories with human lives. John Robb and Tim Pauketat’s edited volume is an important reference here, but another is the work of Alasdair Whittle and Alex Bayliss, drawing on the Bayesian revolution in radiocarbon dating to argue for an archaeology operating at historical scales of analysis.8 Most of these themes are tackled in Chapter 3.

Contemporary pasts The idea of the contemporary past evokes a volume I edited with Victor Buchli back in 2001, though we cannot claim any credit for coining this phrase.9 Yet the term stuck and in fact, has resonated widely since, so that now it refers to many different things. One obvious domain is simply the archaeology of recent/current times, but here I want to rather highlight the theoretical dimension, which is the idea that all archaeological remains, of any ‘period’ are contemporary. This has been argued most forcefully by Laurent Olivier, who draws on the idea of memory to articulate this, setting it in opposition to history, or at least a certain view of history.10 For Olivier and others, this perspective suggests an alternative way to think about and do archaeology. Such concerns are more widely connected with the return to things promoted by Bjørnar Olsen and are especially evident in his

Prologue 5

work with Þóra Pétursdóttir and others on ruins and detritus but also with Shannon Dawdy’s work on clockpunk archaeology and patina.11 On the other hand, Chris Witmore’s recent book, Old Lands, shows us the broader possibilities that such an approach can offer and will surely serve as a paradigm for an archaeology which takes the idea of contemporary pasts seriously.12 My own take on contemporaneity shares much with these approaches but also tries to reconcile rather than oppose them to conventional archaeology and these issues are addressed in detail in Chapter 5.

The future Over the past decade, archaeologists have started to engage with the future as a concept relevant to archaeology, especially through the lens of heritage. Shannon Dawdy’s concept of a millennial archaeology as futurist and her work on patina as a chronotopia explores the way our pasts connect to ways of imagining futures.13 Imagined futures is indeed a powerful way to reflect on archaeology, an approach taken by Dawney et al. in their suggestion for anticipatory archaeologies14 while Laurent Olivier’s more recent work on contemporary pasts takes a very different perspective on the future through Hartog’s concept of presentism.15 Other archaeologists working on the future include the Heritage Futures group and their concept of heritage/archaeology as a future-assembling practice.16 The future is a topic that comes up briefly in Chapter 5 in this book, though it is not a dominant theme addressed in this work.

Indigenous time Another important topic is indigenous concepts of time and how they might be used to reflect on our own practices. This is less about understanding other conceptions of time in the past as it is about how we can think through and with these alternative temporal ontologies to develop archaeological practice. Such a shift reflects the changing mood of academia from the cultural to the material turn as alluded to below as one of the key changes in framing the differences of my 2005 book and this one. The role of alternative or indigenous ontologies has played an important role as a facet of the new materialisms, but specific studies on time in this vein are rare.17 One hopes more of such studies will emerge in the future. Connected to this work are ‘ethnographies’ of archaeological practice that also deal with archaeological time as a form of indigenous time, but of the ‘western archaeologist’. Here the work of Cris Simonetti is especially noteworthy.18 While Simonetti’s work does appear in this book, on the whole indigenous time is not a topic I explore, regretfully.

Movement Mobility and movement have become hot topics over the past decade. In part, the focus on the mobility of things and people has been spurred by new aDNA and

6 Prologue

isotope studies which has re-opened old issues such as migration. But theoretically, it is the recent work on object itineraries and journeys that is more pertinent and connected to, yet different from, earlier studies on object biographies. Rosemary Joyce and Susan Gillespie’s edited volume is important here, as is that by Hans Peter Hahn and Hadas Weiss.19 In relation to time however, the recent book by Oscar Aldred on the archaeology of movement adds an original and more relevant dimension, as this tries to engage with the temporality of movement in a way no previous work has so far done, drawing among other things on the mobility turn in geography.20 Movement is not a concept that I discuss in this book except briefly in the final chapter, yet like the topic of indigenous time, I think it holds tremendous potential for future work.

Change Finally, I must mention the topic of change. Change has of course been a perennial concern of archaeology and the different ways in which it has been interpreted and explained largely mirrors broader disciplinary shifts, as outlined in Rachel Crellin’s recent book.21 But as her study also makes clear, this is a topic that is ripe for investigation and her particular approach shares a platform with others working from assemblage theory, where concepts such as emergence and scale take on a new life.22 Significantly, much of the terminology used in assemblage theory is drawn from complexity theory and non-linear dynamics and while the archaeology of complexity theory which also addresses change has an older pedigree, as yet there has been little dialogue between this ‘school’ and assemblage theory.23 It is an open question whether the commonalities are merely terminological and superficial or may have deeper roots. At stake in both however, is an approach to the archaeological record which sees change as a constant and therefore raises the question of how best to deal with this. The same interest also drives some of the current work exploring the relation between time and materials, especially Tim Ingold’s recent explorations of solid fluids with Cris Simonetti where becoming is privileged over being.24 Change is a topic that I touch on in Chapters 3 and 4. Reviewing this list of topics and comparing it to the situation when I wrote my 2005 book on time, it is clear how the debate has shifted. Much of the early work on time in archaeology from the 1980s and 1990s revolved around the idea of time as socially or culturally constructed. Indeed, if I had to stand back and point to the major change that has occurred between 2005 and now, the answer is, I think, quite straightforward. In 2005, I was still under the influence of what you might call a postmodern or post-processual view of time as something socially and/or culturally constructed; how our own cultural viewpoint affects the way we conceptualize time but also how past people’s perception of time might have differed and how as archaeologists, we might try and access this. The early work particularly of Mark Leone, Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley situated archaeological views of time within this framework, pitching archaeological conceptions of time against past/other people’s sense of time, often in quite a stark

Prologue 7

series of dichotomies.25 Indeed this broad division largely informed the structure of my 2005 book. In this volume, there is very little concern with such matters and while I might occasionally slip into the language of time as a social or cultural construct, my way of looking at this has changed as has general discussion of time within archaeology. Thus such initial disciplinary forays into the topic quickly gave way to a range of more mature treatments in the 1990s and early 2000s. Especially prominent were the concepts of memory and biography, but also explored was the relation of time to formation theory as articulated through time perspectivism and models of change proposed by Annales approaches and complexity theory. While work in all these topics continues today,26 theoretically, it is instructive to see how they have also developed in new directions. How, for example, work on memory has shifted from being about social or collective memory to material memory. Instead of Halbwachs and Connerton, we now cite Benjamin and Bergson. How work on biography has shifted from being about the social life of things to their mobility, their itineraries and connections. Instead of Kopytoff, we cite Tsing. And it is not just how topics have subtly changed meaning or focus; they have also started to blur and create new configurations such as the intersections between Olivier’s work and time perspectivism around the concept of the palimpsest, or between complexity theory and assemblage theory around concepts like phase transitions, as already alluded to above. In all this, there are thus both continuities and transformations, which is perhaps only fitting when the concept we are dealing with is time. It is because of these changes though, and especially because the list I have drawn up here is, on the whole different to a list one might draw from 15 years ago, that a revised version of the 2005 book was not viable. There may be continuities, but the field has shifted to an extent that the premises framing the 2005 book no longer have much relevance. These six contemporary themes doubtless do not exhaust all that has been written or talked about in relation to time in archaeology and certainly they have not all received equal treatment or attention. Indeed, the order in which I have discussed them here more or less reflects the degree to which each has been attended to, with the latter three topics being particularly fresh and waiting for new voices and more discussion. It is thus with some regret that I do not engage with all of them equally or in some cases, hardly at all. This is partly an inevitable consequence of my own limitations, but also the direction my own interest in the topic has taken. It is for these reasons that I do not pretend to offer this book as a survey of the state of the art. It is a personal reflection on a topic that has occupied me professionally now for nearly 30 years but one that still, I hope, manages to connect with the majority of the discipline and deal with concerns shared by us all. Inevitably then, this book is as much a product of today as the 2005 volume was of its time. In this volume, time is bound up more specifically with archaeological practices than over-arching ideologies; it is also regarded as co-constructed by archaeologists and the materialities they work upon and inhabit rather than viewed

8 Prologue

a conceptual framework imposed by archaeologists. The full expression of this shift only really emerges in the last chapter, but it works as an undercurrent and motif of the book as a whole. But to properly set the scene for this book, I need to give a little more context, so without further ado, let me move on to Chapter 1.

Notes 1 G. Lucas, The Archaeology of Time (London: Routledge, 2005). 2 G. Lucas, ‘Genealogies, Classification, Narrative and Time: An Archaeological Study of Eastern Yorkshire, 3700–1300 BC’ (PhD Diss., University of Cambridge, 1994). 3 For example, see J. Thomas, Time Culture and Identity: An Interpretative Archaeology. London: Routledge, 1996). 4 G. Lucas, Understanding the Archaeological Record (Cambridge: Cambridge, University Press, 2012). 5 G. Lucas, ‘Periodization in Archaeology: Starting in the Ground’, in S. Souvatzi, A. Baysal and E. Baysal (eds), Time and History in Prehistory (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 77–94; G. Lucas, ‘Archaeology and Contemporaneity’, Archaeological Dialogues 22, no. 1 (2015): 1–15; G. Lucas, ‘Time’, in A. Gardiner, M. Lake and U. Sommer (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Theory (online, 2014); ‘Time and the Archaeological Archive’, Rethinking History 14, no. 3 (2010); G. Lucas, ‘Time and the Archaeological Event’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 18, no. 1 (2008). 6 C. Gamble, ‘The Anthropology of Deep History’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S), 21 (2014): 147–164; also see, A. Shryock and D.L. Smail (eds), Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 7 I. Hodder, Where Are We Heading? The Evolution of Humans and Things (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). 8 J. Robb and T. Pauketat (eds), Big Histories, Human Lives: Tackling Problems of Scale in Archaeology (Santa Fe: School of Advanced Research, 2013); A. Whittle, The Times of their Lives: Hunting History in the Archaeology of Neolithic Europe (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2017); A.W.R. Whittle, F.M.A. Healy and A. Bayliss, Gathering Time: Dating the Early Neolithic Enclosures of Southern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2011). 9 V. Buchli and G.M. Lucas (eds), Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past (London: Routledge, 2001); A.C. González-Ruibal et al., ‘Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past: An Interview with Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas’, Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 1, no. 2 (2014): 63–74. 10 See L. Olivier, Le sombre abîme du temps: Mémoire et archéologie (Paris: Seuil, 2008), translated as The Dark Abyss of Time: Archaeology and Memory (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2011). 11 B. Olsen and Þ. Pétursdóttir (eds), Ruin Memories: Materialities, Aesthetics and the Archaeology of the Recent Past (London: Routledge, 2014); S. Dawdy, ‘Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity’, Current Anthropology 51, no. 6 (2010); S. Dawdy, Patina: A Profane Study (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016). 12 C. Witmore, Old Lands: A Chorography of the Eastern Peloponnese (London: Routledge, 2020); also see his earlier papers on time, for example, C. Witmore, ‘Vision, Media, Noise and the Percolation of Time: Symmetrical Approaches to the Mediation of the Material World’, Journal of Material Culture 11, no. 3 (2006); C. Witmore, ‘Prolegomena to Open Pasts: On Archaeological Memory Practices’, Archaeologies 5, no. 3 (2009): 511–545; C. Witmore, ‘Which Archaeologies? A Question of Chronopolitics’, in A. GonzálezRuibal (ed.) Reclaiming Archaeology: Beyond the Tropes of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2013). 13 S. Dawdy, ‘Millennial Archaeology: Locating the Discipline in the Age of Insecurity/ Doomsday Confessions’, Archaeological Dialogues 16, no. 2 (2009); also see S. Dawdy, ‘Death and Archaeology in the Present, Tense’, in M. Tamm and L. Olivier (eds), Rethinking Historical Time: New Approaches to Presentism (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).

Prologue 9

14 L.A. Dawney, O.J.T. Harris and T.F. Sørensen, ‘Future World: Anticipatory Archaeology, Materially-affective Capacities and the Late Human Legacy’, Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, 4, no. 1 (2017). 15 L. Olivier, ‘The Future of Archaeology in the Age of Presentism’, Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 6, no. 1 (2020): 16–31. 16 R. Harrison et al., Heritage Futures: Comparative Approaches to Natural and Cultural Heritage Practices (London: UCL Press, 2020); C. Holtorf and A. Högberg (eds), Cultural Heritage and the Future (London: Routledge, 2020). 17 B. Alberti, ‘Archaeologies of Ontology’, Annual Review of Anthropology 45, no. 1 (2016): 163–179); for studies with a temporal emphasis, see C. Cipolla, J. Quinn and J. Levy, ‘Theory in Collaborative Indigenous Archaeology: Insights from Mohegan’, American Antiquity 84, no. 1 (2018); G. Verdesio, ‘Indigeneity and time: Towards a Decolonization of Archaeological Temporal Categories and Tools’, in González-Ruibal (ed.), Reclaiming Archaeology. 18 C. Simonetti, Sentient Conceptualizations: Feeling for Time in the Sciences of the Past (London: Routledge, 2017). 19 R. Joyce and S. Gillespie, Things in Motion: Object Itineraries in Anthropological Practice (Santa Fe: SAR Press, 2015); H. Hahn and H. Weiss (eds), Mobility, Meaning and Transformations of Things: Shifting Contexts of Material Culture through Time and Space (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2013). 20 O. Aldred, The Archaeology of Movement (London: Routledge, 2021). 21 R. Crellin, Change and Archaeology (London: Routledge, 2020). 22 See R.J. Crellin, ‘Changing Assemblages: Tracing Vibrant Matter in Burial Assemblages’, Special edition, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 27, no. 1 (2017): 111–125; C. Fowler, The Emergent Past: A Relational Realist Archaeology of Early Bronze Age Mortuary Practices (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013; C. Fowler, ‘Relational Typologies, Assemblage Theory and Early Bronze Age Burials’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 27, no. 1 (2017) 2017; O.J.T. Harris, ‘Assemblages and Scale in Archaeology’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 27 (2017): 127–139; O.J.T. Harris, ‘More than Representation: Multiscalar Assemblages and the Deleuzian Challenge to Archaeology’, History of the Human Sciences 31, no. 3 (2018). 23 DeLanda, for example, who is a major inspiration for assemblage theory, draws heavily on the terminology of complexity theory (e.g., M. DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (London: Continuum, 2006; M. DeLanda, Assemblage Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). For more conventional uses of complexity theory in archaeology especially in relation to time, see the early work of James McGlade: J. McGlade and S.E. van der Leeuw, ‘Archaeology and Nonlinear Dynamics: New Approaches to Long Term Change’, in S.E. van der Leeuw and J. McGlade (eds), Archaeology, Time and Structured Transformation (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 1–22; J. McGlade, ‘The Times of History: Archaeology, Narrative, and Non-linear Causality’, in J. Murray (ed.) Time and Archaeology (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 139–163. 24 See C. Simonetti and T. Ingold, ‘Ice and Concrete: Solid Fluids of Environmental Change’, in the larger collection of essays on time and materials in Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 5, no. 1 (2018). Also see the forthcoming collection in Theory, Culture and Society. 25 M.P. Leone, ‘Time in American Archaeology’, in C. Redman (ed.) Social Archaeology: Beyond Subsistence and Dating (London: Academic Press, 1978); M. Shanks and C. Tilley, Re-Constructing Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 26 For example, see J. Bintliff, ‘Time, Structure, and Agency: The Annales, Emergent Complexity, and Archaeology’, in J. Bintliff (ed.), A Companion to Social Archaeology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004) pp. 174–194; S, Holdaway and L. Wandsnider, Time in Archaeology: Time Perspectivism Revisited (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2008; J. Joy, ‘Reinvigorating Object Biography: Reproducing the Drama of Object Lives’, World Archaeology 41, no 4 (2009): 540–556; R.M. Van Dyke, ‘Archaeology and Social Memory’, Annual Review of Anthropology 48 (2019): 207–225.

10 Prologue

References Alberti, B. ‘Archaeologies of Ontology’. Annual Review of Anthropology 45, no. 1 (2016): 163–179. Aldred, O. The Archaeology of Movement. London: Routledge, 2021. Bintliff, J. ‘Time, Structure, and Agency: The Annales, Emergent Complexity, and Archaeology’. In J. Bintliff (ed.), A Companion to Social Archaeology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, pp. 174–194. Buchli, V. and G.M. Lucas (eds). Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past. London: Routledge, 2001. Cipolla, C., J. Quinn and J. Levy. ‘Theory in Collaborative Indigenous Archaeology: Insights from Mohegan’. American Antiquity 84, no. 1 (2018): 127–142. Crellin, R.J. ‘Changing Assemblages: Tracing Vibrant Matter in Burial Assemblages’. Special Edition, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 27, no. 1 (2017): 111–125. Crellin, R. Change and Archaeology. London: Routledge, 2020. Dawdy, S. ‘Millennial Archaeology: Locating the Discipline in the Age of Insecurity/ Doomsday Confessions’. Archaeological Dialogues 16, no. 2 (2009): 131–142; 186–193. Dawdy, S. ‘Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity’. Current Anthropology 51, no. 6 (2010): 761–793. Dawdy, S. Patina: A Profane Study. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016. Dawdy, S. ‘Death and Archaeology in the Present, Tense’. In M. Tamm and L. Olivier (eds), Rethinking Historical Time: New Approaches to Presentism. London: Bloomsbury Press, 2019. Dawney, L.A., O.J.T. Harris and T.F. Sørensen. ‘Future World: Anticipatory Archaeology, Materially-affective Capacities and the Late Human Legacy’. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 4, no. 1 (2017): 107–129. DeLanda, M. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. London: Continuum, 2006. DeLanda, M. Assemblage Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. Fowler, C. ‘Relational Typologies, Assemblage Theory and Early Bronze Age Burials’. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 27, no. 1 (2017): 95–109. Fowler, C. The Emergent Past: A Relational Realist Archaeology of Early Bronze Age Mortuary Practices. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Gamble, C. ‘The Anthropology of Deep History’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 21 (2014):147–164. González-Ruibal, A.C., R. Holtorf, R. Harrison and L. Wilkie, with G. Lucas and V. Buchli. ‘Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past: An Interview with Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas’. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 1, no. 2 (2014): 63–74. Hahn, H. and H. Weiss (eds). Mobility, Meaning and Transformations of Things: Shifting Contexts of Material Culture through Time and Space. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2013. Harris, O.J.T. ‘Assemblages and Scale in Archaeology’. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 27 (2017): 127–139. Harris, O.J.T. ‘More than Representation: Multiscalar Assemblages and the Deleuzian Challenge to Archaeology’. History of the Human Sciences 31, no. 3 (2018): 83–104. Harrison, R., C. DeSilvey, C. Holtorf, S. Macdonald, N. Bartolini, E. Breithoff, H. Fredheim, A. Lyons, S. May, J. Morgan, and S. Penrose. Heritage Futures. Comparative Approaches to Natural and Cultural Heritage Practices. London: UCL Press, 2020. Hodder, I. Where Are We Heading? The Evolution of Humans and Things. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. Holdaway, S. and Wandsnider, L. Time in Archaeology: Time Perspectivism Revisited. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2008.

Prologue 11

Holtorf, C. and A. Högberg (eds). Cultural Heritage and the Future. London: Routledge, 2020. Joy, J. ‘Reinvigorating Object Biography: Reproducing the Drama of Object Lives’. World Archaeology 41, no. 4 (2009): 540–556. Joyce, R. and S. Gillespie. Things in Motion: Object Itineraries in Anthropological Practice. Santa Fe: SAR Press, 2015. Leone, M.P. ‘Time in American Archaeology’. In C. Redman (ed.), Social Archaeology: Beyond Subsistence and Dating. London: Academic Press, 1978. Lucas, G. ‘Genealogies, Classification, Narrative and Time: An Archaeological Study of Eastern Yorkshire, 3700–1300 BC’. PhD Diss., University of Cambridge, 1994. Lucas, G.M. The Archaeology of Time. London: Routledge, 2005. Lucas, G. ‘Time and the Archaeological Event’. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 18, no. 1 (2008): 59–64. Lucas, G. ‘Time and the Archaeological Archive’. Rethinking History 14, no. 3 (2010): 343–359. Lucas, G. Understanding the Archaeological Record. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Lucas, G. ‘Time’. In A. Gardiner, M. Lake and U. Sommer (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Archaeological Theory (online), 2014. Lucas, G. ‘Archaeology and Contemporaneity’. Archaeological Dialogues 22, no. 1 (2015): 1–15. Lucas, G. ‘Periodization in Archaeology: Starting in the Ground’. In S. Souvatzi, A. Baysal and E. Baysal (eds), Time and History in Prehistory. London: Routledge, 2019, pp. 77–94. McGlade, J. ‘The Times of History: Archaeology, Narrative, and Non-linear Causality’. In T. Murray (ed.), Time and Archaeology. London: Routledge, 1999, pp. 139–163. McGlade, J. and S.E. van der Leeuw. ‘Archaeology and Nonlinear Dynamics: New Approaches to Long Term Change’. In S.E. van der Leeuw and J. McGlade (eds), Archaeology, Time and Structured Transformation. London: Routledge, 1997, pp. 1–22. Olivier, L. Le sombre abîme du temps: Mémoire et archéologie. Paris: Seuil, 2008. Olivier, L. The Dark Abyss of Time: Archaeology and Memory. Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2011. Olivier, L. ‘The Future of Archaeology in the Age of Presentism’. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 6, no. 1 (2020): 16–31. Olsen, B. and Þ. Pétursdóttir (eds). Ruin Memories: Materialities, Aesthetics and the Archaeology of the Recent Past. London: Routledge, 2014. Robb, J. and T. Pauketat (eds). Big Histories, Human Lives: Tackling Problems of Scale in Archaeology. Santa Fe: School of Advanced Research, 2013. Shanks, M. and C. Tilley. Re-Constructing Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Shryock, A. and D.L. Smail (eds). Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Simonetti, C. Sentient Conceptualizations: Feeling for Time in the Sciences of the Past. London: Routledge, 2017. Simonetti, C. and T. Ingold. ‘Ice and Concrete: Solid Fluids of Environmental Change’. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 5, no. 1 (2018): 19–31. Thomas, J. Time, Culture and Identity: An Interpretive Archaeology. London: Routledge, 1996. Van Dyke, R.M. ‘Archaeology and Social Memory’. Annual Review of Anthropology 48 (2019): 207–225. Verdesio, G. ‘Indigeneity and Time: Towards a Decolonization of Archaeological Temporal Categories and Tools’. In A. González-Ruibal (ed.). Reclaiming Archaeology: Beyond the Tropes of Modernity. London: Routledge, 2013, p. 168.

12 Prologue

Whittle, A. The Times of their Lives: Hunting History in the Archaeology of Neolithic Europe. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2017. Whittle, A.W.R., F.M.A. Healy and A. Bayliss. Gathering Time: Dating the Early Neolithic Enclosures of Southern Britain and Ireland. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2011. Witmore, C. ‘Vision, Media, Noise and the Percolation of Time: Symmetrical Approaches to the Mediation of the Material World’. Journal of Material Culture 11, no. 3 (2006): 267–292. Witmore, C. ‘Prolegomena to Open Pasts: On Archaeological Memory Practices’. Archaeologies 5, no. 3 (2009): 511–545. Witmore, C. ‘Which Archaeology? A Question of Chronopolitics’. In A. González-Ruibal (ed.), Reclaiming Archaeology: Beyond the Tropes of Modernity. London: Routledge, 2013, pp. 130–144. Witmore, C. Old Lands: A Chorography of the Eastern Peloponnese. London: Routledge, 2020.

1 TIME MATTERS

The duplicities of time The concept of time, like almost everything else, has fallen foul of the deep dualisms that have riven western thinking.1 Natural Time is the universal clock, ticking away down the years, centuries and millennia within which events are measured while Cultural Time is how different societies in the past and present mark or represent time: their calendars, festivals, routines, myths and histories. Natural science gives us natural time, while social science and the humanities chart the multifarious ways different cultures have expressed this natural time. Time is, on the one hand, an objective property of the physical world; on the other, a subjective experience of human mind. Physical time and felt time. One might go on listing the permutations of this essential dualism but I think these preliminary remarks will make my point. Indeed, in my prologue I recounted how such dichotomies framed my earlier work on time. To some extent this was almost implicit, an accepted assumption which led me to reject or re-interpret everything on one side of this dichotomy (natural/ physical time) in favour of the other (cultural/felt time). Yet in another sense, I was acutely aware of this dichotomy and, through the work of philosopher Paul Ricoeur, saw it as an inevitable tension, what Ricoeur called the aporias of time. Ricoeur’s solution was to posit a third time – narrative time – with which to bridge the dualism between what he called cosmological and phenomenological time and I have been both enamoured and dissatisfied by his solution ever since. I will return to Ricoeur in a later chapter but I mention him here because in many ways, it is impossible to tackle this dualism without invoking philosophy. This is not a book about the philosophy of time. Yet to avoid philosophical discussion would be disingenuous especially as archaeology is not conducted in a vacuum. Indeed, I shall argue in this chapter that one of the problems that has beset archaeological time is precisely the way in which it is entangled in this broader dualism

14 Time matters

between physical and felt time, or natural and cultural time. But if we need a bit of philosophy to understand the predicament of time in archaeology, then I would also argue that archaeology can, in turn, be used to alter the way we do philosophy. This is a bold claim which I should temper by saying that it is not the primary goal of this book; my main focus is archaeological, not philosophical and any extra-disciplinary benefits are simply a bonus. Such issues aside, let me move on and demonstrate why I think this dualism is so important to confront before we can even begin to tackle time in archaeology. Because in understanding this dualism, we will also have the means to enable archaeology to overcome it. So where to begin? Why not with a debate which epitomized this bifurcation of time at the beginning of the last century: the meeting of Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein in Paris on 22 April 1922.

The Einstein–Bergson debate In 1922, Albert Einstein, who was then in his early 40s, had been invited to be the guest speaker at the annual meeting of the French Philosophical Society. Inevitably, he was asked to present his theory of relativity, publication of which had occurred just a few years previously but whose renown began with his four 1905 publications, including one on special relativity. Einstein’s fame was in the ascendant and his ideas, particularly as they pertained to time were causing ripples of excitement across Europe and the world. But also present at the meeting was Henri Bergson, then well into his 60s but the doyen of French philosophy. Bergson did not like what Einstein had to say. After Einstein gave his lecture, Bergson offered a half-hour critique, to which Einstein replied only briefly, but included in his reply was his famous quip: The time of the philosophers does not exist. Well, who could take such an insult lying down? Bergson wrote an entire book challenging Einstein,2 and even seems to have been instrumental in preventing him getting the Nobel Prize for his work on relativity; instead, Einstein received it for his work on the photoelectric effect. A bit like giving Darwin a prize for his work on earthworms, ignoring his theory of evolution by natural selection. And yet in the end, it was Einstein who became a household name while Bergson’s fame diminished. So what was the debate all about? Put simply, relativity theory challenged the notion of time as duration by demonstrating the impossibility of simultaneity in any absolute sense. Because simultaneity was relative, duration crumbles; relativity theory suggests that event x and event y might succeed one another, be simultaneous or precede one another, dependent on a frame of reference. So from one point of view, x might be before y, but from another, it might come after it. If this is the case, duration, understood as a flow of time, is purely a subjective illusion. Time, with space, constitutes a durationless field, which modern physics calls the block universe view of time. This contradicted the very basis of Bergson’s philosophy which argued for duration as the primordial form of time. For Bergson, physical time was an abstraction which gave the illusion of reality because of its

Time matters 15

measurement by clocks. Yet the irony is, clock time itself was also subverted by the implications of relativity. I have usually assumed that time as expressed through clocks and calendars is fundamentally about sequence: the ticking of seconds on a clock, the regular passing of days and years. At its most basic, it is time as a segmented, equally-spaced series of units, what in mathematics is known as an interval scale or measure. This is certainly true of time as we use it in everyday life, as it appears on our phones, computers, clocks and diaries. Yet in terms of managing and co-ordinating this time into a singularized metrology, the key property is not succession but that of simultaneity: knowing that my clock has the same time as yours, that the seconds or minutes on two clocks are of equal duration, that we both recognize that today is 7 July 2020 or that if you are in Australia and I am in Iceland, that you are ten hours exactly ahead of me. Of course, in practice, clocks can differ, but in principle they can all be synchronized to the same time and where it matters, they usually are. Your computer for example has an internal clock that runs off its own battery, called a CMOS chip; every time you connect to the Internet, the clock re-calibrates itself using Network Time Protocol (NTP) which is designed to synchronize your computer time to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) as registered on a recognized website such as time.gov. It all sounds quite simple but in fact a great deal of work and effort went into establishing UTC as will be further discussed in Chapter 2 and more importantly, such synchronization today relies completely on the network of satellites, fibreoptic cables and Wi-Fi signals, though originally it was made possible by transoceanic and trans-continental telegraph lines and later radio waves.3 With any synchronization, the problem is essentially knowing the time at a location different from the one you are at; as the French polymath Henri Poincaré put it: ‘[we] must, without being at Paris, calculate Paris time.’4 In all cases, even with the Internet, the time delay between sender and receiver is incorporated into any synchronizations, underlining the crucial connection between time and space and until highspeed communication was made possible through telegraphy, calculating such delays were prone to too much error. But just as this synchronization was being created, Einstein’s theory undermined its very basis by inaugurating the loss of simultaneity. What then, remains of clock time? Poincaré wrote an important but under-cited paper about time in 1898 where he argued that our intuitive perceptions of sequence or simultaneity are not based on anything substantial, but simply conventions.5 These conventions vary from case to case, but at their foundation, we use them because they are convenient. Ultimately, Poincaré argued that time was a procedure: something we do with clocks and that any qualitative, intuitive notion we have of it is based on the quantitative measures we perform with our instruments, that is, clocks. Although he does not mention him by name, Poincaré was, essentially, contesting his fellow countryman Henri Bergson’s philosophy of intuition and time.6 He also anticipated many of the points that surfaced in the famous Einstein–Bergson debate of the 1920s.7 Clock synchronization and simultaneity thus become something we make,

16 Time matters

not something we observe in nature. This procedural notion of time is a theme that will take on great relevance for this book. It has been debated how much Bergson misunderstood some key parts of Einstein’s theory of relativity, but Chapter 3 of his book Duration and Simultaneity seems to get to the heart of the difference. There, Bergson makes a distinction between contemporaneity and simultaneity. For Bergson, our primary experience of time as duration or flux can be described as the perception of contemporaneous flows; sitting around a table at a restaurant for example, there are waiters bustling around, other diners conversing, a clock ticking on a wall. In our perception, Bergson argues that we see all these events as both one and many simultaneously; we can choose to filter out everything and focus just on one, such as the person opposite us, or we can soak up the atmosphere of all together. It is this very ability to see events as both a unity and multiple that constitutes contemporaneity. For Bergson, time – in its pure state – is ‘multiplicity without divisibility and succession without separation.’8 It is from the primacy of ‘contemporaneous flows’, that we abstract a notion of ‘simultaneous instants’; like the flow, simultaneous events can be perceived as a unity or singled out. A waiter drops a tray at the same time as a child cries at another table; in one sense, these are part of the contemporaneous flows, but in defining them as simultaneous instants, we are implicitly drawing on what Bergson called a spatialized sense of time. Real duration is ‘thick’, it has no instants; the idea of an instant as a unit of time is a product of spatializing time, converting it into something measurable. Bergson explained the difference by analogy to drawing a line across a sheet of paper; as I close my eyes and make the movement with my hand, the experience is one of undivided continuity. When I open my eyes and see the drawn line, I now perceive a record of that act, a record which though also appears undivided, can now be divided: I can mark cuts or points along it, measure it and so on. For Bergson, spatialized time depended on the materialization of movement, a transition from what he called the unfolding (that is, the movement of pencil across paper) to the unfolded (the line on the paper). It is on such materializations that spatial time – clock time or physical time, is dependent. I think Bergson’s analogy of the line and his idea of the unfolded provide more food for thought, especially in terms of understanding time as a material process so I will return to this in my final chapter. For now though, I want to remain with this idea of a tension or opposition between these two approaches to time. Physical time, expressed as an objective relation measurable by clocks, was ultimately relative and therefore multiple. Simultaneity and succession were therefore also relative: two events which appear simultaneous to person A, could appear successive to person B and vice versa. Philosophical time expressed as the subjective experience of a consciousness was an intrinsically indivisible and unified phenomenon. Simultaneity and succession were derivative perceptions from basic contemporaneous flows. We can perhaps express this tension between simultaneity and contemporaneity by contrasting two different moments of temporal wonder, experiences we can probably all relate to. On a clear and starry night if you cast your eyes upward, you

Time matters 17

see a myriad of twinkling lights, each one a luminous globe like our own sun, or a planet lit up by such a sun. When you gaze at these stars you are directly observing the past – in the present. Because it takes time for light to travel, the image you see is not the ‘now’ of the star but its past. When I first heard about this, it was mindblowing. What are ‘contemporary’ events to us are past for the objects caught up in those events. Reversing this, imagine someone on a distant planet, pointing a telescope to our earth a hundred light years away – they would actually be seeing our world as it was in 1921. These are quite startling ideas, even if we are also used to them, but what they illustrate is the relativity of simultaneity. Now picture a more earthly scene; instead of looking up, look down to the ground and there you see a glint that catches your eye. This is no star – but the reflection off a shiny object half buried. You reach down and pick it up and in your hand you realize you are holding a flint axe. Nobody makes or uses these kinds of things anymore where you live and in fact it turns out to be a Neolithic axe, made around 6,000 years ago. You are looking directly at the past – in the present. This object has persisted, and it is due to this persistence that you are able to hold it now in the present. Sadly, for archaeologists, the same is not true of its maker. Yet this is still a wondrous thing, this tactile, immediate contact with a past contemporaneous with the present. These two moments of wonder are both deeply temporal and play off the juxtaposition of the past in the present. But they do this in very different ways. In the first, the juxtaposition is symmetrical, whereas in the second it is not; that is, what is present for A is past for B and vice versa in the starry sky. In the second, there is no symmetry; the axe inhabits my time, but I cannot inhabit its time (except in my imagination). More importantly though, simultaneity in the first case is dependent upon and relative to space, the distance between me and the star. In the second case, contemporaneity is dependent upon persistence, the continuity and then contiguity of the axe with me, that is, Bergson’s contemporaneous flows. I am not sure how easy it is to reconcile these two cases or argue that one is more primary than the other. But what I do know is that the fallout of this opposition has arguably had deleterious effects on historical disciplines like archaeology.

The bifurcation of time and archaeology The great divergence between physical time and felt time in many ways left historical and archaeological time in limbo – or better yet, increasingly stretched out, with one foot on world time and the other on human, experienced time. Like two continents drifting apart, history and archaeology were caught in between, pulled in two opposite directions, not knowing whether to jump to one side or the other, or try and remain in the middle. Consider, for example, how we articulate deep time. Most of us these days don’t blink an eye if we hear about some archaeological discovery 10,000 or 100,000 years old; it may be interesting or exciting but the distance in time from where we are now does not particularly shock us. We are used to thinking on large time spans. The age of the universe is currently

18 Time matters

estimated at 13.8 billion years while our solar system, including this planet we call home, is thought to be c. 4.5 billion years old. But how do we grasp such time scales – really? How do you comprehend something that happened 4.5 billion years ago or even a few thousand years ago? I know what it is like to think in terms of years, even decades. I think back to my childhood in the 1970s, or my children growing up now. I suppose the older one gets, the greater one’s reach. But the limit of our temporal grasp does seem to be constrained by the finitude of human life. And yet I have excavated on sites 10,000 years old, handled artefacts more than a million years old and while there is, sometimes, that wow factor I related in the last section – these are time scales I don’t usually feel troubled by. What is going on here? I suppose one answer would be that this deep time is a very abstract time; I comprehend it in an almost mathematical, numerical way; those dates – 4.5 billion years, 10,000 years – they are just numerical pegs to position myself and my material. A framework. My childhood in the 1970s on the other hand – that was an experience, I lived it. It is very concrete. At first, this seems to recall the opposition of physical and felt time. And yet when I reflect further on my childhood in the 1970s, I don’t think of it as something that happened four decades ago; I don’t think of it in terms of linear passing at all. It just was. Certainly I can appreciate the difference between something that happened last year and 40 years ago in terms of some kind of temporal ‘distance’; but this idea of distance remains a very vague notion, an intuition.9 In other words, 40 years ago and 40,000 years ago are in some ways, equally strange notions and hard to grasp except as numerical pegs. And by the same token, that wow factor I mentioned earlier – when you hold an object held by another person thousands of years ago – that wow is not only because of the temporal distance between now and then, but also its opposite: temporal proximity. What was then, is here and now – right now. The conjunction of past and present in a single place or object. These two cases are both, in a sense, ways of describing historical time. In the one, historical time is reduced to a chronology, a metrology. We have lots of ways to represent this, but a classic one is the scale of time reduced to the 24-hour day. If Homo sapiens emerged just after midnight, then the development of agriculture and sedentism only occurred in the last hour of the day, and the First World War happened only 30 seconds before midnight. Here, the scalability of chronology is what allows us to bridge the gap between physical time and felt time. Scalability enables you to read this sequence and convert vast scales of time exceeding hundreds of human generations into something you can experience in less than a minute. It is this scalability that taps into your lived experience and amplifies it to the nth degree so that you can accept that this is still time you are looking at. But what makes us perceive this sequence as temporal and this one, not? Why do we read a stratigraphic sequence, or tree rings, as a time series, but a barcode or thermometer scale as something else? After all, materially-speaking, all of them are similar, striated sequences – there is nothing intrinsically temporal about them.

Time matters 19

In the other case, historical time is reduced to a form of material memory, an experience of the past, of history as presence as related in my vignette about holding a Neolithic axe. Its most common occurrence for the majority of people is at a heritage site or in a museum, and although as archaeologists we are privileged to experience this feeling at closer quarters, it is also a feeling we have probably become largely immune to. Yet its temporal properties come from a transposition of personal memory into historical memory; we all know the experience of handling or looking at mementos, objects which are from our own past. From photographs to keepsakes. And even if we have no personal recollection when we pick up a two-million-year-old stone tool or a Roman amphora, that same sense of the presence of the past takes place. Of course, it is not quite the same and in fact that very sense of wonder and awe probably derives from the fact that we have no personal recollection, even though it seems to evoke the same temporal feeling as when we do. It is like an unfamiliar memory, an uncanny past – to use a Freudian turn of phrase. Both chronology and co-presence are surely vital ways to capture historical time. But they are also caught up in the opposition I have previously elaborated, that between physical and felt time. I also wonder if they have a somewhat limited capacity for engaging with historical time. Take historical time as chronology; this is great for ordering events and objects and I don’t doubt for a moment the essential role it plays in archaeology. But in itself, it does not give us history but merely its empty shell. Johannes Fabian, in his classic text on time in anthropology talked about this.10 His historical account of the development of deep time in the 19th century highlighted what he called the naturalization of time – its purification of any meaning, its reduction to a simple metric. It was the need to fill this void of meaning – what Hayden White called the need for narrative11 – that led 19th-century anthropologists and archaeologists to develop those social evolutionary accounts. With historical time as co-presence, the problem is rather different and possibly even more insidious. That experience of the past in the present seems replete with meaning. It is highly alluring to feel that sense of the past in the present, to hold an object or inhabit a space thousands of years old. And yet my feeling is that this is a gilded cage; it looks nice, it feels good – but does it not also conceal a void? In evoking the fullness of personal memory, there remains a sense that such impersonal traces of the past will always escape us. After all, the only reason I see the axe as a remnant of a deep past and not a fossilized lightning bolt as my medieval ancestors might have, is because of the same stories we use to fill the void of historical time as chronology. In the end, what makes historical time real, cannot be reduced to either chronology or co-presence. This tension between physical and felt time moreover, has a particularly urgent and topical dimension in relation to the Anthropocene. As Dipesh Chakrabarty has commented, one of the recurring fractures in discourse around the Anthropocene is the massive gap separating the temporality of the planet-centred science of climate change and the human-centred politics of how to tackle it.12 How do we reconcile the geological time scales of planetary change with human time scales

20 Time matters

of a political solution? What can we do? Ultimately, we must either break down or bypass the dichotomy between physical and felt time, which we can only do by returning to this issue of heterogeneity and the multiplicity of time. Ironically, it seems as if it is Einstein’s physical time which embraced multiplicity while Bergson’s notion of time argued for a deep unity, albeit one riven by heterogeneity; indeed Bergson devoted a whole chapter of his book arguing against the plurality of times implicit in Einstein’s theory of relativity.13 And yet fundamentally, both Einstein and Bergson did share a sense of time as multiple and heterogeneous – they just expressed it in very different ways. Even if modern physics abandoned the notion of a singularized time after Einstein, it has retained a view that it remains something we can measure. Indeed, it was from metrology that multiplicity emerged. But with Bergson, this quantitative aspect of time was always a subsequent derivation: before its division into instants or magnitudes of duration, it exists as a continuous flux. This Bergsonian notion of time as flux is deeply embedded in our human experience of time, the intuitive feeling we have for it as something more than metrology. In the next section, I want to elaborate further on physical and felt time as they are currently portrayed in physics and psychology to see what hope these disciplines might offer for a way out of this dilemma.

The multiplicities of felt time and physical time Let me start with physical time and especially the difference between Newtonian and Einsteinian time. Newtonian time was absolute and viewed as something almost ethereal: literally ether-like as in pre-Einsteinian science. No one talks about the ether anymore but just over a century ago, it was considered quite real or if not real, at least a necessary and useful fiction. Time was similarly viewed as a field or continuum within which objects existed, like space. Things and events exist and occur in time, an idea that is reinforced every time we put deadlines and meetings in our calendar, arrange schedules, plan dates. But after Einstein, physicists have largely regarded time as something local, specific to objects and hence relative. As Ann Ramenofsky astutely observed many years ago, ‘Einstein’s time is a “flexiband” where distinctions of past, present and future no longer make sense. Archaeological time is closer conceptually to Newtonian time. Time is continuous, linear and nonreversible.’14 Much of the recent work on time in archaeology actually comes closer to Einstein’s flexiband notion of time, though we must be careful in over-stating the similarities, as I will discuss in more detail below. But, where once physical time seemed like a straightforward thing – singular, regular, forward moving and aloof to all the vicissitudes of earthly doings, it has now crumbled almost into nothing, in large part thanks to Einstein’s theories of relativity. Indeed, as Peter Galison has pointed out, it is an irony that Einstein’s theory of time and relativity emerged within and was almost certainly informed by the wider project of co-ordinating a universal time across the globe during the late 19th and early 20th century.15 That the very practices and protocols which were

Time matters 21

developed to synchronize clocks to create a singularized time, depended on constructing simultaneity and the recognition that all time was in fact, local. There is no such thing as absolute or singular time. And since Einstein, time has only suffered even more cuts. The twin pillars of modern physics – relativity and quantum theory – together have pulled time apart at its seams.16 Time has no unity; it has a different rhythm in different places and passes slowly or quickly relative to the effects of gravity. Time literally passes more quickly on mountain peaks than on the plains, even if the differences are minute. Time can dilate and contract. Because of the relativity of time to place, there is also no such thing as the present. Relativity theory speaks of an extended present, a zone within which things appear to happen at the same time, but again, always relative to an observer or object. For humans on earth, events on a distant planet lasting 15 minutes would appear only as a moment to us observing them from the earth. There is no way to talk about the present between any two places as the same time – it simply makes no sense under relativity theory. Indeed, the conventional rendering of time in relativity is the block universe model in which there is no flow of time from past, present and future; all are equally co-present, which is to say, the universe is essentially timeless or a static block of spacetime. The experience we have of time flowing is simply a localised illusion. Not all physicists accept this model however, and in fact there are tensions between time as portrayed in relativity and as it is described in thermodynamics. Under thermodynamics, there is a flow of time due to entropy: the fact that things inevitably move from a state of order to disorder. As archaeologists we are acutely aware of this process as objects and former organisms slowly decay and disintegrate. Entropy, as a recognized physical process, presents a real problem for the block universe model, especially when this is paired with cosmological accounts of the expansion of the universe from the big bang. How can we talk about a history of the universe if time does not really exist? Indeed, there is much debate on these issues among physicists, some invoking entropy as a spoiler for the block universe model, others trying to square entropy with relativity by other means. The physicist Lee Smolin, for example, largely adopts the first approach and has recently put on a spirited defence of time and argued that it needs to be re-integrated into physics. Rather than make time simply a variable of physical laws – the ‘t’ in those equations, which in some cases can be dispensed with, Smolin argues that the laws of physics themselves should be seen as historical and time dependent.17 In contrast, Julian Barbour is perhaps one of the best defenders of the block universe model, arguing that the universe is timeless and that at the sub-atomic level time no longer exists.18 Although we perceive time as moving only in one direction, past to future, this is a product of what quantum physics calls macroscopic ‘blurring’; at the microscopic level, there is no distinction between past and future. As we can see, despite the fact that Einsteinian time has superseded Newtonian time in modern physics, there are still problems that suggest all is not quite right, especially when we throw thermodynamics into the mix. But what of the other strand: human, experiential time? It may not have dissolved in a loop of quantum

22 Time matters

gravity or congealed into a block universe, but nor is it quite so unified as Bergson portrayed it. Indeed, from early on, psychologists were suggesting that the unbroken continuity of time that Bergson argued for was also an illusion created in the conscious mind. Gaston Bachelard, another famous French philosopher was deeply opposed to Bergson’s philosophy and argued that time was fundamentally discontinuous. For Bachelard, the instant was not an abstraction from duration, rather duration was derivative of the instant.19 Strategically though, Bachelard fought Bergson on his own ground; instead of invoking relativity theory and Einsteinian time, Bachelard drew on research in the psychology of time to show how the subjective experience of time as continuous was something learnt, something produced as the mind developed.20 In particular, Bachelard’s discussion of temporal superpositions suggested that time operated at different rhythms within the psyche which while the conscious mind managed to smooth over, in the unconscious and especially in dreams, were manifest as temporal dislocations reflecting this deep discontinuity. In Freudian psychology moreover, the unconscious was timeless.21 Since Bachelard, work on the psychology and neuroscience of time has only reinforced these arguments and suggest that our experience and perception of time is actually built on multiple, different internal ‘clocks’ which have discontinuity at their heart.22 The standard model is known as SET or scalar expectancy theory which has developed largely in relation to animal behaviour but is also applied to humans. The model postulates three layers: a pacemaker or clock which tracks time moment to moment, a short-term or working memory which gathers information from immediate experience and a long-term or reference memory which stores up important information from past experience. Decision-making processes which include the sense of expectation or anticipation basically work off the information gathered in short- and long-term memory. Let’s start with the elementary unit of temporal experience – that sense of the moment: William James’ specious present, Edmund Husserl’s now;23 what does it involve? Research points to the human ‘now’ lasting about three seconds: it is the shortest unit of time over which we have a sense of a persistent, coherent and unified present. Beyond that, and we enter a new ‘now’. Take those classic gestalt figures beloved of textbooks illustrating the role of expectation on observation; is this a rabbit or a duck? Well, it turns out the time it takes to switch from one view to the other is about three seconds. We can of course discriminate differences in time in less than three seconds – our brains in fact can perceive change at rates of c. 30 milliseconds or 40 Hz; anything of higher frequency than that and our brains would perceive them as simultaneous. Most modern frame rates on video, TV or cinema run at c. 50 Hz which is why they seem continuous; any slower and they would start to appear jerky. It is also the reason my teenage son seems obsessed with FPS counts (frames per second) and refresh rates with his gaming console and monitor; higher numbers mean a more ‘real-time’ experience. Even if three seconds is the limit for a perceptual ‘now’, we still experience time as continuous at longer stretches; that movie whose frames flicker at 50 Hz can take up to two hours to watch and it can feel like a more or less continual

Time matters 23

experience. This is where short-term memory comes in, stitching together those nows for periods of between 18 and 30 seconds and acting as a bridge to long-term memory which ideally, can last a lifetime. As models go, this has a lot going for it; one can do all kinds of experiments which support the idea of these different systems, although there is no consensus on what the physiological basis of such an internal clock might be. Indeed, at the neurological level, it seems clear there are no pacemakers. The only generally acknowledged internal clock that humans and other animals possess is the circadian clock set to a roughly 24-hour cycle; I say roughly because individuals vary resulting in those famous chronotypes, the early riser and late sleeper. But the theories about the pacemaker clock are more contentious; some link to our physiology would seem evident as it is clear that quickened breathing or heart rates are correlated with experiences of time dilation or compression. Moreover, studies on time perception by animals seems to show a correlation between metabolic rate, body size and temporal thresholds. For example, dogs perceive change at much higher resolution that humans which is why a dog always seems to be one step ahead of us in ball games. Yet even within this basic experience there is variation, especially between heard and seen time, or even within seen time insofar as we perceive colour and shape 50 milliseconds before movement, which suggests that even at the level of the pacemaker, we are not necessarily dealing with a single system. Furthermore, it is not entirely clear how integrated the three systems of pacemaker, short- and long-term memory are either. In other words, for many scholars, our experience of time is more fractured than we like to suppose. Clearly our experience of time – even if it appears to be seamless and continuous, is anything but. Even the early time philosophers such as Bergson, James and Husserl stressed the distinction between our experience of time passing – which was an extended present – and the more conscious act of recollection or expectation. The shading of past, present and future that we experience as a moving ‘now’ is not at all the same juxtaposition of past, present and future that we conceptualize in conscious thought. But even the experience of a moving ‘now’ – Bergson’s contemporaneous flows of duration – is not seemingly as unified an experience as Bergson made out but is rather based on the imbrication of shortterm memory and our pacemaker. And moreover, just because events are experienced as continuous to us, does not mean that organisms with differently constructed time-perception will see it so.

The materiality of time So what might we carry away from this, admittedly hasty and very broad-brushed survey of contemporary thinking on time in physics and psychology? Well, for a start, it is clear that both physical and felt time are plagued by multiplicity and discontinuity. Between time as it occurs in relativity, thermodynamics and quantum mechanics; between time as marked in the neurological and physiological mechanisms related to pacemakers and short- and long-term memory. Conversely

24 Time matters

though, the differences between physical time and felt time are not as stark. Time dilation is not something that just happens under different velocities and gravitational forces; it also happens in moments of extreme boredom. Life is full of experiences where our sense of time expands or contracts depending on the nature of the experience. A week in a new environment feels a lot longer than a week at home in a regular routine. Moreover, the distinction between present, past and future are not just dependent on the distance between two objects in spacetime, creating a variably extended present; they also depend on the ability of our brain to register changes. Just as two events separated by ten minutes on Mars appear simultaneous to us here on earth, so two events separated by less than 20 milliseconds will appear simultaneous to us, but not to creatures whose time-perception thresholds are lower. However, although important, we must be careful not to overplay these similarities; the time dilation experienced during moments of fun is not the same phenomenon as time dilation due to the effects of gravity or travelling close to the speed of light. What is however, common to this recognition of the multiplicities and discontinuities of both felt time and physical time, is their intimate connection to their respective materialities; that temporal multiplicity is bound up with the material multiplicity of reality, whether our bodies or other objects. Time is inextricably bound to gravity, to entropy, to synaptic connections. Ramenofsky, who I quoted earlier, preceded her statement by stating that ‘time is a physical process that has no physical existence … We cannot touch, taste or smell time. It is conceptual.’24 At one level, this seems intuitively correct; time is an abstract concept and rather than being an object of experience like a chair or blade of grass, it frames that experience; in Kantian terms, it is a category of understanding, not a perceptual object. The same idea underlines this notion of time as a field or container within which objects and events occur. Yet surely what these accounts from contemporary physics and psychology demonstrate is that time is fundamentally physical or material; that time is not something which clocks or experience express, but more as something which these things create. Ultimately, it is through recognizing the materiality of time – that things make time rather than exist in it – that this tension between physical and felt time finally dissolves. For me, this is the key lesson that emerges from this survey. That if we bring time down to earth and relate it to concrete materialities, then the philosophical opposition of natural and cultural time or physical and felt time, begins to dissolve. Another way of expressing this is to say that time is what time does. In ancient Greek, there were typically two words for time: kairos and chronos. In archaeology (and other contexts), this opposition has sometimes been regarded more generally as that between concrete experiential or social time in opposition to the abstract time of sequence. But I think this glosses over a more subtle point about kairos and chronos: their distinction is better understood when both are seen as referring to time as verb than a noun, as timing rather than time. The idea of timing as a process gets much closer to what this distinction hinges upon. Timing can mean a measure of duration, such as timing a race to see how fast someone runs; this is

Time matters 25

chronos. Although we use clocks to perform this, any repetitive act can serve as a measure. Chronos should not be confused with clock time. But timing can also mean a calculation of when to do something, such as timing your leap at the right (or wrong) moment as you jump over a hurdle; this is kairos. Moreover, these two senses of timing are not in opposition or mutual exclusion; for example, when starting a race, timing is implicated in both senses. When I shout ‘go!’, then the runners have to be ready and start at that moment – too early and they are disqualified, too late and they risk losing. Getting the timing (kairos) right is important. When I shout ‘go!’, I also begin my stopwatch and so commences the timing (chronos) of the race. This verbal or processual definition of time also keeps it more closely wedded to the specific materialities with which it is connected. Things don’t exist in time, they make time. The immediate consequences of this are clear: time is not one thing, or even two things – physical and felt time – but many things. Time is multiple. Moreover, once we accept this, it should be clear that archaeological time should not be shoe-horned into a metaphysics of either physical or felt time; that if we want to understand what archaeological time is, then all we need to do is pay attention to how time is made through archaeology. What kinds of time do archaeological materialities produce? And just as we should not expect any unity to the physical or psychological notions of time, so we should no more expect to see such unity in archaeology. Archaeological time is not one thing, or two things – but many things. Even chronology and archaeological dating, often taken as the paradigm of natural or physical time in archaeology, is not one thing but a stitched together, composite weave of multiple temporalities. It is only because a great deal of work and effort has gone into making this composite time appear singular and unified, that we fail to see the obvious. Indeed, it is precisely this work that I attempt to unravel in the next chapter, exposing the multiplicity that lies beneath our notion of a singular chronology. Following this in subsequent chapters, I trace other discontinuities and multiplicities in archaeological time, drawing out the various ways in which time is materialized in archaeology. I explore the concepts of time scale, of periodization, of contemporaneity and narrative and how time in these contexts is also multiple and discontinuous and how our attempts to patch up these discontinuities and unite these multiplicities usually leads us into trouble. In short, this book is an attempt to celebrate the diversity of time but more than that, embed time in an archaeological materiality. In this way, I think we can not only develop an autochthonous sense of time in archaeology, but also one that might – in however small a way – rebound back into these larger philosophical debates.

Notes 1 See B. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), for perhaps one of the most well-known in a long line of critiques of western binary thinking; for archaeology more specifically, see J. Thomas, Archaeology and Modernity (London: Routledge, 2004). 2 H. Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 1999).

26 Time matters

3 See P. Galison, Einstein’s Clocks and Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003); V. Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time 1870–1950 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015). 4 H. Poincaré, ‘The Measure of Time’, in The Foundations of Science. New York: The Science Press, 1933), p. 233. 5 H. Poincaré, ‘Le mesure du temps’, Revue de métaphysique et de morale 6 (1898): 1–13; see Poincaré, ‘The Measure of Time’, for translation. 6 For example, see H. Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell (London: Macmillan, 1964); H. Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1994) and H. Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (New York: Dover, 2001). 7 The session was published in Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie, volume 22, no. 3 (July 1922), pp. 102–113. A translation of the debate can be found in Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity. For the general background and context of the debate, I have drawn on the work by J. Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate that Changed Our Understanding of Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). 8 Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, p. 30. 9 This was one of Poincaré’s arguments in his 1898 paper – that any ‘intuition’ we have of time is really illusory and rather derivative of our time-measuring devices. See Poincaré, ‘Le mesure du temps’; Poincaré, ‘The Measure of Time’ in The Foundations of Science, 1913. 10 J. Fabian, Time and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 11 H. White, ‘The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality’, Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (1980). 12 D. Chakrabarty, ‘Anthropocene Time’, History and Theory 57, no. 1 (2018). 13 See Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, Chapter 4. 14 A. Ramenofsky, ‘The Illusion of Time’, in A. Ramenofsky and A. Steffen (eds), Unit Issues in Archaeology: Measuring Time, Space, and Material (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1998), p. 78. 15 Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, p. 292. 16 The discussion that follows is largely built on the recent book by physicist Carlo Rovelli (The Order of Time, London: Penguin, 2008,), although Rovelli does not discuss thermodynamics much in this work, arguably this represents yet a third strand of physics and in some ways, all three fields – relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics – give very different perspectives on time. See for example, J. Al-Khalili, The World According to Physics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020). 17 See J. Smolin, Time Reborn: From the Crisis of Physics to the Future of the Universe (London: Penguin, 2013), which runs through some complex arguments for re-habilitating time. Smolin draws heavily on cosmological arguments and thermodynamics, which if nothing else, certainly highlight the fractures between different domains within modern physics regarding time. 18 See J. Barbour, The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 19 One of Bachelard’s first works, Intuition of the Instant, was a spirited defence of a discontinuous time, based on philosophical and psychological arguments though also drawing inspiration from relativity and quantum theory. See G. Bachelard, Intuition of the Instant, trans. E. Rizo-Patron (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, [1932] 2013). 20 G. Bachelard, Dialectic of Duration, trans. M. McAllester Jones (Manchester: Clinamen Press [1950] 2000); the later work, Dialectic of Duration, was a more extended refutation of Bergson and drew even more widely on psychology. 21 For example, see A. Green, Time in Psychoanalysis: Some Contradictory Aspects (London and New York: Free Association Books, 2002). 22 In what follows, I draw primarily from work by Marc Wittman (Felt Time: The Science of How We Experience Time, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017) and Dean Buonomano (Your

Time matters 27

Brain is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018). 23 W. James, The Principle of Psychology (New York: H. Holt & Company, 1893); E. Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (Bloomington: Indiana, 1966). 24 Ramenofsky, ‘The Illusion of Time’, p. 78.

References Al-Khalili, J. The World According to Physics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020. Bachelard, G. Dialectic of Duration. Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000. Bachelard, G. Intuition of the Instant. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013. Barbour, J. The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Bergson, H. Creative Evolution, translated by A. Mitchell. London: Macmillan, 1964. Bergson, H. Matter and Memory, translated by N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1994. Bergson, H. Duration and Simultaneity. Manchester: Clinamen Press, 1999. Bergson, H. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. New York: Dover, 2001. Buonomano, D. Your Brain is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018. Canales, J. The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. Chakrabarty, D. ‘Anthropocene Time’. History and Theory 57, no. 1 (2018): 5–32. Fabian, J. Time and the Other. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Galison, P. Einstein’s Clocks and Poincaré’s Maps: Empires of Time. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003. Green, A. Time in Psychoanalysis: Some Contradictory Aspects. London and New York: Free Association Books, 2002. Husserl, E. The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966. James, W. The Principles of Psychology. New York: H. Holt & Company, 1893. Latour, B. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Ogle, V. The Global Transformation of Time 1870–1950. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015. Poincaré, H. ‘La mesure du temps’. Revue de métaphysique et de morale 6 (1898): 1–13. Poincaré, H. ‘The Measure of Time’. In The Foundations of Science. New York: The Science Press, 1913, pp. 223–234. Ramenofsky, A. ‘The Illusion of Time’. In A. Ramenofsky, and A. Steffen (eds), Unit Issues in Archaeology: Measuring Time, Space, and Material. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1998. Rovelli, C. The Order of Time. London: Penguin, 2018. Smolin, L. Time Reborn: From the Crisis of Physics to the Future of the Universe. London: Penguin, 2013. Thomas, J. Archaeology and Modernity. London: Routledge, 2004. White, H. ‘The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality’. Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (1980): 5–27. Wittman, M. Felt Time: The Science of How We Experience Time. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017.

2 THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL CLOCK

Absolute chronology I was walking along the beach the other day with my family and one of my children picked up a water-rolled fragment of a glass bottle; knowing I was an archaeologist, he ran to me and asked me how old it was. I took it from him, turned it around and examined it carefully; after a few moments I said ‘Oh, not that old, about a hundred years at the most’. I am not sure if he was impressed or not – either by my performance or its antiquity, but he kept the piece and later used it to decorate a sandcastle. This desire to know the age of things is of course fundamental to archaeology and how we manage to work this out is not always easy. With that glass fragment on the beach, it was the tell-tale signs of machine production that gave it away and sometimes, especially with more recent objects, they even come with their own date stamp. Not long before this incident on the beach, I had been analysing an assemblage of finds from a U.S. Army base in Iceland occupied during the Second World War and some of the beer bottles found there had codes on the bases that revealed the exact year (and place) of manufacture. Dating them was easy, but only because more diligent scholars than me had already put in the hard work of trawling through archives which helped to decipher what these codes meant. If only all finds came with a date stamp. I suppose the larger point here is that this desire to know the age of things is about being specific; it is not enough to know something is old, or even very old – we want to know how old. Age can of course be expressed in many ways; instead of telling my son that glass fragment was about a hundred years old, I might have said it was made around the time his grandmother was born. In this case, age is not specifically associated with how old in years his grandmother is but simply that she is older than him and me. It works off a relative scale. Any sense of age in years will be

The archaeological clock 29

impressionistic and even for children as old as my son, who was ten at the time, connecting the notion of birth order (i.e., succession) and age (i.e., duration in years), is commonly still not fully developed.1 This distinction between age as a relative order of succession and age as duration basically corresponds with the archaeological distinction between relative and absolute chronologies. Relative scales have formed the core of archaeological chronologies but all they do is provide a sequence: it tells you x came before y. The classic exemplar of this is stratigraphy: the superposition of layers in the ground are read as a sequence of events, where bottom is earliest and top is latest. Now this method works fine for many purposes as we can produce relative chronologies across large areas, even continents; the Three Age System that was developed in the early 19th century by a Danish antiquarian and which divided prehistory into a Stone, Bronze and Iron Age was a European-wide relative chronology and one that still largely frames disciplinary thinking today. But there is one thing a relative chronology cannot do: it cannot measure duration. It excels at finding sequences, but ask it how many years that layer represents, or how long the Iron Age lasted – and it cannot tell you. For that we need an absolute chronology, which in common talk, boils down to dates. An absolute chronology is effectively any system of dating which allows us to peg a calendar date on an event. For a long time, archaeology had real difficulty with this. Three hundred years ago, most educated Europeans including the likes of Kepler, Newton and Descartes, thought human and indeed earth history covered not more than 6,000 years. This time span was of course drawn from biblical chronologies, the most famous of which was developed by Archbishop Ussher in the mid-17th century who calculated that genesis began on 23 October 4004 BC.2 I have always liked that date as it happens to be my birthday (the month, not the year!). Although Ussher also adds that time itself, began on the day before the 23rd. The beginning of time. Now there is a thought – but one we might leave for later. Ussher’s methods and indeed those of other scholars who had attempted similar calculations relied heavily on the genealogical succession and the chronicle of events listed in the Old Testament starting with Adam and Eve begat Cain and Abel and so forth. When the acknowledgement of deep time and a long chronology was established in the last quarter of the 19th century, the methods of absolute dating did not really change that much well into the 20th century. That is, the main source of getting absolute dates was by triangulating between written sources, archaeological evidence and the modern calendar. This is important because it is all too easy to dismiss Ussher’s calculations as pre-scientific, but Flinders Petrie used similar principles for cross-dating in the early 20th century. By the mid-18th century, several scholars were already suggesting a longer time scale for an earth before humans. Buffon’s estimates of 75,000 years suddenly increased the timescale tenfold and a century later, new estimates ranged in the millions. By the late 19th century, the acceptance of Darwinian evolution and the confirmed association of human tools with extinct fauna enforced the recognition that human history was connected to the development of other life on the planet

30 The archaeological clock

and therefore of considerably greater antiquity than previously imagined.3 Many archaeologists resisted this extension of deep time into a deep history, or what became known as prehistory, but they are now mostly forgotten and written out of or marginalized in histories of archaeology.4 By 1900, the archaeological clock of deep time – conceptually even if not practically – was well established. Actual estimates in calendar years however varied a lot but a common date for the first tools and human ancestors was c. 0.5 million years ago. But it is one thing to recognize a vast period before written history, quite another to estimate how much time we are talking about. The usual methods which relied on recorded history might not seem much use for periods before written sources although archaeologists continued to use them for later prehistory well into the 20th century. In part, this was due to the integration of new textual sources such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mesopotamian cuneiform. Methods of cross-dating, developed by Flinders Petrie in the early 20th century, used objects associated with dated inscriptions in Egypt to date other contexts in the eastern Mediterranean where the same objects occurred as imports; linking up these objects with others, allowed a chain of dating associations to be extended across Europe. However, the further along the chain, the more weak the associations became and when the first C14 dates started to come out for northwestern Europe in the 1960s, they revealed errors of up to 2,000 years in the orthodox chronology.5 The first half of the 20th century saw various attempts to develop alternative methods of absolute dating which culminated in the use of C14. I am always a little wary in overplaying technological or methodological advances but at the same time, perhaps today we also take too much for granted the impact C14 had on archaeology. It was momentous and still is; many claim we are in the midst of a third radiocarbon revolution now with the use of Bayesian modelling.6 I will return to this later in the chapter but for now, I want to rather reflect on the deeper view of time that C14 inherits. Let us remind ourselves what we are talking about when we talk about an absolute chronology such that C14 affords us. As I mentioned, it is, in practice, about assigning dates by which I mean years; if we want to nit-pick here, the passage of years is no more absolute than the superposition of layers. A year is a span of time relative to the motion of the earth around the sun. But a year on Jupiter is equivalent to 12 years on earth. All dating systems are relative and you don’t need to be an Einstein to figure that one out. On the other hand, there is no archaeology on Jupiter – unless we consider space probes as archaeology and in fact, given the increasing amount of anthropogenic junk floating around in space, this is not such a stretch as some have argued. Indeed, space archaeology is increasingly a real subject of study.7 But, practically speaking, since most archaeological work is still confined to planet Earth, using the solar year as a contingent or strategic definition of absolute time should not be too worrying. In fact, more relevant that being absolute, is the fact that the intervals between years are regular – more or less. I will come back to this more-or-less later. What

The archaeological clock 31

really distinguishes a chronology based on say stratigraphy, from one based on the solar year, is that the duration of the units of succession in stratigraphy are unknown and in fact most likely uneven. One layer may have accumulated over ten years, another been deposited in a day. As a result, duration is simply abstracted out to leave pure sequence. In math-speak, relative dating just gives us an ordinal series; sequence is all that matters. But with what we call absolute dating, the duration of each unit – the year – is known and more importantly, it is regular. It offers us an interval series, giving us both sequence and duration. It is this regularity which enhances its metrological status – its ability to act as a measure, like a giant clock. So when we talk about absolute chronologies, we are talking about dating methods which can be directly or indirectly linked to the solar year as a standard unit of measure. Written documents do this of course, but so do various natural phenomena. The oldest alternative methods to written sources rely on natural events which leave an annual and cumulative trace – such as varves in glacial lake sediments or growth rings in tree trunks; these were developed as dating techniques in the late 19th and early 20th century.8 So long as you can tie the sequence into the calendrical system, you are good to go – more or less. The problem with these methods is their restricted scope; varve chronology only works in glacial regions; dendrochronology only works if you have wood and the right kind of wood. As any archaeologist knows, wood does not preserve too well unless it is charred or burnt. The reason why C14 has become the standard and most widespread method of absolute dating is because it does not suffer from these limitations; so long as you have any organic-based material, you can get a C14 date. Almost any archaeological site, anywhere on earth, will probably have something that can be carbon dated such as bones, seeds, wood, shells. But C14 doesn’t works like varves or tree rings – it does not have a tempo which matches the solar year; but it does have a tempo which can be defined in relation to a solar year, namely its decay rate which is typically expressed as its half-life – the years it takes an atom of C14 to lose half its energy value. C14 is just one of several isotopes used in radiometric dating but its usefulness for archaeology is due to the fact that it is found in organic materials and that its half-life of c. 5,730 years means it is good for dating anything from the past 50,000 years. But of course, it is still not quite that simple. A whole host of factors need to be considered from the archaeological context of the sample to the calibration of the C14 date. I don’t want this to turn into a 101 on radiocarbon, so let me just remind you that getting a calendar date using C14 always involves a lot of work in what might be called ‘chronometric hygiene’; this was a term that was originally devised in the context of resolving dating issues around C14 in Polynesia,9 but it can be more widely used to cover any and all work needed to turn a C14 sample – that bit of bone for example – into a robust and reliable calendrical date. And if we have learnt one thing over the past 50 years of using C14, it is that the work involved in chronometric hygiene has increased quite substantially. Atmospheric variation, reservoir effects, isotopic fractionation – these and other factors all have to be taken into account.

32 The archaeological clock

And yet this should really come as no surprise. The fundamental task of chronometric hygiene is to make two very different systems of measuring time, align. What we are effectively doing is trying to stitch together the tempo of a radioactive clock with the tempo of the solar year so they are synchronized. This is much harder than we originally thought – but it is possible, albeit still hedged by probabilities. Such work in fact, is the very essence of any modern chronology and points to a deep, underlying desire for a singular temporality. Nature and society are replete with cycles and processes of different tempos; yet the need to bring them together under a single system of time reckoning is very specific to modern western culture and science. The sociologist Norbert Elias was one of the first scholars to write about the socially constructed nature of time and his book on the subject is a little gem.10 In it, he expresses much the same idea – that modern time-reckoning systems are characterized by an increasing drive toward synthesis and synchronization. Elias framed his discussion in broader, universalist terms than I would, also linking it to his more general thesis on the ‘civilizing process’ through restraint and self-control. But read more parochially as a characterization of the Western European construction of time since the 16th century, it has much to recommend it. It does seem to me that perhaps one of the most hidden aspects of an absolute chronology is its singularity – not the fact that it is linear or abstract, as is so often touted. It presents time as a single, unified phenomenon. The synchronization of our various archaeological clocks, like C14, dendrochronology, thermoluminescence, all require a great deal of effort and like the engineers and technicians who worked toward the creation of a Coordinated Universal Time in the late 19th and early 20th century, this singular time is not natural but artificial. It is a construct. We almost intuitively think there is just one time. Although we have different ways of measuring it, such as clocks and calendars, as well as acknowledging that different objects and processes operate at different tempos, for all that, time itself is singular. Yet as we saw quite clearly with the work of chronometric hygiene, such singularization is an achievement, depending on the work of trying to synchronize different temporalities. At the heart of singularization is the work of creating simultaneity, as we saw in the last chapter. If we forget this and regard singularization as an inherent property of time, then it has all kinds of consequences, one of which is to encourage us to think of history as similarly singular. Even if we can accept that different events and sequences take place in different parts of the world, there is still just one historical or world time. In this chapter I want to dig deeper into this notion of singularity and explore its social and historical roots. This might be a familiar story, but I think it is always worth repeating since it effectively underlies the principles of chronometric hygiene for C14 and other methods of absolute dating used in archaeology.

The singularization of time In characterizing the singularization of time as constructed, all I mean is that it is not a natural or given feature of time but something that has been produced. But

The archaeological clock 33

calling it constructed is not to demean it; it actually involved a lot of work and still does, as we saw with C14. There are two key historical phases to this process of singularization that I want to explore here; one involving the dominance of the anno domini calendrical system in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries, the other involving the alignment of calendrical and clock time during the 18th and 19th centuries. Just look at the clock on your phone or computer; there are almost always two times: a clock and a calendar date. They are distinct yet also integrated; we know that when the clock passes 23:59, the calendrical date will change in synchronization. Yet how did this happen? Again, there is nothing natural about it and in fact the two systems don’t need to be tied together, they can operate perfectly happily independently. If we don’t recognize this, it is simply because we have become so used to the idea of a singular time. Let me start with calendrical dates. In everyday life, bridging past and present is never really a problem; that is what memory does automatically. Memory has its problems for sure, but it is a readymade faculty we have for relating past and present even if, as we saw in the last chapter, it is anything but simple. But the relevant issue here is how we bridge the past and present in contexts that lie outside personal memory since this is the realm that archaeology largely deals with. The most common way throughout human history has been through what we call social or collective memory: the transmission across generations of personal memories through storytelling and other performances or material inscriptions which no doubt become stylized and modified over time.11 Such methods may or may not be concerned with measuring time depth in any quantifiable way; but for those that were – and here, we are generally talking about societies with characteristics usually attributed to states – the most common solution was the development of calendrical time.12 Calendrical time refers to the measurement of time in years; most commonly this was measured in relation to the reigning period of a monarch, or patriarch, but many societies using regnal calendars, also developed solar and lunar calendars. However, these solar and lunar calendars were not commonly used to measure historical time in themselves, even if they were related. It was precisely such regnal calendars that allowed Ussher to build his 6,000-year chronology or Flinders Petrie to develop his method of cross-dating. Today, although we might still use regnal time, the standard method of marking historical time is through the Gregorian calendar based on the anno domini system.13 That is, all historical events are situated in relation to years AD or BC. Today, most of us perceive the Gregorian calendar as largely secular even if we recognize the vestiges of its Christian origins; replacing AD and BC with CE and BCE just makes this recognition more explicit – but it doesn’t alter the system itself and the reference point of Christ’s birth. The exceptions include some scientific dating such as C14 which uses BP – before present, where the present is defined as 1950. But even with C14, dates are more often than not converted – and calibrated – into the Gregorian calendar, simply because it has become for us, the most natural way to read historical time.

34 The archaeological clock

Calendrical time and the anno domini system The anno domini system began to be used from the 9th century CE in Europe, though by no means was it exclusive or even dominant. Regnal calendars remained in use well into the early modern period as any historian can tell you. Administrative documents were commonly dated in reference to the year of the reigning monarch, the regnal year usually calculated from the date of accession to the throne. For England, Cheyney’s Handbook of Dates is a key resource for converting regnal dates into contemporary chronology. Many other examples of material culture also exhibit this feature. Coins are a relatively common archaeological find and we often think of these as great dating fossils; while the first European coin with an anno domini date is a Danish silver penning from the 13th century, these in fact remained rare until the 16th century. It was during the 16th century that our modern dating system started to be used more systematically on a whole range of objects, not just documents and coins. The archaeologist Harold Mytum has explored the growth of anno domini dates on a variety of objects in Britain, from church bells to chests, from gravestones to glassware, showing a common and consistent trend across all objects.14 The use of such dates begins in the 16th century but shows a marked increase over the 17th century peaking in the early 18th century. It suggests that between the middle of the 16th and the middle of the 18th century, the anno domini system rapidly spread across all areas of life to become a dominant way of marking time, replacing the regnal system. Mytum discusses this change as one of the rise and dominance of a linear view of time, linked to an emergent, new middle class seeking to distinguish itself from an older aristocracy, where a different temporal regime was in use – one that drew on the concept of patina and antiquity, as first suggested by Grant McCracken.15 There is no doubt that this period saw major changes in the perception of time, one which was also linked to the increasing use of clocks. I will come to clocks in a moment, but first I think it important to clarify what is at stake here. I tend to be very wary of some temporal oppositions and that between linear and cyclical time probably tops my list. One often hears of modern, scientific or western time described as linear as opposed to the cyclical time of traditional societies. This has never made much sense to me; our modern calendar is based on the solar year, an annual cycle, while I have no doubt almost any society in history could conceptualise time as linear in certain contexts such as generational succession or simply growing old. Even as a more particular description of historical time it does not ring true; regnal calendars imply a linear time while cyclical notions of history are not hard to find in modern, western historical discourse, Spengler and Toynbee being prime exemplars. Another obfuscating opposition is that of abstract versus substantial time, especially when attached to the western/non-western or modern/medieval distinction. But this too is problematic. For example, we often tend to think of an abstract notion of time as something that emerged with modern science – Newton’s absolutes of space and time – or capitalism, but it is much older. Hayden White, in reflecting on the structure of early medieval annals, suggested there was a conscious

The archaeological clock 35

distinction between a secular notion of time as devoid of meaning and the Christian eschatology which underwrote the anno domini system.16 Using the example of the Annals of St Gall written in the 8th–10th century, he notes the list of dates on the left side with events on the right – but draws our attention to the empty years (Figure 2.1). He argues that the significance of this was precisely to underline the indifference of a secular passing of time; even if it used the anno domini system of marking time, this does not mean a Christian cosmology suffused the annals – anymore than it does when we use it. One can disconnect them. This is not to suggest medieval monks anticipated Newton by several centuries; Newtonian abstract time is different to this kind of abstract time. The important aspect here is not that they are both abstract, but the rationale behind the abstraction. For the annalist, the passing of years depicts that sometimes things happened, sometimes they didn’t; the blank years did not concern the annalist because the fullness of secular history is given by the tally of years not the events. Indeed, the very indifference of secular time drew its force in opposition to other meanings of time, especially divine time or eternity on the one hand (aeternitas) and the

709. Hard winter. Duke Gottfried died. 710. Hard year and deficient in crops. 711. 712. Flood everywhere. 713. 714. Pippin, Mayor of the Palace, died. 715. 716. 717. 718. Charles devastated the Saxon with great destruction. 719. 720. Charles fought against the Saxons. 721. Theudo drove the Saracens out of Aquitaine. 722. Great crops. 723. 724. 725. Saracens came for the first time. 726. 727. 728. 729. 730. 731. Blessed Bede, the presbyter, died. 732. Charles fought against the Saracens at Poitiers on Saturday. 733. 734. FIGURE 2.1

Extract from the Annals of St Gall.

36 The archaeological clock

timeliness of divine acts on the other (kairos) – the latter of which in some ways, can be seen as the intersection of eternity with secular time. It helps to unpack these terms a little more because even if medieval annalists and modern archaeologists both use a notion of abstract time rendered in the anno domini system, they carry slightly different connotations because of their relation to other temporal concepts. Take eternity – when we use the term today, it usually has no theological connotations and in fact typically means endless time – time of infinite duration. But medieval Latin had another word for that – sempiternal. Eternal rather means simply outside of time – although actually, there is nothing simple about that concept at all and in fact there was a lot of debate during the 17th century on the issue of infinite time in relation to space, matter and God, exemplified in the correspondence between Henry More and Descartes.17 The other term, kairos, we don’t have a decent word in English for but it broadly means ‘timeliness’. The distinction between time as simply passing and time as timeliness was inherited from Greek thought and the difference between chronos and kairos, which I discussed in the previous chapter. As I mentioned there, we can appreciate this distinction better when we think of time as a verb rather than a noun – as in two meanings of the phrase ‘timing’. Timing can simply mean marking the time, as in counting the minutes it takes to read this page. This is chronos. But timing can also mean choosing the right moment to act – for someone wanting to pause their reading, it may about choosing that moment appropriately. This is kairos. Reflecting on our contemporary concept of abstract time as we might typically use it in archaeological chronology then, it is not eternity or timeliness that immediately spring to mind as opposites. Rather it would more likely be something like subjective or experienced time – indeed this was the whole basis of my discussion in the last chapter. As a result, abstract time for us has slightly different connotations, captured in the related distinction between objective and subjective time, or physical and felt or psychological time which are not the same oppositions as chronos and kairos, or secular time and eternity. Our abstract time is caught up in a very different cosmology and metaphysics when humanity and the individual replaces the polis or God as the measure of all things. And this now brings us back to all those different objects with dates on them, that Mytum helpfully drew our attention to. I would suggest that what they signal is not so much an increasing emphasis or stress on linear or abstract time, but a notion of historical time which took its meaning not in tension with divine time, but in tension with the time of the individual: the singularity of the human life span. Look at what all the dates were used for; to link an object with a person. It is no coincidence that dates on objects frequently occur with initials or names, just as they do on documents: in Mytum’s examples, church bells, datestones, gravestones, furniture and tablewares. The inscriptions act to situate a particular individual within historical time. They engendered a new sense of historical consciousness, one where the individual could co-ordinate their life within a broader timescale that was not mediated by a ruling monarch. The connection to the rise of

The archaeological clock 37

individualism during this period is too obvious to need emphasizing, even if individualism is itself, a somewhat problematic concept.18 Another way to frame the adoption of the anno domini system is that it democratized time; it enabled people to have a direct, and unmediated relation to history which regnal time did not. Yet it is important to remember that even the anno domini system is essentially still a regnal calendar – the only difference is that it acknowledges only one reign, that of God incarnate, that is, Jesus Christ. All time and history hinges around him. It is a regnal system distilled to one referent. We might call it a mono-regnal calendar. This means that you also never have to reset the clock to year one, whereas in poly-regnal calendars, this happens every time there is a change of ruler. The singularizing effect of this distillation should not go un-noticed. Nor should the fact that just as under the Reformation, individual access to God was being promoted over the mediation of the Church, so the adoption of the anno domini calendar over other regnal calendars expressed the ability of individuals to relate themselves directly to a notion of historical time without the mediation of secular rulers. Paradoxically, the Christian calendar was crucial to the development of our modern secular notion of time.

Clocks and the co-ordination of calendrical and quotidian time If the anno domini system enabled the conception of a singular historical time to emerge, it was only in conjunction with the rise of individualism that it started to become the dominant framework. After all, the system had been in use since the 9th century, but regnal calendars tended to dominate, especially for secular histories. It was not until the 15th and 16th century that chronicles of events using the anno domini system started to proliferate, followed soon after by the use of the system on documents and objects connected to specific individuals. But even though a singular chronology was being established for historical time, this does not mean other forms of time did not exist or were not acknowledged. The rhythms of daily life would have been structured by specific practices as they related to particular social and historical contexts; household routines, farming practices, religious festivals and so on. These have all been well documented and researched now in studies of social time. But at around the same time as historical time was being singularized through the increasing adoption of the anno domini system, so quotidian time was being singularized through the increasing presence and use of clocks. Clocks have been around for a long time – not as long as calendars, though of course it depends on how you define a clock. Clocks too, have been linked to the emergence of abstract time, modernity and capitalism19 but clocks and abstract clock time preceded capitalism and modernity by centuries, just as abstract calendrical time did.20 Clocks and clock time did, however, play a critical role in capitalism and forging a new time consciousness in the early modern period; the important thing is not their initial appearance but their dominance. Prior to the industrial revolution, clock time was confined to specific spheres or domains of

38 The archaeological clock

practice; in industry, mainly to specific trades like the textile guilds or in philosophical discourse and early scientific experimentation. Clocks were also a fairly rare object; most people would have encountered them only on church towers. Over the 17th and into the 18th century however, clocks became more ubiquitous, both in the home and workplace and were being used to regulate all aspects of everyday life. This is a familiar story that needs no elaboration. What I want to draw your attention to here is the way calendrical and clock time – initially very different time-reckoning systems used in different contexts – became aligned to create one, universal, singular time. As clocks insinuated themselves into our daily lives, so they also started to increase their resolution; what began as a machine for marking the hours, soon marked minutes and ultimately seconds.21 Paradoxically, it is only when clocks increased their resolution down to the second that they also began to be used to co-ordinate calendrical time. Let’s think about this. How do you know when one year ends and another starts? How did you welcome in the new year last December? I bet you counted down the seconds or at least responded to some clock somewhere counting down the seconds to midnight on 31 December. This is not just some obsession with precision. This is a deep reflection of how our calendrical system has become entangled with clock time, in fact, made subservient to clock time. We don’t mark the new year by the hour, or even the minute; we do it to the second. Compare this with Samuel Pepys, writing nearly 350 years ago on 31 December 1664: Thence home to eat a little and so to bed. Soon as ever the clock struck one, I kissed my wife in the kitchen by the fireside, wishing her a merry new yeare, observing that I believe I was the first proper wisher of it this year, for I did it as soon as ever the clock struck one.22 I am sure historians can tell us how old this practice is of marking the time to usher in the new year, but I suspect it is not much older than the 17th century and probably only became widespread in the late 18th and 19th century. Samuel Pepys clearly acknowledged the turn of the year through his clock in the 1660s, but there were no second hands and probably even no minute hands on his clock. The full co-ordination of clock time and calendrical time only happened in the late 19th century with the adoption of Greenwich meridian as the prime meridian (i.e., 0 degrees longitude) and Greenwich mean time as the basis for a coordinated universal time. The initial impetus for co-ordinating time was of course longdistance travel, originally on ships and later the railways, and the critical tool for such co-ordination was the chronometer – basically a very accurate clock. It was used as the standard to measure time at the Greenwich Observatory and other clocks were calibrated against it. However, such clocks were still prone to great error when moved over distances. It was only with the invention of the telegraph and the laying of transatlantic cables and later, radio waves that

The archaeological clock 39

allowed near-simultaneous comparison of clocks separated by thousands of miles, that more precise co-ordination became possible, alongside the use of new electronic rather than mechanical clocks. Since the late 1960s, atomic clocks have replaced electric clocks as the ultimate standard.23 Today, following the International Organization of Standardization (ISO), the second is currently recognized as the basic unit of time in the International System of Units (SI); all larger units – minutes, hours, days and years are defined in reference to the second. The second itself is measured as the vibration of a caesium-133 atom in International Atomic Time (TAI). Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC, is set to a mean solar time at Greenwich meridian; however, because solar time of each day varies slightly, it has to be adjusted which it is to the atomic clock of caesium. UTC has been calibrated against TAI since 1972 over which time, the difference between the solar day and an atomic day has diverged by 27 seconds.24 Our contemporary calendars, even if they still use the Christian notation dating back more than a thousand years, are not regnal. They are not calibrated against the lives of kings or the son of God. Rather they are calibrated against the oscillations of a caesium-133 atom. What the synchronization of calendrical and clock time did was a step toward singularization at a whole new level. While the anno domini system provided a means to replace or stitch together successive regnal calendars into a unified system, the units used in both regnal and anno domini systems were the same: years. But with the advent of UTC, now different time units were coordinated, seconds and years, and all the multiples of subdivisions thereof. This is singularization of a whole new kind, one which was infinitely scalable up or down; and it is the same kind of singularization that is performed every time we want to generate a C14 date expressed in calendrical years. If the anno domini system created singularization on the horizontal plane, UTC constituted it on a vertical axis (Figure 2.2).

The archaeological clock Perhaps it is now a good time to return to archaeology. I have spent some time reminding ourselves of the constructed nature of time, and more specifically, time as it is typically understood in the historical sciences and the notion of an absolute chronology. We often characterize this kind of time as abstract and linear, but these are not the inventions of modern time-consciousness. Just read Aristotle or St Augustine. More pertinent is the singularity of time, expressed in terms of both extendability and scalability: the notion of a universal, singular time against which events can be measured. By extendability, I mean the notion that for any one unit of measure, such as years, we can extend it backward or forward without having to change our system of reckoning. This is what the adoption of the anno domini system achieved in replacing a stable method against regnal calendars which had to be reset every time a monarch died. By scalability, I mean the ability to connect two time-reckoning systems which operate with different units, such as relating the system of days, months and years to the system of seconds, minutes and hours. This

40 The archaeological clock

FIGURE 2.2

The singularization of time: extendability and scalability.

is what UTC achieved and which is why those two systems on your phone or computer – date and time of day – are integrated. But such singularity is not easy to achieve; Christian cosmology helped with the adoption of a single calendar system expressed through the anno domini system, but it was not until this became more commonly used as the principal chronology over the 17th and 18th centuries that it helped create this kind of universal time. But other times still existed, especially clock time which saw a similar rise over a similar period and it was not until the 20th century that clock time and calendrical time were fully aligned into a single system. Arguably we still experience other times, other rhythms and tempos outside the hegemony of this calendrical–clock nexus; but as archaeologists, it is this chronological system that dominates and frames so much of what we do. Why? I think the answer is really simple: it is so damn useful. It allows us to compare and analyse through a universal yardstick. It is a ruler for measuring different aspects of the temporality of events. It is a universal translator. Like money which converts any commodity into any other, an absolute chronology can convert a parcel of the world into a form comparable with any other. Neither the spatial metaphor of a ruler, nor the market metaphor of money is accidental. Concepts of space, like time, underwent a similar set of changes in European society over this period, and both were clearly related to the emergence of capitalism and the dominance of a market and consumer economy mediated by money.25 This metrological and singularized conception of time of course came at a cost, and I don’t need to repeat all the philosophical arguments about how it results in a

The archaeological clock 41

very impoverished and reductive notion of time. Bergson and Heidegger cover this ground well, along with a host of others following in their footsteps. All true. Moreover, since the beginning of the 20th century, the notion of time in many sciences has actually undergone a reversal and move away from this process of singularization; the theory of relativity, quantum gravity and psychological studies of time all point to a much more fractured temporality and indeed, in the case of quantum gravity, its very existence is questioned as was briefly covered in the last chapter. Similar trends toward an acknowledgement of the multiplicity of time emerged in archaeology in the last quarter of the 20th century and aspects of this will be discussed in my subsequent chapters. But for now, I want to keep a focus on the benefits of such a singular time, especially as they pertain to archaeology. What does singularized time in the form of an absolute chronology do for us? I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter that the great benefit of an absolute chronology over a relative one is that it can measure duration not just sequence. There are two major consequences of being able to measure duration: one is tempo, that is, the rate at which things change: how long did x last? How quickly did y happen? The other is synchrony, that is, the degree to which changes are contemporary or not. Did x happen at the same time as y? Neither of these are really possible with relative chronologies except as very coarse guesses. When C14 entered the archaeological toolkit, both of these issues became increasingly more significant because answering them became more conceivable. However it was a slow process; the first flush of C14 dates probably had the greatest impact in re-thinking the chronology of European prehistory. The larger chunks were reordered, for example, moving the Neolithic of Britain back from just after 2000 BC to 3200 BC (now, dated to c. 4000 BC). But the initial high hopes of C14 were not realised. Problems emerged, there was variability in the accuracy and precision of the dates and while as a dating tool it remained a vital and important component of archaeology, the limitations in its resolution were starting to be felt. C14 dates are always expressed as probabilities – the probability of the sample dating to within a specific range; but archaeologists slowly realized and had to accept that these ranges were often quite large – a century or two. This is still better than nothing, but in terms of the issues of tempo and synchrony, the resolution was not good enough to necessarily mark any great improvement over what was possible with relative dating. Some archaeologists started to become sceptical that such resolution was ever possible and used the nature of the archaeological record itself to argue that only longer-term processes and patterns would ever be discernible. In the last decades of the 20th century, questions of temporal scale became increasingly a matter of concern. I will discuss these issues in more detail in the next chapter. But, in the last decade, what has been called a third radiocarbon revolution has occurred which has suddenly made answering these questions of tempo and synchrony more conceivable again: the use of Bayesian modelling to tweak those probability ranges to a resolution of decades.26

42 The archaeological clock

The promise of Bayesian modelling is indeed exciting; for Alasdair Whittle and Alex Bayliss, who have been among the most vocal in promoting and working with these new techniques, they offer the possibility of doing an archaeology more like history. It means working at the scale of human lives or even decades. Already, some of the results from the Gathering Time and subsequent Times of their Lives projects on the Neolithic of Britain and Europe are making us re-think traditional narratives.27 Where before continuity was seen, now there is hiatus; where before, tempos were regarded as even, now we have models of fluctuating tempo – early flashes followed by slowing down or various permutations thereof. Once we can control duration down to the scale of decades, as Bayesian modelling offers, then questions about the speed and synchronization of change take on a whole new level of relevance. However, they also bring in a whole new set of complex issues which, although acknowledged, have not – I believe – been fully appreciated. My sense is that there is a belief that simply by increasing our scale of resolution, we will have also solved all other temporal issues. But the issues of tempo and synchronization are more than about measuring time more precisely. Even though any method which can increase our ability to date the archaeology more precisely should be exalted, I believe there are still problems facing us which have nothing whatsoever to do with refining our dating. It is these issues I want to address in the next chapter.

Notes 1 A.R. Galper et al., ‘The Child’s Concept of Age and Aging’, International Journal of Aging and Human Development 12, no. 2 (1991): 149–157. 2 See, for example, T Murray, ‘Archbishop Ussher and Archaeological Time’, in L. Vishnyatsky (ed.), The Archaeologist: Detective and Thinker (St Petersburg: University of St Petersburg, 2004), pp. 204–215. 3 D.K. Grayson, The Establishment of Human Antiquity (New York: Academic Press); A.B.V. Riper, Men among the Mammoths: Victorian Science and the Discovery of Human History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993). 4 For an excellent discussion of the controversies over the acceptance of the Three Age System as a chronology for this new deep time, see P. Rowley-Conwy, From Genesis to Prehistory: The Archaeological Three Age System and its Contested Reception in Denmark, Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 5 See C. Renfrew, Before Civilization (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978). 6 A. Bayliss, ‘Rolling Out Revolution: Using Radiocarbon Dating in Archaeology’, Radiocarbon 51, no. 1 (2009): 123–147. 7 See, for example, A. Gorman and B. O’Leary, ‘The Archaeology of Space Exploration’, in P. Graves-Brown, R. Harrison and A. Piccini (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 409–424. 8 See, for example, M.J. Aitken, Science-based Dating in Archaeology (London: Longman, 1990); M. Baillie, A Slice Through Time: Dendrochronology and Precision Dating (London: Routledge, 1997). 9 M. Spriggs, ‘The Dating of the Island Southeast Asian Neolithic: An Attempt at Chronometric Hygiene and Linguistic Correlation’, Antiquity 63 (1989): 587–613; see also M. Schmid et al., ‘Enhancing Radiocarbon Chronologies of Colonization: Chronometric Hygiene Revisited’, Radiocarbon 61, no. 2 (2019): 629–647.

The archaeological clock 43

10 N. Elias, Time: An Essay (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). This is a book I only read recently for the first time and is a constant reminder how, even if you have been researching a topic in depth for years, there is always something new out there that might still have been written a long time ago. 11 See P. Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 12 See E.G. Richards, Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 13 See G. Declercq, Anno Domini: The Origins of the Christian Era (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000). 14 H. Mytum, ‘Materiality and Memory: An Archaeological Perspective on the Popular Adoption of Linear Time in Britain’, Antiquity 81, no. 312 (2007): 381–396. 15 See C. McCracken, Culture and Consumption (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press). 16 H. White, ‘The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality’, Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (1980): 5–27. 17 See here the important work by Alexandre Koyré: From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1957). 18 See, for example, R. Porter (ed.), Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Routledge). 19 The classic reference here is E.P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and Present 38 (1967): 56–97, but also see D.S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge: Belknap Press) and J. Martineau, Time Capitalism and Alienation: A Socio-Historical Enquiry into the Making of Modern Time (Leiden: Brill, 2015). 20 C. Cipolla, Clocks and Culture 1300–1700 (London: Collins, 1967). 21 See for example G. Lucas, ‘The Changing Face of Time: English Domestic Clocks from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Design History 8, no. 1 (1995): 1–9. 22 S. Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys (London: George Bell & Sons, 1893). 23 See V. Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time 1870–1950 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). 24 E.F. Arias, ‘The Metrology of Time’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (A) 363 (2005): 2289–2305. 25 Martineau, Time Capitalism and Alienation. 26 See Bayliss, ‘Rolling out Revolution’; E. Bánffy et al., ‘Seeking the Holy Grail: Robust Chronologies from Archaeology and Radiocarbon Dating Combined’, Documenta Praehistorica XLV (2018): 12–36. 27 A. Whittle, The Times of their Lives: Hunting History in the Archaeology of Neolithic Europe (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2017); A. Whittle, A. Bayliss and F. Healey, ‘The Timing and Tempo of Change: Examples from the Fourth Millennium cal. BC in Southern England’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 18, no 1 (2008): 65–70.

References Aitken, M.J. Science-based Dating in Archaeology. London: Longman, 1990. Arias, E.F. ‘The Metrology of Time’. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (A) 363 (2005): 2289–2305. Baillie, M. A Slice Through Time: Dendrochronology and Precision Dating. London: Routledge, 1997. Bánffy, E., A. Bayliss, A. Denaire, B. Gaydarska, D. Hofmann, P. Lefranc, J. Jakucs, M. Maric, K. Oross, N. Tasic´, and A. Whittle. ‘Seeking the Holy Grail: Robust Chronologies from Archaeology and Radiocarbon Dating Combined’. Documenta Praehistorica XLV (2018): 12–36. Bayliss, A. ‘Rolling Out Revolution: Using Radiocarbon Dating in Archaeology’. Radiocarbon 51, no. 1 (2009): 123–147.

44 The archaeological clock

Cipolla, C. Clocks and Culture 1300–1700. London: Collins, 1967. Connerton, P. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Declercq, G. Anno Domini: The Origins of the Christian Era. Turnhout: Brepols, 2000. Elias, N. Time: An Essay. Oxford: Blackwells, 1993. Galper, A., R. Jantz, C. Seefeldt and K. Serock. ‘The Child’s Concept of Age and Aging’. International Journal of Aging and Human Development 12, no. 2 (1981): 149–157. Gorman, A. and B. O’Leary. ‘The Archaeology of Space Exploration’. In P. Graves-Brown, R. Harrison and A. Piccini (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 409–424. Grayson, D.K. The Establishment of Human Antiquity. New York: Academic Press, 1983. Koyré, A. From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1957. Landes, D.S. Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1983. Lucas, G. ‘The Changing Face of Time: English Domestic Clocks from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Century’. Journal of Design History 8, no. 1 (1995): 1–9. McCracken, C. Culture and Consumption. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1990. Martineau, J. Time, Capitalism and Alienation: A Socio-Historical Enquiry into the Making of Modern Time. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Murray, T. ‘Archbishop Ussher and Archaeological Time’. In L. Vishnyatsky (ed.), The Archaeologist: Detective and Thinker. St Petersburg: University of St Petersburg, 2004, pp. 204–215. Mytum, H. ‘Materiality and Memory: An Archaeological Perspective on the Popular Adoption of Linear Time in Britain’. Antiquity 81, no. 312 (2007): 381–396. Ogle, V. The Global Transformation of Time 1870–1950. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015. Pepys, S. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. London: George Bell & Sons, 1893. Porter, R. (ed.), Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present. London: Routledge, 1997. Renfrew, C. Before Civilization. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978. Richards, E.G. Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Riper, A.B.V. Men among the Mammoths: Victorian Science and the Discovery of Human Prehistory. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993. Rowley-Conwy, P. From Genesis to Prehistory: The Archaeological Three Age System and its Contested Reception in Denmark, Britain and Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Schmid, M., R. Wood, A. Newton, O. Vésteinsson and A. Dugmore. ‘Enhancing Radiocarbon Chronologies of Colonization: Chronometric Hygiene Revisited’. Radiocarbon 61, no. 2 (2019): 629–647. Spriggs, M. ‘The Dating of the Island Southeast Asian Neolithic: An Attempt at Chronometric Hygiene and Linguistic Correlation’, Antiquity 63 (1989): 587–613. Thompson, E.P. ‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’. Past and Present 38 (1967): 56–97. White, H. ‘The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality’. Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (1980): 5–27. Whittle, A. The Times of their Lives: Hunting History in the Archaeology of Neolithic Europe. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2017. Whittle, A., A. Bayliss and F. Healey. ‘The Timing and Tempo of Change: Examples from the Fourth Millennium cal. BC in Southern England’. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 18, no. 1 (2008): 65–70. Whittle, A.W.R., F.M.A. Healy and A. Bayliss. Gathering Time: Dating the Early Neolithic Enclosures of Southern Britain and Ireland. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2011.

3 TIME SCALES

The problem of scale You can’t really talk about time scales in archaeology or history without invoking the name of Braudel in the same breath. Braudel’s famous distinctions of historical time into three scales or tempos – the event, conjuncture and longue durée – are surely so well-known I don’t need to elaborate on them here.1 They were adopted and used by many archaeologists in the 1990s and remain powerful ways still for some to deal with the complexity of an archaeological record that can capture both moments and millennia.2 But there are also a set of problems entrained by them that archaeologists have never quite resolved, not least how to mediate between these scales.3 It is interesting here to contrast three different approaches that have emerged in archaeology over the last decade or so, all of which use the concept of scale or mediate between the long chronology of archaeology and the shorter chronologies of history. One is Clive Gamble’s endorsement of deep history, working alongside Daniel Smail.4 The aim here is to pull down the divide between prehistory and history by affirming a long term perspective and also reviving a vision of a united social science: deep history as the common ground for a new kind of four-field anthropology. This also draws on the classic strength of archaeology: its access to the long term. A somewhat different approach is offered by Alasdair Whittle who, as we say at the end of the last chapter, has been a key figure in promoting new Bayesian modelling as a way to obtain tighter chronological resolution.5 For Whittle, the prehistory–history divide is breached not through a long-term perspective but through access to the short term. If Gamble’s vision of deep history is about making history more like archaeology, Whittle’s vision is about making archaeology more like history; finally we can tell stories at a temporal scale that matches historical narrative. The third and final approach is one that tries to argue

46 Time scales

for a multi-scalar approach, one where archaeology needs to grapple with the way different processes and practices play out at different scales. This lies at the basis of John Robb and Tim Pauketat’s goal to bring together big histories and human lives.6 It also evident in Chris Gosden and Lambos Malafouris’s call for a process archaeology which is attentive to multiple scales of time and of course has older precedents such as the Annales-inspired work of John Bintliff.7 To be fair, both Gamble and Whittle would endorse a multi-scalar approach (Whittle certainly does), so my characterization here is somewhat contrived. Nonetheless, both tend to put greater stress on the benefits of either starting big or starting small, respectively. In many ways though, what all of these examples demonstrate – and many others one could invoke – is that scale is a key issue. And yet the notion of scale in relation to time has entrained all kinds of problems which have not always been acknowledged. Rachel Crellin has recently identified three major issues with the way scale is deployed in archaeology.8 The first is that the scale at which an archaeologist chooses to work at is often a political issue; focusing on the short-term, small-scale of human lives can be a way of foregrounding the human subject, their agency, whereas large-scale, long-term approaches tend to subsume individuals and people into larger processes and institutions.9 Of course, for some archaeologists like Robb and Pauketat, this should not be an either/or choice – we can, indeed ought, to deal with both, which is why for them, the issue is fundamentally about integrating these different scales. Yet this tendency to conduct a more humanist archaeology at the small-scale and a more detached archaeology at the large scale also maps on to another problem identified by Crellin: cultural change occupying the shorter time scales, natural change falling along longer time spans. Time scaling thus becomes another tacit way of preserving the bifurcation of culture and nature. For example, Braudel’s association of the longue durée with geography and climate, while events and conjunctures relate to economic social and political change. While this may have a certain ring of truth, I am less sure this problem is as real as Crellin suggests; there are for example, plenty of examples of long-term cultural changes adopted by archaeologists, from Hodder’s adoption of the Annaliste notion of mentalité in his narrative of the domus in Neolithic Europe to contemporary Darwinian accounts of cultural evolution where selection acts on the transmission of cultural traits. Crellin’s third and final critique of scale is perhaps the most pertinent. That the very distinction between short, medium and long-term is premised on an anthropocentric perspective of time. That it is the human experience of time that ultimately prefigures these scales, whereas if we de-centre the human, then we also remove any implicit ranking or hierarchy of scales. This is a really powerful point but I almost feel as if Crellin does not take it to its natural conclusion: that scale is ultimately an inappropriate concept to use. For while Crellin argues that there is no one right scale to work at, that different scales ‘fold together’, she does not seem to wish to abandon the concept altogether. Yet this is precisely what I want to argue in this chapter. Ultimately, what really needs unpacking here is what it is we mean, when we talk about scale in relation to time and a good place to start is the

Time scales 47

example of the Palaeolithic site of Boxgrove used in a paper by Chris Gosden with Karola Kirsanow from 2006.10

What is scale? Boxgrove is a village in West Sussex, southern England where quarrying exposed remains dating to the Lower Palaeolithic, or approximately half a million years ago.11 What makes it interesting is that excavations uncovered the residues of activities that perhaps represent only around 15 minutes of action – knapping flints. It was as if these early hominids had just left the site a few hours before the archaeologists arrived. This image of course, misrepresents the hours and weeks of work spent by the archaeologists carefully uncovering the traces, but the key point here is that these residues clearly evoke a moment in the past at a very human scale of experience. Archaeologists have a name for these kind of situations: we sometimes call them Pompeii sites, after the ancient Roman city buried under volcanic ash. We also know they are extremely rare and not at all the norm, which led to the coining of the phrase ‘Pompeii Premise’ which is used when an archaeologist interprets their site as if it was like Pompeii: reading residues as direct traces of past events, as if they had not undergone all sorts of transformations since the original activities which led to their deposition.12 Call it a kind of archaeological source criticism. Ironically, it has even been suggested that Pompeii itself was no Pompeii in this sense, insofar as people did not just up and run leaving the pot still boiling on the hearth or remain frozen to the spot waiting to be encased in ash.13 It took time for the site to be covered and in that time, all kinds of things happened which will have disrupted normal routines. I will be talking more about the Pompeii Premise in Chapter 5 so I will say no more for now. There was no volcanic eruption covering Boxgrove but there was an equally sudden burial of the old land surface upon which the residues of these activities took place, which is why Boxgrove has the feel of a Pompeii. The site lay at the foot of a chalk cliff which had collapsed and buried the site in a sudden landslide. But what makes the example of Boxgrove interesting for a discussion of time scale is really about how this very high-resolution record of events is situated within an absolute chronology. Dating the site was not easy and in fact generated some controversy; C14 doesn’t work here, rather, a different set of techniques were used which I do not need to go into here. But even if we accept the proposed date of half a million years, what this more precisely means is that the site dates sometime in the period 478,000 to 524,000 years BP. That still leaves a window of 46,000 years. So we have a set of activities which we know took place in less than an hour, yet connecting that hour to a calendrical date is near impossible. We are not talking about days, years, decades, or even centuries, but sometime within a 46,000-year period. It’s like the proverbial needle in the haystack. How do we bridge such vastly different time scales? In a sense, archaeologists face this problem all the time; Boxgrove is a good example because it presents an extreme case and sharpens our perception of the

48 Time scales

problem, but almost any site will present a similar issue. With a site I have been working with in Iceland, I am dealing with 30-year time units or tricennia, and even if it is no Pompeii, there are still features that we know represented much shorter time scales – the construction of a fireplace that could have been accomplished in a day, the placing of a coin under a timber sill beam that only took a few seconds. We experienced our mini-Pompeii moments and most sites will have them. But even if I could tie this moment or event down to within a 30-year window – certainly much better than 46,000 years! – there is still a large gap. A lot can happen in 30 years. How does one relate one act to another in a 30-year window? Part of the answer to this question touches on issues of contemporaneity which I will discuss in Chapter 5, but another part stems directly from the way we use the concept of scale. One of the things Gosden and Kirsanow stress in their paper is that scale is relational and the scale you adopt is dependent on your point of reference; is it the human life span and if so, what span do you choose since it is so variable, historically and culturally? Or is it material culture, which has even greater variability; some objects last for centuries, millennia, while some last only for a few moments? They argue that because of this variability, archaeology needs to embrace a multiscalar approach to time. Crellin made a similar argument as outlined earlier. But Gosden and Kirsanow also add a qualifier to such a multi-scalar approach: that it should be one which does not try to understand temporal scale by analogy with spatial scale. Or at least not exclusively so. What does this mean though? It is a very common criticism to make that we spatialize time, especially when we are thinking of time as represented in absolute chronologies; these critiques go back to Bergson and Heidegger in the early 20th century, if not earlier.14 But I think it is more accurate to argue that if time seems spatial, that is only because both concepts underwent a similar and joint process of abstraction and singularization over the 17th and 18th centuries. The concept of scale to my mind, is bound up with this process of singularization and metrology that I discussed in the last chapter, where different temporal systems – especially calendars and clocks – are integrated into a single metrological system. A system where days and years can be converted into minutes and seconds. This very scalability of time is connected to the drive toward singularization. It is this connection that also lies behind the Boxgrove paradox. Because seconds, minutes, hours are seamlessly connected to years, centuries and millennia as a singular temporality, we feel an inherent dissatisfaction when we cannot bring the two scalar units together. But there is also another and perhaps more pertinent issue that lies behind the Boxgrove paradox, namely the conflation of time as a unit of measure and time as that which is measured. It is this conflation that is probably more associated with the idea of a spatialized time. Again, this conflation is in part a legacy of the same singularization of time just mentioned, but the concept of scale is bound up in this conflation too. Sometimes, when archaeologists talk about time scales, they are talking about the scale of resolution or unit of measure: decades, centuries, millennia. Yet, sometimes, they use the term scale to refer to the duration of an object

Time scales 49

or process, for example, a human lifetime or the life of a monument. The two are not the same even if the unit of measure we use is based on the duration of an event, that is, the solar year. It is this conflation which explains why the Boxgrove example seems so frustrating. In the case of the 15-minute flint-knapping activities, this is really about the duration of this event, while in the case of the 46,000-year window in which these events took place, we are really talking about the unit of measure. In fact, talking about the event of knapping as ‘quarter of an hour’ or 15 minutes only adds to the confusion because the duration of this event is only converted into clock time to make it relatable; all we really know is that it was of short duration, resembling something like what we today, describe as quarter of an hour. Cris Simonetti has offered a wonderfully simple way of expressing this distinction in the context of a discussion on time perspectivism; he talks about the difference between optical and digital resolution.15 Think about it in terms of a camera, which often has both an optical and digital zoom function; the optical zoom uses the lens to actually bring you closer in to the subject, whereas digital zoom simply enlarges the picture on the screen. Whereas in the former, you suffer no loss of clarity or sharpness, in the latter the more you zoom, the more pixelated the image becomes. Optical resolution is all about scale and the ability of a device to differentiate between two points; digital resolution is about the clarity of an image based on the density of pixels. Optical resolution is about time as a unit of measure; digital resolution is about time as an event. Using this terminology, Boxgrove offers us very high digital resolution of the site but lousy optical resolution (Figure 3.1). Personally, I would rather we restricted the term ‘scale’ to refer solely to the unit of measure; indeed, if you consult any dictionary, this is its primary meaning (for example, think about Fahrenheit scale, weighing scale or map scale). If we do that, then in some ways the question of scale is only something that applies to our dating techniques. We can thus improve our scale only to the extent we can improve our dating tools, Bayesian modelling of C14 dates being a prime, contemporary example. But however good these are, there remain other limits set by the structure of the archaeological record that have nothing to do with our ability to refine our dating methods. Here, the question of scale is irrelevant; rather, it is about how pixelated the actual ‘image’ is in the ground, which varies and varies a great deal; most Palaeolithic sites are not like Boxgrove with its high digital resolution, but instead finds have been mixed and incorporated in deposits that may have taken centuries, if not longer, to form. Even on later prehistoric and historic sites, such resolution will vary across the site. This is simply about the temporality of formation processes and what time perspectivists call time averaging which no amount of improvement in dating techniques can ever overcome.16 This distinction between the resolution of our dating tools and the resolution of the archaeological record is fundamentally about the distinction between time as a metrological concept of scale and time as the duration of an event or process. Perhaps in arguing for the concept of scale to be confined to our metrology, I am

50 Time scales

FIGURE 3.1

Optical and digital resolution of time.

demanding too much. What’s wrong with talking about processes operating at different scales? The connection between metrology and the duration of an event or process are not arbitrary, or at least should not be. Daily routines, life cycles, generational change; these all develop over different spans of time and it makes no more sense to use centuries to talk about daily routines as it does to use days to measure generational change. This is true, but the problem of conflating scale with duration is not simply that they are different things, but that duration itself incorporates multiple dimensions. If we carelessly inter-change the two, then we are masking a deeper complexity within the nature of duration and change. Generational succession, for example, doesn’t just occur over longer time spans than daily routines; it also embodies very different types of change. The former deals with household or family reproduction, with people dying and being born; the latter

Time scales 51

with repetitive activities around spaces and objects. Reducing the difference between the two to the duration over which they take place is to ignore the more critical and specific nature of change each embodies. To clarify this, let me highlight two common slippages that occur when archaeologists use the term scale to apply to duration rather than as a measuring tool. The first is to conflate scale with extent; for example, in acknowledging the long-term nature of the record accessible to our discipline, it is often argued that archaeologists have unique access to a different perspective on history. This virtue of the long-term however, conceals, or is conflated, with a sense of objectivity which historians have talked about in terms of historical distance;17 that the further removed from the events we are, the more clearly they appear; it is a spatial metaphor of distance, but not just distance but also perspective. When we talk about the long-term in this way, we are not imagining it as if we were viewing some town on the distant horizon but up in a plane or balloon, high above the town. When we talk about the long-term, we are not looking horizontally back into the past, like at a vanishing point on the horizon; no, we are talking about being up high, like a god, surveying the course of history below us. The higher up we ascend, the greater expanse of history lies open before us. But the long-term can be interpreted differently; as the ground-level view of that town on the horizon and our journey toward it. Just because archaeologists deal with material spanning millennia does not mean they have to zoom out and adopt a different scale of analysis. Think of it this way; we have two books, one a hundred pages long and another, a thousand. Should, or could, we read the thousand-page book any differently? No, it just takes longer to read. Arguing that because archaeology covers longer stretches of time, it therefore requires a more zoomed-out approach is like saying we should somehow speed-read the thousand-page book. If there is any justification for a different ‘reading’, it comes not from the longevity of the archaeological record but its ‘digital resolution’ as argued above. Mention of speed-reading brings me to the second issue, which is the conflation of speed for scale. As already critiqued by Gosden and Crellin, one of the problems with scale is that it is relative and anthropocentric; 100 years is a lifetime or more to a human, whereas to a bristlecone pine tree living up to 5,000 years, a century is nothing. Often when we acknowledge the different durations over which different organisms live or objects last, there is also a corresponding sense of time flowing differently. Think, for example, about how we convert dog years into human years to relate to the ageing of these companion species. Typically, we might do the same when discussing the history of human societies, monuments or objects over several centuries or millennia. We speed up time in our narratives as if it is flowing at a ‘normal’ pace and although we might claim we are simply zooming out and discussing the matter at a different scale, what we are really doing is adjusting the tempo, manipulating speed. Such time manipulation is something I will return to the in final chapter but for now, all I want to stress is that speed is not the same as scale. If the concept of scale as a measure has been conflated with the concepts of resolution, extent and speed as they apply to the events and objects under study,

52 Time scales

then this conflation has also carried over into our understanding of change via the notion of different durations/scales. Nowhere are all of these issues more apparent than with Braudel’s vision of history with which I opened this chapter and to whose ideas I now return. In a really concise way, re-examining Braudel allows us to see the distinctions and connections between concepts of scale, duration and change.

De-scaling Braudel Recall Braudel’s three scales of history mentioned earlier: the event, conjuncture and longue durée. Frequently, we refer to these as the short, medium and long-term time scales. But even though we commonly use the term scale to refer to these three temporalities, what we usually mean is not scale as a unit of measure but scale as duration, whether this is conceived in terms of extent or speed. Of course, there is some alignment between the two – for example, we use smaller scales of time (days or years) for the smaller durations (events) and so on, but since the precise duration of these three scales is never really addressed, only generally sketched out, we know that we are dealing with things of different durations, even within one scale. Herein lies the first problem with Braudel’s scheme: why just three scales? Is it really the case that one can group historical processes broadly into three sets based on their duration of tempo? It seems very problematic to say the least, but then maybe the fault lies more with us than Braudel for sticking with his trilogy. As Bayliss and Whittle have pointed out, some of the key temporal processes that structure human society work at a scale between events and conjunctures such as generational succession.18 In many ways, this is a minor issue however, as apart from some die-hard Braudelians, most archaeologists working with concepts of time scale don’t feel obliged to stick to his three time scales. More worrying is the way these scales – as durations – are often read as tempos or rhythms. Thus, the short term deals with fast-moving events, momentary flashes; the medium term with slower-paced repetitive events, typically rendered as economic cycles, and the long term as the slowest of all, barely changing such as natural topography and geography. Yet even this characterization is also misleading; certainly there is a sense in Braudel that speed or slowness – that is, tempo, defines the three temporalities, like the second, minute and hour hands on a clock.19 But I think this misrepresents the ontological differences between event, conjuncture and structure which is why it is dangerous to substitute short-, medium- and long-term for event, conjuncture and structure. One of the most common criticisms of Braudel’s scheme is that the three temporalities never seem to relate; analysis of events, conjuncture and structures all take place independently and often, it is the longue durée of structures that trump the others. Indeed, such failures to integrate the scales has been perhaps the major focus of most archaeologists who have discussed the significance of time scales.20 While I think this is true, at the same time I do not see this is as a failure of the model, it rather points to the underlying basis of the temporal triptych. Indeed, the very

Time scales 53

attempt to try and reign all these different scales together seems to me, simply a product of thinking like chronology. Just as we try and stitch together the vibrations of a caesium atom with the solar year to create a singular chronology, so must we try and stitch together the multiple temporalities of history into a singular weave. Is this necessary? I am certainly not arguing that we should not look for connections between different temporalities, but we cannot presuppose them; surely the point is to explore specific intersections, to understand when and why some tempos are connected and others not. Adopting the language of integrating scales seems to me too overbearing, too redolent of a grand project of singularization as exemplified in the construction of absolute chronology. Moreover, these different temporalities are not just different tempos, like the caesium atom and the solar year; they have other forms. This is another reason why scale is inappropriate: because it masks this diversity. Thus, I want to suggest that we see these temporalities as not different durations or tempos but as different concepts of change. Describing this change purely in terms of rhythm – fast, slower and really slow – just doesn’t cut it. Of course, different things have their different rhythms and tempos and as such, it makes even less sense to cram these into three groups; rather there is enormous diversity of different rhythms, which suggests to me that the distinction between event, conjuncture and structure relates to something more significant. But tempo is just one species of change. Let me take Braudel’s three concepts to unpack this further. I will start with the difference between event and conjuncture first. Events are typically viewed as short-lived, but more significantly I would argue, they also tend to be unique: singular occurrences like a political uprising, a volcanic eruption. Conjunctures on the other hand, at least as Braudel usually defined them, are iterative events, repetitive occurrences that occur over years or decades – or longer. Economic cycles are classic cases. Now of course, rebellions and volcanic eruptions re-occur all the time, but the difference between re-occurrence and repetition is vital here. Repetition implies cycles; it implies ordered or patterned re-occurrence rather than randomness. More fundamentally, it is only with conjuncture that the idea of rhythm or tempo has any purchase. So what about structures? Structures typically refer to the geographical conditions, but also enduring mentalities or ideological structures. Now, it seems to me, that although we can describe structures as very slowly changing, Braudel more often than not, describes them as unchanging – the stable, enduring backbone of history. This should not necessarily be intended to be read in absolute terms, but relative to conjunctures and events. So what we have now are three temporalities each with different conceptions of change: events as singular occurrences, conjunctions as repetitive cycles and structures as enduring forms. Penelope Corfield has suggested something similar in her book Time and the Shape of History, invoking a three-dimensional model of time made of up deep continuity or persistence, evolutionary micro-change and radical discontinuity or macro-change.21 Her concepts don’t quite align with my characterization of Braudel’s three terms, but there is a common recognition here that an ontological dimension to change and time is needed that is more than simply a

54 Time scales

question of scale or tempo. Now perhaps I am still just stating the obvious. But it does seem to me that archaeologists at least – if not many others – have not fully taken on board the ontological implications of these three Braudelian terms, especially in relation to change. Indeed, Braudel himself often gives ambivalent renderings of these three concepts, sometimes implying they represent different kinds of change, sometimes implying they represent different tempos or scales of change. So in fact, what I am about to say next, is more a re-interpretation of Braudel’s three concepts rather than an attempt at a faithful summary. In order to re-interpret Braudel, I want to proceed in two steps. The first thing I would suggest is that we can uncouple any association between these three terms and the idea of short, medium and long term as scales of duration. Events, conjunctures and structures can all be seen as short, medium or long duration. Once this uncoupling has been achieved, the second thing is to re-think Braudel’s three concepts in terms of the type or kind of change they evoke, rather than the speed or scale over which they operate. Let’s first take a closer look at this point about event, conjuncture and structure as working at any scale of duration. Discussing events in terms of multiple scales might seem a long shot, but a little reflection shows that we use event-like concepts at all scales. There are the obvious examples of events in the archaeological record that I have already alluded to such as the Boxgrove flint-knapping activities which are estimated to have lasted quarter of an hour; but there are other more protracted events such as house building, which we see regularly in the archaeological record, which may have taken days or weeks or longer depending on the structure. How short does something have to be, to be classed as an event? Sites of conflict are particularly good examples of events of differing variation – from individual battlefield sites to the trenches of World War I or even Cold War installations. Of course, one might question whether it is appropriate to call a whole ‘war’ an event but I think that is only because of a prejudice about events having to be of short duration. As I will argue below, our definition of event might be better tied to concepts of change than concepts of time scale. Indeed, that is why we almost implicitly think of some of the biggest changes in prehistory as events, such as the Neolithic revolution. Although the concept of revolution conjures up something that happened fast, its greater significance lies in the kind of radical or synchronized change it ushers in; that is why we readily accept notions such as the Neolithic revolution or the industrial revolution as event-like. The industrial revolution was surely a protracted process that occurred over a century or more, while the Neolithic revolution was anything but fast; Ian Hodder has recently described it as a very slow revolution and indeed, the general consensus today is that the various processes that we attribute to it, took place over several millennia.22 With the concept of conjuncture we are on easier ground. It is not difficult to find examples of cycles that stretch from the fast to the slow and encompass all three scales from short to long-term. Our world abounds in the different rhythms and cycles. Peter Westbroek’s portrayal of the earth through multiple processes which cycle at different rates is especially interesting as he highlights the way

Time scales 55

organic and inorganic cycles are intertwined.23 But even if we keep our focus on humans, there remains great variability. Our own body clocks, the numerous daily routines we engage in from going to the toilet to brushing our teeth, all these take place on a scale of 24 hours or less. Longer routines such as the working week, or annual routines such as birthday or Christmas celebrations are still within what might be called the short term. As are even longer cycles, such as parliamentary elections or university graduations and arguably even generational succession or human life-cycle rites of passage. Where we cut the line between short- and medium-term is really arbitrary though; the economic cycles that are often invoked as classic cases of conjuncture range in scale from the Juglar investment cycle that lasts typically 7–11 years to the better known Kondratiev technological cycles of 45–60 years. In many ways, the existence of cycles in human society is actually easier to sell for the short-term; all those routines that practice theory made central to its goal of mediating between the individual and society typically take place on the faster tempo of days and years. It is rather the longer-term cycles that are often more contentious, especially when they get inflated as grand narratives such as the rise and fall of civilizations which were so popular in the early 20th century. And yet this is not to deny such longer-term cycles exist; only that they are more convincing if they are tied to specific phenomena which in turn, are often connected to natural cycles outside the control of humans. These medium to long-term cycles are also those more visible archaeologically. A classic example of Braudelian archaeology drawing on the idea of conjunctural change is John Bintliff and Anthony Snodgrass’s Boeotia project from the 1980s. Based on landscape survey, it argued for 400–500-year cycles of agricultural boom and bust waves; this long-term cycle or conjuncture was manifest at the level of events in terms of increasing social tension, evident in inscriptions about debts, crime, and crop failures, which coincided with the bust period but here the events are clearly just localized manifestations of the medium-term conjunctures.24 More recently, resilience theory has looked explicitly at the way natural cycles of environmental change such as intermittent dry periods had an effect on social structures such as settlement abandonment. Here, the rhythm of climate change is coupled with events of settlement abandonment as a way to explore the adaptability of societies to changing environmental conditions. The existence of medium and longer-term cycles in history is then, in many ways, much easier to appreciate when these cycles are related to naturally occurring cycles.25 Both of these examples look at the medium- to long-term primarily in relation to cycles or rhythms evident in settlement patterns of growth or abandonment. A very similar focus on tempo in settlement histories has emerged from Whittle’s Times of their Lives project, though Whittle has a more nuanced take on tempo, seeing such cycles as varying – sometimes fast, sometimes slow.26 This is undoubtedly a more sophisticated approach which draws on the benefits of tighter dating. The premise of all these studies though, is to define change in terms of tempo. But another set of long-term archaeologies has a rather different focus.

56 Time scales

Those which invoke not conjuncture, but structure. The use of structure deals not with rhythms or tempos but persistence or endurance. This is the long term as a stable set of forms which explain underlying continuities. Structures are interesting because in one sense, they don’t change at all; they simply are. A good example of the long-term as a persistent structure is Ian Hodder’s work on the domestication of Europe from the 1990s where a long-term mentalité revolving around the domus defined people’s relationship to their world and each other.27 In a nutshell, domestication was an ideology before it was subsistence practice. In many ways, this is classic Annaliste history with ideology replacing environment as a long-term structure. As Hodder made very clear, this long-term structure was not unchanging – especially as agricultural practices moved from south-east Asia into north-west Europe, the specifics of the domus also changed, such as the shift in focus from houses to tombs. However, such change could be glossed as local variation on a theme. A more recent example, which also uses this notion of long-term structure but with less explicit reference to Braudel, is the work on deep history by scholars like Daniel Lord Smail who argue for the importance of recognizing the role biological structures, such as neurochemistry, have on human history.28 Like Hodder’s domus, these biological structures are not so much deterministic but enabling, setting up capacities and capabilities which human culture enhances, or not as the case may be. In other words, the historical variations are as important as the deep structure. But it is ultimately the deep structure that provides the common thread, which gives relevance to the long-term as an explanatory framework. But structural change is not confined to the long term; if structural change is defined as the emergence or cessation of a structure – basically as birth or death – then this too happens at all scales. If human biology can work as a long-term structure, then an individual human body is a relatively short-term structure: formed in the womb, dissipated in the grave. Anything can be seen as an enduring structure if its identity is defined as persisting between two points in time. A pottery vessel may only last a few years before it is broken, and can be viewed as a short-term structure, while a pottery type might last longer – a century or more and is a medium-term structure. Anything can be defined as a structure in the sense that what constitutes it, is simply its persistence as recognizably the same thing.29

Time and change Let me now sum up the points I have been making. In order to avoid confusion, it is probably also beneficial to re-name Braudel’s three concepts of event, conjuncture and structure, even if they might still be broadly appropriate. Respectively, I will refer to them now as severance, recurrence and persistence. Severance: Events as singular occurrences, being unique, seem almost inexplicable. We can describe them, even define the antecedent events which led up to them, but because they are unique, they tend to remain inexplicable except in terms of chance. This is why events were unimportant for Braudel – the froth of history.

Time scales 57

But I would suggest we see events more positively, especially events which are taken to have historic significance. Turning points and tipping points, bifurcations or convergences, interruptions or pauses, fractures or discontinuities; these are all event-like changes with different qualities but share one thing in common: they mark a break. For example, drawing on the historian William Sewell’s logics of history, Doug Bolender and colleagues have suggested that an event be seen as a cascade of particular occurrences that transform a structure through reconfiguring the material resources and mental schemas that constitute such structures.30 An event is, essentially, a structural disjunction. For a more quantitative approach, one might also cite work in complexity theory and phase transitions which adopts a broadly similar model of change, albeit expressed in very different terms. Moreover, as Serres has suggested, such bifurcations or branching of time has two faces; they both mark a break or rupture with what came before, but they also announce a new beginning, a fresh start: they are advents as well as events.31 Recurrence: Moving on from Braudel’s events to conjunctures, these are the classic economic or social cycles. In historical and archaeological writing, the simplest and perhaps most common way such iteration is expressed is through bell curves or well curves, or in fact any trends such as linear trajectories of growth and decline. In some ways, there might be a tendency with such trends to link them to natural cycles as with resilience theory. But with any situation looking at multiple cycles, the question of their synchronization or harmonization should always be addressed rather than taken as given. A good example illustrating this point is Valentine Roux’s analysis of the adoption of wheel-made pottery in the Levant; it appears and disappears twice in the archaeological record between the Chalcolithic and the early Bronze Age before finally, on the third appearance, it stabilizes and remains.32 Roux’s explanation for this has been tied to transmission networks, with earlier potters being mobile and exclusively attached to elites whose power base was unstable; every time a power base toppled, the potters lost their patrons and their craft died out. In the latter part of the early Bronze Age however, wheelmade pottery was less dependent on the elites and as a result, transmission networks withstood economic upheavals. Central to this interpretation therefore, is a sense of kairos or timing of these cycles. Persistence: Finally, we turn to structures defined as enduring or persistent entities. With structures, the burden no longer rests on modelling change but rather explaining stasis; why do things persist? Rather than simply assume continuity or persistence as a given, as the natural state of things like inertia, we must try and understand what mechanisms, practices or properties are in play to keep change at bay. Such mechanisms might be political, where conservative forces or counterhegemonic, resistant practices act to stem change; or perhaps the material and structural properties of things and assemblages develop an in-built inertia, making change hard to effect. Whatever the complexity of reasons and causes, persistence has to be seen as an active power in tension with change. The work of Lee Panich is important here, especially his re-working of the notion of persistence as less a passive statis and more a dynamic and active process of balancing continuity and

58 Time scales

change within a community.33 His work comes off the back of critiques of narratives of indigenous tribes where change in colonial contexts is equated with loss, so-called terminal narratives.34 Persistence is then defined not by stasis but change, not as a passive continuity of tradition but an active re-working and perpetuation of a culture. A different interpretation for persistence comes from entanglement theory and its used of path dependence. Ian Hodder draws on path dependence to explain how people become dependent on things – how they get locked in.35 A good example is the work of Dorian Fuller and colleagues on plant domestication and how such dependences creates further entanglements as humans have to construct walls to keep out animals, are tied down to the reproductive cycle of the plants, and how new technologies are needed to process and store the plants which in turn creates further dependencies and so on.36 In substituting Braudel’s terms of event, conjuncture and structure for severance, recurrence and persistence, the goal has been to highlight the salient properties of both sets of terms in reflecting a taxonomy of change that is unrelated to the duration over which the change takes place. But in re-working Braudel’s three terms however, there is a danger that one gets locked into a tripartite classification. In offering these alternative concepts, I would not want to argue that they exhaust all the possibilities. Indeed, change is a complex phenomenon to which I can barely do justice in a single chapter.37 My main goal here has been to pull apart the concept of scale and in focusing on Braudel’s three terms of event, conjuncture and structure, my primary objective has been to ‘de-scale’ them. To make that fully effective, it was important to render them in terms other than short-, medium- and long-term and to demonstrate that it is possible to perform a Braudelian archaeology which is utterly non-scalar. More importantly though, I wanted to separate the question of change from scale; scale is simply a property of our metrology or chronology. If we want to examine the multiplicity of time, it is not about trying to integrate or co-ordinate different time scales. That is a purely technical matter of dating resolution. Rather the real tension comes in trying to triangulate between different ontologies of change: breaks, cycles, persistence, and probably many more besides. The analysis of Braudel and scale presented in this chapter brings us to the point where we now need to confront more fully this concept of change. All this talk about different scales, different tempos or durations are all predicated on the notion of change. If there was no change, how would we account for duration? For tempo or rhythm? What are we measuring with our time scales, our metrologies if not change? The concept of change is of course worthy of a book on its own and indeed Rachel Crellin’s work, which I have already mentioned, fulfils that need admirably. My aim in the concluding section of this chapter is therefore rather more specific: how does change relate to time? It is an interesting paradox that archaeologists don’t observe change, rather they infer it from variation in matter. A stratigraphic section is just a series of more or less stationary layers, one on top of the other. The ‘more or less’ refers to the fact that of course they do change, but at rates so slow we cannot perceive them. Moreover, the change that we do attribute

Time scales 59

to them is based on something else: the superposition of visibly distinct deposits. The same applies to a typological progression of artefacts; formal variations in style or technique become temporal variations in production. What is it that makes us connect material or spatial variation to temporal variation? In everyday life we might encounter similar situations; I leave for work with a tidy kitchen, only to return and find a mess of plates and cups. Something has changed and probably, it was my hungry children coming home from school. Such a change is discontinuous, but only in the juxtaposition of past memory with present perception. The very discontinuity nonetheless suggests to me a single event has intervened to affect this transformation to my kitchen. On the other hand, if I had put up a webcam to record what was going on, I probably would have had a rather different perception of change; I would see my kids arriving, going into cupboards, pulling out crockery and food, moving to the table and then moving back to pile up the dirty cups and plates. Change now has a very different appearance; now the discontinuity that I experienced upon first coming home is replaced by a perception of continuous movement. Isn’t this what we do in archaeology? We see the type series or stratigraphic section and assume it is similar to the experience of being absent while the change occurred; all we get is the before and after. But drawing on our experience, we assume that what was responsible for the change – over and above the specific agents and causes – was movement of bodies and matter. It is no surprise therefore, that change should largely be conceived in terms of movement. The trees outside my window are now swaying in the wind, the second hand of the clock on my wall is silently sweeping a circle around the face; change is all around me and marked, more than anything, by movement. Looking at a sequence of artefact types or a stratigraphic section is not like watching the second hand of a clock move. But we assume that the changes we observe in the archaeological record occurred in a similar way. That deposits accumulate through movement. But how then, do we relate time to movement? This is where things get tricky; we could follow Bergson and suggest that movement is inherently continuous, a flow but, as I discussed in Chapter 1, most psychological studies of our experience of time suggest this continuity is a post facto construction, that subconsciously, we register time discontinuously. In other words, the discontinuity between memory and perception discussed in my example of the messy kitchen, may actually also represent how my mind processes continuous movement within perception. Now we find that our original assumption has been inverted. Instead of change being derivative of movement, rather movement is now derivative of change. So if we cannot rely on movement to elucidate change, how can we start to make sense of it? Rather than try and resolve this through further philosophizing, perhaps we just need to stay with what concerns us here: change in the archaeological record. And this kind of change has only one form: the contemporaneous juxtaposition of things presumed to have come from different times, rather like my case of the memory of the kitchen and its present perception. But unlike the case

60 Time scales

of memory and perception, there is a difference. Earlier, I characterized this as an absence of intervening time or movement, just the before and after. But it isn’t even that of course; in archaeology, there are no ‘befores’, just a succession of ‘afters’. The archaeological record is not like a snapshot or frame from a webcam showing my kitchen at time T1 and T2. Nor is it the same as how our perception registers change in our surroundings. It is far more complex than that as I shall explore in Chapter 5. However, before we tackle that we need to address a more urgent issue. Regardless of how change is constituted, how do we connect together all the changes we do observe? Because in many ways, all this concern for integrating scales in archaeology can be re-cast in other terms. I want to suggest that our primary concern is with integrating the multiplicity of change, not scale. Sometimes this multiplicity is about change occurring over different durations or at different tempos, but not always. Indeed, the main point of this chapter has been to argue that change is broader than that. And so it is that in the next chapter, I turn to this new question: how to address the multiplicity of change in the archaeological record.

Notes 1 F. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols (London: Fontana/Collins); see also F. Braudel, ‘History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée’, in F. Braudel, On History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980), pp. 25–54. 2 For example, see J. Bintliff (ed.) The Annales School and Archaeology (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1991); B. Knapp, Archaeology, Annales and Ethnohistory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 3 See J. Harding, ‘Rethinking the Great Divide: Long-term Structural History and the Temporality of the Event’, Norwegian Architectural Review 38, no. 2 (2005): 88–101, for an early statement of this problem. 4 C. Gamble, ‘The Anthropology of Deep History’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S) 21 (2014): 147–164; A. Shryock and D.L. Smail (eds), Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 5 A. Bayliss and A. Whittle, ‘What Kind of History in Prehistory?’ in S. Souvatzi, A. Baysal and E. Baysal (eds), Time and History in Prehistory (London: Routledge, 2019) pp. 123–146; A. Whittle, The Times of Their Lives: Hunting History in the Archaeology of Neolithic Europe (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2017). 6 J. Robb and T. Pauketat (eds), Big Histories, Human Lives: Tackling Problems of Scale in Archaeology (Santa Fe: School of Advanced Research, 2013). 7 C. Gosden and L. Malfouris, ‘Process Archaeology (P-Arch)’, World Archaeology 47, no. 5 (2015): 701–717; J. Bintliff, ‘Time, Structure and Agency: The Annales, Emergent Complexity, and Archaeology’, in J. Bintliff (ed.), A Companion to Social Archaeology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 174–194. 8 R. Crellin, Change and Archaeology (London: Routledge, 2020). 9 Also see S. Pollock, ‘Commensality, Public Spheres and Handlungsraüme in Ancient Mesopotamia’, in Robb and Pauketat, Big Histories, Human Lives, pp. 145–170. 10 C. Gosden and K. Kirsanow, ‘Timescales’, in G. Lock and B. Molyneux, Confronting Scale in Archaeology: Issues of Theory and Practice (New York: Springer, 2006), pp. 27–38. 11 M.B. Roberts and S.A. Parfitt, ‘Boxgrove: A Middle Pleistocene Hominid Site at Eartham Quarry, Boxgrove, West Sussex’, English Heritage Archaeological Report 17 (London: English Heritage, 1999).

Time scales 61

12 L. Binford, ‘Behavioural Archaeology and the “Pompeii Premise”’, Journal of Anthropological Research 37 (1981): 195–208; M. Schiffer, ‘Is There a “Pompeii Premise” in Archaeology?’, Journal of Anthropological Research, 41 (1985): 18–41. 13 S.E. Bon, ‘A City Frozen in Time or a Site in Perpetual Motion? Formation Processes at Pompeii’, in S.E. Bon and R. Jones (eds), Sequence and Space in Pompeii (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1997), pp. 7–12. 14 H. Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (London: Macmillan, 1910); M. Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962). 15 C. Simonetti, ‘Timescales and Telescopes: Optics in the Study of Prehistory’, in S. Souvatzi et al., Time and History in Prehistory, pp. 42–57. 16 See for example, G. Lucas, ‘Time and the Archaeological Event’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 18, no. 1 (2008): 59–64. 17 For further discussion of historical distance and objectivity in archaeology, see G. Lucas, Writing the Past: Knowledge and Literary Production in Archaeology (London: Routledge, 2019). 18 Bayliss and Whittle, ‘What Kind of History in Prehistory?’. 19 See Braudel, The Mediterranean and Mediterranean World, p. 893. 20 Harding, ‘Rethinking the Great Divide’; Robb and Pauketat, Big Histories, Human Lives. 21 P. Corfield, Time and the Shape of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 22 I. Hodder, The Domestication of Europe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2018). 23 P. Westbroek, Life as Geological Force (New York: W.W. Norton and Company). 24 See Bintliff, The Annales School. For a similar approach to medieval France, see Bintliff, ‘Time, Structure, and Agency: The Annales, Emergent Complexity, and Archaeology’ in Bintliff, Companion to Social Archaeology. 25 See, for example, Nelson et al., ‘Long-term Vulnerability and Resilience: Three Examples from Archaeological Study in the Southwestern United States and Northern Mexico’, in J. Cooper and P. Sheets (eds), Surviving Sudden Environmental Change (Boulder, University Press of Colorado, 2012), pp. 197–222. 26 Whittle, The Times of their Lives. 27 I. Hodder, The Domestication of Europe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 28 D. Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley: University of California Press); also see Shryock and Smail, Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present. 29 Here it might be useful to invoke Aristotle and his discussion of change, which hinges on the distinction between accidental and substantial change. Accidental change refers to changes in the attributes of an entity, while substantial change refers to the actual existence of an entity. For example, any human life is considered to represent a continuous being; it is born and it dies. These two moments mark an example of substantial change. But between these two moments, that being also undergoes various other changes – our skin loses its elasticity and smoothness, our hair stops growing or grows in all the wrong places, our eyesight gets worse. Yes, we grow old. But we still think of ourselves as the same person – something, some x – call it the soul, the ego, the self – persists throughout these changes. This distinction between substantial and accidental change however, opens up the whole problem of identity and change, as some philosophers have suggested there is no x, that we are not the same person we were ten years ago, or even ten seconds ago. This is a problem I have no wish to go into here, as my main concern with discussing structures is to highlight the tension they express between continuity and change which occurs across any time scale. 30 R.A. Beck et al., ‘Eventful Archaeology: The Place of Space in Structural Transformation’, Current Anthropology 48, no. 6 (2007): 833–860; also see D. Bolender (ed.), Eventful Archaeologies: New Approaches to Social Transformation in the Archaeological Record (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010). 31 M. Serres, Branches: A Philosophy of Time, Event and Advent (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). 32 V. Roux, ‘Evolutionary Trajectories of Technological Traits and Cultural Transmission: A Qualitative Approach to the Emergence and Disappearance of the Ceramic

62 Time scales

33 34 35 36 37

Wheel-Fashioning Technique in the Southern Levant during the Fifth to Third Millennia BC’, in M.T. Stark, B.J. Bowser and L. Horne (eds), Cultural Transmission and Material Culture: Breaking Down Boundaries (Tucson: University of Arizona Press), pp. 82–104. L. Panich, ‘Archaeologies of Persistence: Reconsidering the Legacies of Colonialism in Native North America’, American Antiquity 78, no. 1 (2013): 105–122. S. Silliman, ‘Change and Continuity, Practice and Memory: Native American Persistence in Colonial New England’, American Antiquity 74, no. 2 (2009): 211–230. I. Hodder, Entangled (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). D.Q. Fuller et al., ‘Entanglements and Entrapment in the Pathway towards Domestication’, in L. Der, and F. Fernandini (eds), Archaeology of Entanglement (Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2016), pp. 151–172. For a much fuller treatment, see Crellin, Change and Archaeology.

References Bayliss, A. and A. Whittle. ‘What Kind of History in Prehistory?’. In S. Souvatzi, A. Baysal and E. Baysal (eds), Time and History in Prehistory. London: Routledge, 2019, pp. 123–146. Beck, R.A., D.J. Bolender, J.A. Brown and T.K. Earle. ‘Eventful Archaeology. The Place of Space in Structural Transformation’. Current Anthropology 48, no. 6 (2007): 833–860. Bergson, H. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. London: Macmillan, 1910. Binford, L. ‘Behavioural Archaeology and the “Pompeii Premise”’. Journal of Anthropological Research 37 (1981): 195–208. Bintliff, J. (ed.). The Annales School and Archaeology. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1991. Bintliff, J. ‘Time, Structure, and Agency: The Annales, Emergent Complexity, and Archaeology’. In J. Bintliff (ed.) A Companion to Social Archaeology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, pp. 174–194. Bolender, D. (ed.). Eventful Archaeologies: New Approaches to Social Transformation in the Archaeological Record. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010. Bon, S.E. ‘A City Frozen in Time or a Site in Perpetual Motion? Formation Processes at Pompeii’. In S.E. Bon and R. Jones (eds), Sequence and Space in Pompeii. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2010, pp. 7–12. Braudel, F. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols. London: Fontana/Collins, 1972. Braudel, F. ‘History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée’. In F. Braudel, On History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980, pp. 25–54. Corfield, P. Time and the Shape of History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Crellin, R. Change and Archaeology. London: Routledge, 2020. Fuller, D.Q., C. Stevens, L. Lucas, C.A. Murphy and L. Qin. ‘Entanglements and Entrapment on the Pathway towards Domestication’. In L. Derand F. Fernandini (eds), Archaeology of Entanglement. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2016, pp. 151–172. Gamble, C. ‘The Anthropology of Deep History’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 21 (2014): 147–164. Gosden, C. and K. Kirsanow. ‘Time Scales’. In G. Lock and B. Molyneux (eds), Confronting Scale in Archaeology: Issues of Theory and Practice. New York: Springer, 2006, pp. 27–38. Gosden, C. and L. Malafouris. ‘Process Archaeology (P-Arch)’. World Archaeology 47, no. 5 (2015): 701–717. Harding, J. ‘Rethinking the Great Divide: Long-term Structural History and the Temporality of the Event’. Norwegian Archaeological Review 38, no. 2 (2005): 88–101.

Time scales 63

Heidegger, M. Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962. Hodder, I. The Domestication of Europe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Hodder, I. Entangled. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Hodder, I. ‘Things and the Slow Neolithic: The Middle Eastern Transformation’. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 25 (2018): 155–177. Knapp, B. Archaeology, Annales and Ethnohistory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Lucas, G. ‘Time and the Archaeological Event’. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 18, no. 1 (2008): 59–64. Lucas, G. Writing the Past. Knowledge and Literary Production in Archaeology. London: Routledge, 2019. Nelson, M.C., M. Hegmon, K.W. Kintigh, A.P. Kinzig, B.A. Nelson, J.M. Anderies, D.A. Abbott, K.A. Spielmann, S.E. Ingram, M.A. Peeples, S. Kulow, C.A. Strawhacker and C. Meegan. ‘Long-Term Vulnerability and Resilience: Three Examples from Archaeological Study in the Southwestern United States and Northern Mexico’. In J. Cooper and P. Sheets (eds), Surviving Sudden Environmental Change. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2012, pp. 197–222. Panich, L. ‘Archaeologies of Persistence: Reconsidering the Legacies of Colonialism in Native North America’. American Antiquity 78, no. 1 (2013): 105–122. Pollock, S. ‘Commensality, Public Spheres and Handlungsraüme in Ancient Mesopotamia’. In J. Robb, and T. Pauketat (eds), Big Histories, Human Lives: Tackling Problems of Scale in Archaeology. Santa Fe: School of Advanced Research, 2013, pp. 145–170. Robb, J. and T. Pauketat (eds), Big Histories, Human Lives. Tackling Problems of Scale in Archaeology. Santa Fe: School of Advanced Research, 2013. Roberts, M.B. and S.A. Parfitt. ‘Boxgrove: A Middle Pleistocene Hominid Site at Eartham Quarry, Boxgrove, West Sussex’, English Heritage Archaeological Report 17. London: English Heritage, 1999. Roux, V. ‘Evolutionary Trajectories of Technological Traits and Cultural Transmission: A Qualitative Approach to the Emergence and Disappearance of the Ceramic Wheel-fashioning Technique in the Southern Levant during the Fifth to Third Millennia BC’. In M. T. Stark, B.J. Bowser and L. Horne (eds), Cultural Transmission and Material Culture: Breaking Down Boundaries. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2008, pp. 82–104. Schiffer, M. ‘Is There a “Pompeii Premise” in Archaeology?’. Journal of Anthropological Research 41 (1985): 18–41. Serres, M. Branches: A Philosophy of Time, Event and Advent. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Shryock, A. and D.L. Smail (eds), Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Silliman, S. ‘Change and Continuity, Practice and Memory: Native American Persistence in Colonial New England’. American Antiquity 74 (2009): 211–230. Simonetti, C. ‘Timescales and Telescopes: Optics in the Study of Prehistory’. In S. Souvatzi, A. Baysal and E. Baysal (eds), Time and History in Prehistory. London: Routledge, 2019, pp. 42–57. Smail, D. On Deep History and the Brain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Westbroek, P. Life as a Geological Force. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992. Whittle, A. The Times of Their Lives: Hunting History in the Archaeology of Neolithic Europe. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2017.

4 THE SHAPE OF TIME

Change and continuity Change may be constant, but we only recognize it when it happens because of the things that don’t change. When a car drives past stationary road signs, when your children outgrow their clothes, when your friends have bought a new flatscreen TV for their living room. We notice when something is different, but only insofar as most of the time, most things around us stay the same. If everything was changing all the time, the world would be chaos. Yet for archaeologists, change has a rather different character. Changes in deposition or in assemblage composition involve interpreting spatial or material variation in temporal terms, as discussed at the end of the last chapter. In these instances, change is perceived not so much against a backdrop of continuity as against an adjacent, that is, previous state of affairs. The best analogy in everyday life is when the change observed is not against a frame of continuity but rather against what came before. When that new flatscreen is not seen as a subtle change to the appearance of an otherwise unchanged living room, but as a replacement for the previous television. This kind of change – let us call it succession – is the kind that is often most prevalent in archaeological descriptions of change; where one type of artefact replaces or succeeds another, one layer is superimposed on another. The difference between these two kinds of change is of fundamental importance. In the first, change can only be understood in relation to continuity. In the latter, it is always framed in opposition to it. That an artefact type persists for a certain period of time, until it is succeeded by another; that a certain phase of activity occurs on a site until it is succeeded by another one; that a way of life, an archaeological period like the later Iron Age, lasts in a certain area until it is succeeded by another one. Many of the problems around change – and time – result from adopting this successive view of change, what Rachel Crellin has recently

The shape of time 65

called a block-time approach to change, one where all the action is concentrated at the transitions, while in between are just periods of stasis or continuity.1 In other words, most of the past seems to occupy broad periods of continuity, where nothing changes, with shorter bursts of change occurring at transitions. In this way, change and continuity are set up as oppositional. In my discussion in the last chapter of Braudel’s three concepts of event, conjuncture and structure, one can see the same bias there, especially in the opposition of event and structure (or severance and persistence as I re-named them), which in archaeology are often foregrounded while Braudel’s third term of conjuncture is marginalized or silently elided. The fact that archaeology has been so powerfully caught up in a successive model of change is probably largely due to the legacy of relative chronology, which foregrounds this.2 You may recall that one of the most important features of relative against absolute chronologies is that relative chronologies lack duration – they only really define sequence. A relative chronology cannot tell you how long the Iron Age lasted in a certain area, all it can tell you is that it succeeds the Bronze Age. Phrasing it this way of course highlights the deficiency of a relative chronology in comparison to absolute chronologies which can tell you about both duration and sequence. But another way of defining relative chronologies is that they tell us about change; indeed this is their strength. They lack the metrological precision of absolute dates, but what they lack in precision, they make up for in relevance. A date, after all, is just a date; it doesn’t tell you anything on its own until it is tied to events and the events and their dates are compared. For example, knowing this deposit dates to c. 1230 AD is not necessarily as informative as knowing that it lies beneath a house foundation and thus pre-dates the construction of the house. It starts to become more informative if we know that all similar houses excavated so far date to before 1200 AD, but again, only because the date is associated with a specific event or state of affairs. In many ways, the new Bayesian methods applied to C14 discussed in the previous chapters combine the best of both absolute and relative dating chronologies; they exploit the qualities inherent in relative chronology to help refine an absolute chronology and one might even suggest they are the first real glimpse of how the distinction between the two might be dissolved. Not that the individual methods involved in conducting seriation, stratigraphy or generating a radiocarbon date would merge; rather that the chronological framework created was the product of multiple methods. But even if we argue this, there remains a difference between chronology as a means to measure time, and the temporal quality of the events being measured. So although both absolute and relative chronologies are structured on a sequence of events, both in a sense co-ordinate change, the ‘events’ in an absolute chronology are largely detached from human affairs – the circuit of the earth around the sun, the growth of a tree, the oscillations of a caesium atom. Not so with the events in a relative chronology like the deposition of anthropogenic deposits or stylistic change in artefacts; these events principally (though not always) implicate human or human-related agency. Unlike radioactive decay, archaeological

66 The shape of time

stratigraphy or typological development, they involve events with an in-built cultural significance. What this significance means and whether it is productive or interesting is another matter of course. Both absolute and relative chronologies are dependent on events as already noted; C14 is dependent on the event of radioactive decay, of the death of an organism, and others. But the event-dependence of relative chronologies is different not only in being tied to culturally relevant changes, they are also different in another way; they are far more place-specific. Time is much more bound to space in relative chronology than it is with absolute chronology. Each excavation uncovers its own, unique stratigraphic profile, each region its own specific sequence of material culture. Although relative chronologies can expand outward to cover larger areas, generally the larger the area, the more risky they become, unless they also become more abstract and reductive. Periodizations are the classic exemplar of these kinds of more general relative chronologies and ones which are familiar to historians, archaeologists, palaeontologists and geologists alike. In terms of human history, the only truly singularized relative chronologies have been the various social evolutionary schemes proposed, from 18th century Enlightenment conjectural histories to 20th century neo-evolutionism and these were common to most of the social sciences even if they also influenced archaeology. These are very abstract systems which define a historical sequence based on very general concepts such as cultural development or social complexity. We are a long way from stratigraphy here. The Three Age System was the first archaeological, relative chronology to strive for some universality, and it was based on technological innovations in cutting implements. However, unlike the evolutionary schemes, it retains a link to stratigraphy. It was developed by a Danish antiquarian Christian Thomsen in the early 19th century and became the standard framework for ordering prehistory throughout most of Europe by the end of the century. But the further away from north-west Europe (where it was developed) you became, the less effective it seemed to be. Africa always lacked a Bronze Age, China dropped the Iron Age as prehistory had already given way to history with the advent of written records, while in the Americas the system had no real purchase at all. The only global success the system enjoyed was in the early 20th century when Gordon Childe interpreted these technological stages as economic stages based on a Marxist interpretation of prehistory, conjoining it with those social evolutionary models of human society.3 The pivotal markers were now the transition from hunting and gathering to farming, and the emergence of state-level societies which Childe defined as the agricultural and urban revolutions respectively. As befitted a Marxist view of prehistory, these were the major historical events preceding the third great revolution: the industrial one. Today, although both universal periodizations based on Thomsen’s Three Age System and socio-economic transitions based on Childe’s revolutions still structure archaeological research to an extent, they have lost most of their force as chronological systems. Relative chronologies still play a vital – arguably central role – in

The shape of time 67

archaeology, but the aspiration for a singular or universal periodization is not a common objective. Yet there still exists a tension in archaeology between the inbuilt tendency for relative chronologies to be multiple and the aspiration for a singularity which mimics that of absolute chronology. This tension is manifest in more contemporary aspirations such as Daniel Lord Smail’s call for deep history which seeks to erase the boundaries between prehistory and history, or David Christian’s vision of big history whose goal is even more singularizing: to link human history with cosmological history.4 In Chapter 2, I devoted most of my attention to absolute chronology and portrayed it as a successful effort to create a singular time but one that requires constant vigilance and work. Such singularity is an achievement, created by stitching together through synchronization, multiple and very different materialities with their own times – C14 decay, tree rings, volcanic tephras, ice cores and all the various localized systems which affect the ‘clocks’ of these things. Attempts at universal periodizations are simply the same operations performed, but with relative, not absolute, chronologies. Such calls for deep history and big history share with 19th-century evolutionary accounts the same drive toward singularization, even if they lack a sense of a universal periodization. However, such criticism should not blind us to some of the positive messages of these ideas; the divide between prehistory and history is troubling and should be dismantled, as should that between human and non-human histories. My chief concern really, is that breaking these divides is done at the expense of perpetuating a singularized view of time and history. I would argue that we need to keep this vision of a singular history tempered by an equal concern for multiplicity. And the main way in which we can do that, is by abandoning the successive model of change; by seeing change in relation to continuity, not in opposition to it. The rest of this chapter will attempt to articulate one way in which we might achieve this.

Representing change and continuity Consider a stratigraphic sequence, especially how it is rendered through the Harris matrix: a succession of deposits, one after the other. Each unit marks a change, or more accurately the interface marks a change (represented as the connecting line between units on the matrix); the unit itself rather denotes continuity, a unity, a block of homogenous time. Although the Harris matrix is a wonderful tool, it does have limitations and some of these I have explored in an earlier work.5 One of the problems, for example, is how the matrix – like any relative chronology – does not incorporate duration, only sequence or succession. The length of continuity implied in the units is never expressed and often for good reason; we simply don’t know how long it took a deposit to form. Using scientific dating techniques and typological dating from artefacts may give us some broad date range, but often this exceeds the resolution implied by the formation of the deposit. For example, it may have only taken a day to dig and backfill a grave, but the dating of this event may – even in best case situations – only be attributable to a broad window of

68 The shape of time

decades. Moreover, even if we might guess it only took a day to dig and backfill a grave, how enduring was the feature once it was dug? How visible did it remain? It is one thing to assess the duration of formation of a unit, another to assess the duration of its visibility or potential presence in terms of how it impacts subsequent actions. A grave might take a day to make, but its presence in a churchyard can last centuries which will impact how other grave-digging or ground-disturbing activities take place. What these issues show is the impossibility of representing continuity and change together within a matrix diagram. Solutions to this have involved the construction of alternative time diagrams which show the time-lines of individual units or features and these have the advantage of showing both duration and sequence, although duration is privileged over sequence; what you don’t see in the diagram are stratigraphic relations though these will provide the start and sometimes end points of these lines. If these kind of diagrams have not become common, it is largely because estimating the duration of individual deposits remains extremely difficult and on the whole, these diagrams work better for stratigraphic groups like structures which persist for longer periods of time.6 This is how I have subsequently used them, as I will discuss further below (e.g., see Fig.4.3). My route into using them however came from studying typological variation in artefacts, that is how we represent change in the form or design of objects. When studying the changing face of clocks 25 years ago, I found exactly the same set of issues here.7 Where conventionally, one type replaces another as a separate and distinct entity, where each type represents a continuity of form punctuated by change which resulted in a new type (or variant) I was interested in finding out how we might represent variation in form or design where continuity and change were kept together, rather than separate. I used exactly the same kind of time-series diagrams, breaking objects down into temporal elements, as if an object was like a site, composed of layers (Figure 4.1). This temporal stratification of an object enabled me to show how objects are always composites of older and new elements, always combinations of what art historian George Kubler called convention and invention.8 Moreover, you quickly realize that sometimes there will be a little more invention or a little more convention, resulting in objects that break more with tradition or those that cleave more closely to it. You might also see the recapitulation or revival of older elements which had all but died out, archaisms as they used to be called. It was precisely because any object was a multi-temporal composite that Kubler made a distinction between what he called the absolute age of an element and its systemic age.9 The absolute age referred to the date of production, while its systemic age referred to how novel the element was in the wider system of objects; he cites the example of a staircase built in an English country home in 1560 as having a young systemic age because such types of staircases only started to appear in European houses in the early 1500s. Now a staircase type that has been around for half a century might not sound young to us, but of course it all depends on the rate at which types change. Youth is a concept relative to longevity, for organisms as much as for artefacts. More critically, absolute age and systemic age do not have to

The shape of time 69

FIGURE 4.1

The temporal layers of clock design.

synchronize; I eat off plates which may have been made only a few years ago but stylistically, they are 200 years old. As Kubler points out: ‘Because duration can be measured by the two standards of absolute age and systematic age, historic time seems to be composed of many envelopes …’.10 It is precisely this phenomenon that Laurent Olivier discovered in his study of miners’ lamps, which portrayed the warped archaeological temporality underlying seriation.11 The trajectory of the design of objects would snake around an ideal line staked out by the regular series of absolute chronology suggesting that seriation will never provide us with an accurate method of dating since it assumes a rhythm of regular change (Figure 4.2). But the issue of how to relate change and continuity does not stop with specific forms like artefact types; it is also about how a type relates horizontally within a broader cultural horizon. Henri Focillon, who was Kubler’s teacher, described this

70 The shape of time

The disparity between chronological and typological time; a gradient vector analysis of 19th- and early 20th-century miners’ lamps. Source: Image courtesy of Laurent Olivier.

FIGURE 4.2

as the double problem of how time relates to form. The first problem is internal, that is how a form relates to its typological system, which is what Kubler discussed through the difference between absolute and systemic age. Focillon referred to this same phenomenon as the difference between the date and the ‘wavelength’ of an object; like Kubler, he pointed out one should not expect isochrony, that all objects should change at the same rate. Rather, the whole point of dates and absolute chronology was to expose the anisochronisms of different things. But in addition to this internal problem there was an external one too: What is the relation of this development to other aspects of human activity? If the time of a work of art were the time of all history, and if all history progressed at the same rate, these questions would never need to be asked. But such is not the case. Instead of being a neatly plotted series of harmonic tableaux, history is, throughout its entire course, variety, exchange and conflict.12 In short, Focillon prompts us to ask how we draw together all the specific trajectories of things into a larger tapestry. In the context of my time-series diagrams, the issue is then this: while we might represent changes in the archaeological record

The shape of time 71

through layered time diagrams, how do we start to build synthetic accounts around this? How do we narrate or write about the history of a site in such a way that remains faithful to this connection between change and continuity? Because in many ways, the Harris matrix as a representation of a site history meshed very well with more traditional ways of representing the temporality of a site. Using periods or phases to order a narrative has been a common method in most historical disciplines, including archaeology. Like the matrix, phasing and periodization typically revolves around the separation of continuity and change: periods of life as normal, punctuated by transitions where all change is bunched up. How do we avoid falling back into the pit of all change as successive, where continuity and change are separate rather than correlated? For Kubler, one gets a sense that this is a fruitless exercise; history is nothing more than an almost random juxtaposition of individual trajectories: Instead, we can imagine the flow of time as assuming the shapes of fibrous bundles …, with each fiber corresponding to a need upon a particular theater of action, and the lengths of the fibers varying as to the duration of each need and the solution to its problems. The cultural bundles therefore consist of variegated fibrous lengths of happening, mostly long, and many brief. They are juxtaposed largely by chance, and rarely by conscious forethought or rigorous planning.13 Is he right? This is what I want to explore next by tackling the topic of periodization.

Problems with periodization I am in the final stages of preparing a monograph on a large-scale excavation I directed in Iceland in the early 2000s.14 The excavation focused on the core of an elite settlement called Skálholt which was an episcopal manor and school. Established probably in the 10th or 11th century CE, our excavations largely dealt with the last century of its life as an episcopal seat in late 17th to late 18th century as well as its subsequent transformation into an ordinary farmstead in the 19th and early 20th century. Altogether, we looked at about 300 years of continuous activity and occupation. In writing the basic narrative of the site chronology, I faced a troubling dilemma. On the one hand, ever since I first started writing these kind of site narratives as an archaeologist I had adopted the standard model one can find in almost any site monograph: breaking the chronology down into discrete phases or periods. Sometimes these phases or periods even had sub-phases. Major periods or phases mark the most important changes, whereas less significant or more ambiguous changes will warrant subdivisions within these broader periods. This is relative chronology at its most basic – even if one has calendar dates to link to these phases as I did – though in this case they derived from documentary sources, not C14. It was also quite explicitly a successional view of change.

72 The shape of time

Periodization is never arbitrary – not in the sense of being random; it always aspires to follow change. When scholars talk about the arbitrariness of periodization, what they usually mean is that it is something imposed by the scholar on the past or on the course of history, rather than something inherent in history itself. The problem – and potential arbitrariness – lies in choosing where to make the cuts; change is all around us all the time, but as scholars studying the past, we usually elevate some changes as being more relevant or significant. And this brings me back to my dilemma. When I looked at my site, even the three centuries we excavated, it was hard to see any obvious way of creating site-wide periods. Each building underwent its own rhythm of change, following repairs and alterations; sometimes they synchronized with other buildings, sometimes not (Figure 4.3). In short, the stratigraphic sequence of the site reflected exactly the kind of transformation you experience walking around any city or town today – piecemeal change, here and there, rather than any large-scale co-ordinated and synchronized transformation. This is what my time-series diagram in Figure 4.3 shows and which honours the co-relation of continuity and change. How then, should I choose to phase my site? Or more appropriately, why should I phase my site? Isn’t this to revert to a successional view of change which these time-series diagrams avoided? So my response was to resist this urge to phase the site altogether. After all, what was this urge except the very drive toward singularization that is inherent in absolute chronologies and the need to make the site conform to an image of successive change. Surely it was not necessary. Not only is it hard to do, it simply does not capture the complexity and articulation of change and continuity which all our hard work on careful, stratigraphic excavation and dating revealed. Moreover, perhaps the multiple temporalities are telling us something important about how we should be dealing with change in archaeology. Such abandonment of a single,

FIGURE 4.3

Longevity of different structures at the post-medieval site of Skálholt, Iceland.

The shape of time 73

site-wide phasing went against all my training and the general direction in which conventional relative chronologies in archaeology strive toward: a singular, successional view of change. I thought bucking the trend was a good idea. But it had horrible consequences. In making a decision to dispense with a site-wide periodization, I found I had only traded one problem for another. One of the benefits of using a singular, sitewide periodization is that it enables us to conduct studies in change of material culture – how, for example, a pottery or faunal assemblage changes between periods I, II and III. But if I abandon a singular, site-wide phasing, how should I deal with the problem of tracking change in my artefactual or zooarchaeological assemblages? Initially I was stumped and struggled to find a solution – partly because thinking with phases was so ingrained. However, in the end I realized it was enough to link my material culture to an absolute chronology in the same way my building sequences were. I did not need a singular, site-wide chronology when I already had a singular, universal chronology of years. Because of the nature of my material, I had a very good set of independent dates from clay pipes, coins, pottery, glassware and other items as well as documentary sources about the site. All of which allowed me to date my building phases to quite a high level of resolution – decadal. Obviously it varied between buildings and deposits, but on the whole, the average temporal unit on my site was three decades. Thus my method involved creating an absolute chronology based on the resolution afforded by the site itself; in this case, units of 30 years or a tricennium. That’s not a word you hear much since our decimal system prefers us to think in tens, for example, decades and centuries. But I wanted to remain faithful to the resolution of my site, not some scaling based on an arbitrary convention. Thus armed with a tricennial chronology, I could now bypass the need for a singular, site-wide periodization and once again, focus on the specific rhythms of change exhibited in the material culture at a tricennial scale of resolution. However, while this got round the impetus to singularize my various relative chronologies through a site-wide phasing, it did present another problem. It is not just the different structures on my site changing at different rates and at different times, but the material culture sequences also had their own internal clocks which, like the buildings, sometimes synchronized but just as often did not. Thus, while ceramics might display a marked change in the early 19th century, window glass had followed its own tune, and so on. And the more materials I track, the more, new temporal boundaries will emerge. In other words, I wanted to resist singularization and embrace the multiplicity of relative chronologies – but beware of what you wish for. I got multiplicity by the bucket load. Every item of material culture could potentially carry its own periodization. But this is good isn’t it? Yes, and no. Yes, I was being more faithful to the different objects and their temporalities than a site-wide phasing would, which would mangle them into a singular, uniform sequence. But no, in the sense that I now had a real headache in how to tie these different temporalities together. After all, at the end of the day I want to tell a story here. Is Kubler right? Isn’t it enough to

74 The shape of time

stick with these fibrous bundles? I think to answer this, we need to pay attention to the way the multiple fibres of time synchronize or not. If the key issue of internal temporality was isochronism, as Focillon suggested, then the important property of external temporality becomes synchronism. Here we are no longer talking about uniform or variable rates of change but rather co-ordinated durations; where different elements or forms stop or start at the same time. In terms of periodization, what this means is that a period transition designates a moment when lots of things all change at the same time. That, for example, the Neolithic signals a shift from hunting and gathering to farming, that new things emerge such as permanent architecture, polished axes, pottery, monuments, and so on. Synchronization thus, ultimately implies a connection; two or more sites change at the same time, not through some magical coincidence but because they are connected in some way. In a discussion of global periodizations, this is exactly what Jerry Bentley argues; that to talk about a global periodization presupposes talking about the world as inter-connected. How can we use the same periodization in Europe and North America in prehistory if their histories are not entangled in anyway? A global periodization is one which will be based on those aspects which make the world connected: cross-cultural interaction.15 Such synchronizations are probably quite rare but more significantly, it begs all kinds of questions: how many changes need to be synchronized for us to accept something as a period transition? And what unit of time should we use to measure the synchronization – a century, a decade, a year? All of those features typically listed for the Neolithic clearly emerge at different times in different places and form only a very vague and loose package which raises questions about how much local and historical variability is being lost under such broad periodizations.

Periodization and relevant change I cannot help feeling that resolving (or smoothing over) these issues are largely due to the fact that one has already decided ahead of time, what the relevant change is; only then do you try and find or ensure other things synchronize around it, adjusting your scale depending on the degree of alignment. We have already decided that farming, sedentism or monument-building is the key factor defining the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition, and so everything else can be fitted in around that. No wonder this transition lasted a long time! These problems highlight, I think, one of the core issues around multiplicity and archaeological studies of change. In part, it concerns a question of politics and the kind of historical narrative we want to write; almost any periodization that cuts across multiple contexts and objects will end up giving some attributes more salience than others. The American historian Jennifer Morgan’s critique of how periodization in North American history sits uneasily with studies of slavery is one example,16 while the Spanish archaeologist Paloma Gonzáles-Marcén has shown how the Iberian Bronze Age chronology is inflected by an androcentric bias based on the selected range of items used to construct it.17 Similarly, Maynes and Watner’s more general critique of

The shape of time 75

prehistoric periodizations shows how they are structured on both androcentric concerns such as technology (e.g., Three Age System) as well as Eurocentric narratives.18 Returning to the context of my site, Icelandic archaeology for example has traditionally followed a, largely implicit, tripartite periodization: the Settlement Period (landnámsöld, 870–930 CE); the Free State or Commonwealth period (þjóðveldisöld/ goðaveldisöld, 930–1262 CE) and later periods (seinni alder, 1262–present).19 The focus on divisions in the earlier centuries reflects an entrenched, nationalist ideology which glorifies the first centuries when Iceland was an independent country before it came under the kingdom of Norway–Denmark in 1262 and remained as such until 1944. The lumping together of most of what we would call the medieval and postmedieval periods reflected a sense of a long, dark age where nothing really changed. This was especially true of archaeology but also to a large extent, history in Iceland as well, until recently.20 If nationalism seems to pervade Icelandic periodization, then other ideologies come into play at the European scale. One of the apparent advantages of shifting from the regional to the global – or at least inter-regional perspective, is that we can also escape the nationalist ideologies which might affix to a periodization focused on a single country like Iceland. However, this only substitutes one political ideology with another. Colonialism has often been acknowledged as the flipside of nationalism, or rather vice versa, and it is thus no surprise to find that when we start to think about more global periodizations, we enter the political minefield of Eurocentrism.21 There are many ways this manifests itself – in prehistory, the work of Maynes and Watner has already been mentioned, but more generally, the very divide between prehistory and history is caught up in a Eurocentric narrative which has especially infected archaeologies of former colonial contexts.22 But both nationalism and colonialism are closely bound to modernity, and it is modernity that really occupies the central role in periodization of European history, specifically in the classic tripartite schema of ancient, medieval and modern.23 The problematic term among these three, as many scholars have noted, is that of modernity.24 I do not need to revisit these arguments here, suffice to say that there is a highly loaded set of connotations and associations which positively value modernity and – by implication if not in word – denigrate that which is nonmodern. It is this negative space that connects the Middle Ages, the Colonial Other, and Prehistory as non-moderns. Although there have been various attempts to revise or restructure these divisions, they generally only shift the transition points, preserving the basic periods. Thus a number of scholars including Dietrich Gerhard, Geoffrey Barraclough, Jacques Le Goff and William Green have argued for a long Middle Ages, each putting the starting date slightly differently but all agreeing on an end date of the 18th century.25 This is a position to which some archaeologists have also added their voice.26 While of interest, these debates nonetheless still preserve the basic tripartite schema of ancient, medieval and modern. Indeed our current divisions – the big ones, such as between prehistory and history, or between ancient, medieval and

76 The shape of time

modern history, dominate not only our conceptual landscape of the past but our institutional frameworks within which scholars study the past. This was a point made long ago by Gerhard,27 and perhaps remains one of the biggest obstacles to re-thinking our current periodizations and especially the ideological baggage of modernity. Indeed, these periodizations demonstrate yet again how marking change is caught up in deeper ideological and political commitments; that where to make the cut is never purely an empirical issue of synchronized change, but rather that synchronicity can be ‘stretched’ to fit a particular definition of relevance. The advent of modernity is as much debated as the advent of the Neolithic – or more topically, the Anthropocene.28 Such advents always have an empirical dimension, but they can never be reduced to it. But in the context of this chapter, these political dimensions are simply part of a larger issue around periodization: it is all about successional change. As such, let me re-iterate a few key points:   

Periodization is fundamentally a means to mark change. Change happens all the time – is constant, and occurs at different rates because of the different temporal rhythms of different objects, actors etc. To effect a viable periodization means identifying relevant change, which is both a political and epistemological problem.

These points are presented in order to underline the fact that periodization is constructed, but not arbitrary; it is also meant to remind us that periodization is critically linked to questions of generalization. In the wake of a revival of long-term perspectives in history, periodization is becoming a more pressing issue and one to which archaeology, because of its long-term perspective, is well-suited to address.29 At the heart of this though, lies the issue of generality – that is across how many different objects and domains can a periodization operate without seriously misrepresenting, simplifying and reducing those objects and domains? Given the violence a site-wide periodization would seem to do to my multiple temporalities at Skálholt, how much more violence is effected when we extend a periodization across sites, regions and even continents as with grand periodizations like the Three Age System? Is there any way to do this responsibly, sensitively – and meaningfully?

Periodization as continuity It is at this point that we now need to consider a very different approach and definition of periodization. To view periodization not as means of marking change, as has been the case so far, but as a means of characterizing continuity. Change does happen constantly, yet somehow we still manage to perceive a segment of time as having some kind of unity or coherence, whether it is the fashion and music of the 1980s, the cultural zeitgeist of turn of the 19th century Europe, or even, yes, the material culture of the Neolithic. In Crellin’s terms, periodization is now precisely about those long periods of life as normal, those blocks of time

The shape of time 77

rather than the transitions between them. Such a stance leads us to Collingwood’s forgotten or at least marginalized view of periods as being defined by their epicentre rather than their edges.30 For what Collingwood suggested was that to understand a period such as 5th-century Athens, one needed to do so from the inside; a period was less about what distinguished it from preceding or succeeding periods (i.e., marking change), but more about what held it together as a unity (i.e., its coherence). Such an approach has also played an important, though often less acknowledged role in the construction archaeological chronologies. Relative chronologies as you will recall, deal only with sequence, not durations. We have no way of knowing how long a certain period or phase lasted, only that it comes before or after another such period. As a result, they work primarily through identifying change as a marker of sequence but also, because of this, they also adopt a model of change which is predominantly successional. But how is this achieved, practically speaking? Archaeology typically has drawn on two methods for constructing relative chronologies or sequences; the standard and preferred method has used stratigraphy where vertical layering or spatial relations of contiguity are interpreted as temporal relations of succession. This is fine, but as any archaeologist who has worked on poorly stratified sites knows, this will not get you very far. Instead, archaeologists depend on other techniques which all share one thing in common; using morphological similarity to generate relations of contemporaneity between features, after which, parcels of contemporaneous features can be ordered sequentially. One technique, rather misleadingly called horizontal stratigraphy, illustrates this approach. Defining what features are contemporary on a site draws on the morphology and material similarities of deposits as well as their spatial symmetry, chiefly alignment. A line of postholes, right-angled ditches, graves with similar backfill composition; in the absence of close dating from finds or tight stratigraphic relations, symmetry and morphology are what we conventionally rely on.31 And even when we do use finds, it is their morphological similarity that is drawn on – that is, typological dating. Yet what is really striking is how marginalized these techniques are in excavation manuals; they are often presented as anomalies, exceptional cases, residual issues after the important work of stratigraphic analysis has been conducted. But for so many archaeological sites – especially in ploughzone areas – these are the norm, not the exception. In many cases of rural archaeology, stratigraphic analysis can be of minimal help in interpreting chronology. This is the power of codification and the way we are victims of our own disciplinary history: stratigraphy being presented as the most important principle in fieldwork. This is simply not true in practice. Morphological similarity as a technique for defining contemporaneity is of course, only useful insofar as it defines contemporaneity in terms of a broad block of time, but to order these blocks into a sequence, we need to add other methods: either using what stratigraphy there is, drawing on absolute dates, inferring a directionality, or cross-tabulating the data to conduct a seriation. But the basic method of morphological similarity is primarily about defining contemporaneity first, sequence second. As a method of relative chronology, it plays a key part in

78 The shape of time

archaeology, especially through typology but has a probably stronger presence in related art historical approaches to artefactual and architectural analysis. Think about how we identify a church as Romanesque or Gothic, an assemblage of pottery as Neolithic or Iron Age. Yet what is it that enables us to group objects together under such labels? For example, to what extent is the succession of Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age informed by the sequence of changes that they mark as opposed to internal features that characterize them? If we think about the Three Age System as it was originally devised, it was largely a relative chronology based on marking a change in cutting tool technology: from stone, to bronze to iron. The direction of this sequence was not guessed at and even if it was informed by older ideologies of technological development, it was ultimately ratified by find combinations with stratigraphic relationships. But if we think about what, for example, the Neolithic means today, is it more a polymorphous entity, characterized by various features such as domestication, monumental architecture, pottery use, sedentism. Significantly, none of these features exclusively define it, its boundaries are blurred. What it points to is a subtle shift from thinking about a period like the Neolithic, less in terms of its edges – its distinction from preceding and later periods – and more in terms of its centre. What holds it together as a recognizable phenomenon. At the same time, the edges still matter. For a period to be considered a whole, a totality, means it has to have a beginning – and an end. All of which brings us to the issue of historical distance. Historical distance is what allows us to see the past, or segments of the past, as a whole in the first place. Humboldt’s 1821 essay ‘On the Historian’s Task’, offers a succinct and condensed explanation for what is ultimately at issue: it is all about seeing the form or shape of history.32 As Humboldt himself put it: ‘Thus historical truth is, as it were, rather like the clouds which take shape for the eye only at a distance’.33 It is why, even into the early 20th century, many historians considered ‘contemporary history’ an oxymoron; to study the history of recent times was like looking at a painting with your nose pressed to the canvas – how could you possibly determine its subject? If historical distance is about seeing the shape of history then clearly what matters is that the relation between the archaeologist or historian and their subject needs to be defined by one of closure. If contemporary history seems to lack the quality of historical distance, it is because history itself has not finished; it is like living in the middle of a story, whose ending we do not know because it lies in the future, even if its beginning happened over a century ago. How can we possibly discern its form when it is still forming? And yet there is also a paradox here in relation to periodization. If seeing periods as a whole requires historical distance, surely this contradicts Collingwood’s idea of a period being defined from its epicentre? In a sense, Collingwood’s definition of seeing the period as a whole seems to require not so much historical distance as immersion into the very midst of events – to see the period from the inside out, from its centre towards it margins. Again, such issues lead directly into epistemological debates about empathetic understanding and the nature of historical

The shape of time 79

interpretation for which Collingwood is better known. But the more relevant issue for a discussion of time is how this encapsulates a paradox about any periodization as continuity: that it requires we understand it internally, from the inside out, yet simultaneously to achieve this, we must position ourselves outside, at a suitable distance, which means acknowledging, in effect, that things have changed – that we live in an era different to that we are studying.

Synchronicity The previous discussion of periodization has highlighted what I see as two very different ways of conceptualizing periodization. On the one hand, we have a view that stresses its function in marking change; it privileges the edges of periods – transitions, origins, revolutions – and treats the time in between as business as usual. Stretches of continuity punctured by moments of change. On the other hand, we have a view that stresses the continuity of a period, one which gathers things together as typical or representative of an era; the transitions between periods are not the primary concern. These two views of periodization are not mutually exclusive and methodologically, we can and do employ both to construct our periods; yet they do work only through opposing change to continuity. Maybe in some ways, these two approaches also return us to the discussion of Braudel at the end of the last chapter, especially his concepts of event and structure which I reworked as severance and persistence. Viewing periods as marking change is highlighting breaks, discontinuities, while viewing them as blocks of contemporariness is to stress the persistence of certain features, qualities which define a period as a whole. But what then of the third term, conjunctions or recurrence? Maybe this oft-neglected third term of the Braudelian trio is the ultimately the most important. The notion of conjunction suggests a coming together, a temporal synchronicity while that of recurrence suggests continuity through change. Despite the differences between these two approaches to periodization – marking change versus expressing continuity – they do share a deeper affinity in terms of how they resolve their units of analysis. For the first, the problem lies in deciding what constitutes important or relevant change which involves ‘synchronizing’ an array of key features or elements. The duration of the transition or revolution will depend entirely on how closely synchronized its elements are, but more importantly, such synchronization is dependent on the very features selected. It begs the question: what does synchronicity really mean? For the second approach, exactly the same issues crop up; in defining the limits of a period as an era of continuity, requires that we assume some kind of contemporaneity, some co-existence of the features that constitute its unity as an epoch. What is it that defines the period as a whole? Thus regardless of how we choose to define or approach periodization – as marking change or characterizing continuity – both ultimately depend on a particular configuration of synchronicity: of things happening or existing at the same time. In this way, we may also find a resolution to the problem with which we opened this chapter: how to articulate continuity and change together, rather than as separate

80 The shape of time

things. Indeed, the irony is that in moving from an internal to an external analysis of time as characterized by Focillon, we have ended up back with an oppositional relation between change and continuity, that is, periods being defined either by change or by continuity. And yet in identifying synchronicity as a problem common to both, I think we may also find a solution to this other problem. That it is only through an investigation into synchronicity that we find a way to talk about continuity and change in a way that keeps them together, rather than posed as opposites or alternatives. It is thus to this topic I now turn.

Notes 1 R. Crellin, Change and Archaeology (London: Routledge, 2020). 2 And not just archaeology; even philosophy, especially philosophies of time and change that define them in terms of movement, where movement is regarded as a succession of positions occupied in space. Such a view results in the various Aristotelian problems of time and change illustrated through Zeno’s paradoxes of the arrow in flight or Achilles and the tortoise. See G. Lucas, The Archaeology of Time (London Routledge, 2005) for further discussion of these problems. 3 V.G. Childe, ‘Changing Methods and Aims in Prehistory’, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 1 (1935): 1–15. 4 A. Shryock and D. Smail (eds) Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); D. Christian, Origin Story: A Big History of Everything (London: Penguin, 2018). 5 G. Lucas, Critical Approaches to Fieldwork (London: Routledge, 2001), see especially pages 160–162. 6 For an early example of this, see M. Carver, ‘Digging for Data: Archaeological Approaches to Data Definition, Acquisition and Analysis’, in R. Francovich and D. Manacorda (eds), Lo scavo archeologico: dalla diagnosi all’ edizione (Florence: Ediziono All’Insegna del Giglio, 1990), pp. 45–120. 7 G. Lucas, ‘The Changing Face of Time: English Domestic Clocks from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries’, Journal of Design History, 8 (1995): 1–9. 8 G. Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), pp. 61–64. 9 Kubler, The Shape of Time, pp. 90–91. 10 Kubler, The Shape of Time, pp. 91. 11 L. Olivier, The Dark Abyss of Time: Archaeology and Memory (Lanham: AltaMira Press), pp. 164–166; also see, L. Olivier and B. Wirtz, ‘Recherches sur le temps archéologique: l’apport de ‘archéologie du present’, Antiquités nationales 35 (2003): 255–266. 12 H. Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art (New York: Zone Books, 1992), p. 141. 13 Kubler, The Shape of Time, pp. 111. 14 This section draws on an earlier publication; see G. Lucas, ‘Periodization in Archaeology: Starting in the Ground’, in S. Souvatzi, A. Baysal and E. Baysal (eds), Time and History in Prehistory (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 77–94. 15 J. Bentley, ‘Cross-cultural Interaction and Periodization in World History’, American Historical Review, 101, no. 3 (1996): 749–770. 16 J. Morgan, ‘Periodization Problems: Race and Gender in the History of the Early Republic’, Journal of the Early Republic, 36 (2016): 351–357. 17 P. Gonzáles-Marcén and S. Montón-Subías, ‘Time, Women, Identity and Maintenance Activities: Death and Life in the Argaric Communities of Southeast Iberia’, Aegaeum: Annales d’archéologie égéenn de l’Université de Liège 30 (2009): 69–73. 18 M.J. Maynes and A. Watner, ‘Temporalities and Periodization in Deep History: Technology, Gender, and Benchmarks of “Human Development”’, Social Science History 36,

The shape of time 81

19

20 21 22

23 24

25

26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33

no. 1 (2012): 59–83; on eurocentrism and periodization, also see, C. Orser, ‘The Politics of Periodization’, in A. González-Ruibal, Reclaiming Archaeology: Beyond the Tropes of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 145–154. See, for example, O. Vésteinsson, ‘Defining the Medieval in Icelandic Archaeology’, in M. Svart Kristiansen, E. Roesdahl and J. Graham-Campbell (eds), Medieval Archaeology in Scandinavia and Beyond: History, Trends and Tomorrow (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2015), pp. 213–234. For example, G. Lucas, ‘Later Historical Archaeology in Iceland: A Review’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 16 (2012): 437–454. P. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Orser, ‘Politics of Periodization’; K.G. Lightfoot, ‘Culture Contact Studies: Redefining the Relationship between Prehistoric and Historical Archaeology’, American Antiquity, 60 no. 2 (1995): 199–217; C.N. Matthews, ‘History to Prehistory: An Archaeology of Being Indian’, Archaeologies 3 (2007): 271–295; P.P.A. Funari, M. Hall and S. Jones (eds), Historical Archaeology: Back from the Edge (London: Routledge, 1999). J. Le Goff, Must We Divide History into Periods? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); W. Green, ‘Periodization in European and World History’, Journal of World History 3, no. 1 (1992): 13–53. See especially, P. Corfield, Time and the Shape of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); P. Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 2010); also see H. Jordheim, ‘Against Periodization: Koselleck’s Theory of Multiple Temporalities’, History and Theory 51 (2012): 151–171. E. Gerhard, ‘Periodization in European History’, The American Historical Review 61, no. 4 (1956): 900–913; G. Barraclough, History in a Changing World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955); Le Goff, Must We Divide; Green, ‘Periodization in European and World History’, 39. For example, P. Courtney, ‘The Tyranny of Constructs: Some Thoughts on Periodisation and Culture Change’, in D. Gaimster and P. Stamper (eds), Age of Transition: The Archaeology of English Culture, 1400–1600 (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1997), T.E. Fagerland and K. Paasche (eds) 1537 – Kontinuitet eller Brudd? (Trondheim: Tapir Academic Press, 2011). Gerhard, ‘Periodization in World History’. S. Lewis and M. Maslin, ‘Defining the Anthropocene’, Nature 519 (2015): 171–180; B. Smith and M. Zeder, ‘The Onset of the Anthropocene’, Anthropocene 4 (2013): 8–13. For example, D. Gabaccia, ‘Is It About Time?’, Social Science History 34, no. 1 (2010): 1–12; Corfield, Time and the Shape of History. R.G. Collingwood, ‘Oswald Spengler and the Theory of Historical Cycles’, Antiquity 1 (1927): 311–325; also see R.S. Baker, ‘History and Periodization’, Clio 26, no. 2 (1997): 135–141. See, for example, Carver, ‘Digging for Data’, pp. 281–287. W. von Humboldt, ‘On the Historian’s Task’, History and Theory 6, no. 1(1967); J. den Hollander, ‘Contemporary History and the Art of Self-Distancing’, History and Theory 50, no. 4 (2011): 51–67. Von Humboldt, ‘Contemporary History’, 58.

References Baker, R.S. ‘History and Periodization’. Clio 26, no. 2 (1997): 135–141. Barraclough, G. History in a Changing World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955. Bentley, J. ‘Cross-Cultural Interaction and Periodization in World History’. American Historical Review 101, no. 3 (1996): 749–770.

82 The shape of time

Carver, M. ‘Digging for Data: Archaeological Approaches to Data Definition, Acquisition and Analysis’. In R. Francovich and D. Manacorda (eds), Lo scavo archeologico: dalla diagnosi all’edizione. Florence: Ediziono All’Insegna del Giglio, 1990, pp. 45–120. Carver, M. Archaeological Investigation. London: Routledge, 2009. Chatterjee, P. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Childe, V.G. ‘Changing Methods and Aims in Prehistory’, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 1 (1935): 1–15. Christian, D. Origin Story: A Big History of Everything. London: Penguin, 2018. Collingwood, R.G. ‘Oswald Spengler and the Theory of Historical Cycles’, Antiquity 1 (1927): 311–325. Corfield, P. Time and the Shape of History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Courtney, P. ‘The Tyranny of Constructs: Some Thoughts on Periodisation and Culture Change’. In D. Gaimster and P. Stamper (eds), Age of Transition: The Archaeology of English Culture, 1400–1600. Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1997, pp. 9–24. Crellin, R. Change and Archaeology. London: Routledge, 2020. Fagerland, T.E and K. Paasche (eds), 1537 – Kontinuitet eller brudd? Trondheim: Tapir Academic Press, 2011. Focillon, H. The Life of Forms in Art. New York: Zone Books, 1992. Funari, P.P.A., M. Hall and S. Jones (eds), Historical Archaeology: Back from the Edge. London: Routledge, 1999. Gabaccia, D. ‘Is It About Time?’. Social Science History 34, no. 1 (2010): 1–12. Gerhard, E. ‘Periodization in European History’. The American Historical Review 61, no. 4 (1956): 900–913. Gonzáles-Marcén, P. and S. Montón-Subías. ‘Time, Women, Identity and Maintenance Activities. Death and Life in the Argaric Communities of Southeast Iberia’. Aegaeum: Annales d’archéologie égéenne de l’Université de Liège 30 (2009): 69–73. Green, W. ‘Periodization in European and World History’. Journal of World History 3, no. 1 (1992): 13–53. Hollander, J.den ‘Contemporary History and the Art of Self-Distancing’. History and Theory 50 (2011): 51–67. Humboldt, W.von ‘On the Historian’s Task’. History and Theory 6, no. 1 (1967): 57–71. Jordheim, H. ‘Against Periodization: Koselleck’s Theory of Multiple Temporalities’. History and Theory 51 (2012): 151–171. Kubler, G. The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962. Le Goff, J. Must We Divide History into Periods? New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Lewis, S. and M. Maslin. ‘Defining the Anthropocene’. Nature 519 (2015): 171–180. Lightfoot, K.G. ‘Culture Contact Studies: Redefining the Relationship between Prehistoric and Historical Archaeology’. American Antiquity 60, no. 2 (1995): 199–217. Lucas, G. ‘The Changing Face of Time: English Domestic Clocks from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries’. Journal of Design History 8 (1995): 1–9. Lucas, G. Critical Approaches to Fieldwork. London: Routledge, 2001. Lucas, G. The Archaeology of Time. London: Routledge, 2005. Lucas, G. ‘Later Historical Archaeology in Iceland. A Review’. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 16 (2012): 437–454. Lucas, G. ‘Periodization in Archaeology: Starting in the Ground’. In S. Souvatzi, A. Baysal and E. Baysal (eds), Time and History in Prehistory. London: Routledge, 2019, pp. 77–94. Matthews, C.N. ‘History to Prehistory: An Archaeology of Being Indian’. Archaeologies 3 (2007): 271–295.

The shape of time 83

Maynes, M.J. and A. Watner. ‘Temporalities and Periodization in Deep History: Technology, Gender, and Benchmarks of “Human Development”’. Social Science History 36, no. 1 (2012): 59–83. Morgan, J. ‘Periodization Problems: Race and Gender in the History of the Early Republic’. Journal of the Early Republic 36 (2016): 351–357. Olivier, L. The Dark Abyss of Time: Archaeology and Memory. Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2011. Olivier, L. and B. Wirtz. ‘Recherches sur le temps archéologique: l’apport de l’archéologie du present’. Antiquités nationales 35 (2003): 255–266. Orser, C. ‘The Politics of Periodization’. In A. González-Ruibal (ed.), Reclaiming Archaeology: Beyond the Tropes of Modernity. London: Routledge, 2013, pp. 145–154. Osborne, P. The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde. London: Verso, 2010. Shryock, A. and D.L. Smail (eds), Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Smith, B. and M. Zeder. ‘The Onset of the Anthropocene’. Anthropocene 4 (2013): 8–13. Vésteinsson, O. ‘Defining the Medieval in Icelandic Archaeology’. In M. Svart Kristiansen, E. Roesdahl and J. Graham-Campbell (eds), Medieval Archaeology in Scandinavia and Beyond: History, Trends and Tomorrow. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2015, pp. 213–234.

5 THE SAME TIME

Simultaneity and contemporaneity When two things happen at the same time, we might describe them as simultaneous. As discussed in earlier chapters of this book, simultaneity was the problem in constructing a universal co-ordinated time, so that ships, railways, telecommunications and other forms of long-distance exchange and travel could be conducted without mishap or confusion. It was also ironically, at the same time that simultaneity itself was found to be an impossibility – at least in any absolute sense. Einsteinian relativity ushered in the loss of simultaneity just as it was being established for clocks around the globe. For most practical purposes, assumptions of simultaneity and Newtonian time work; the absolute chronology of archaeology proceeds on this basis and it too, coordinates its various clocks in the same way: C14, tree rings, solar years and so on. But when we say two events in the archaeological record occur at the same time or belong to the same time, is this the same thing? In my discussion at the end of the last chapter on the synchronization of change or coherence of an era, simultaneity seems too accurate, too precise a term to employ for synchronicities and unities that might be very loosely or broadly aligned in time. Instead, the term contemporary seems more appropriate. But what then is the difference between simultaneity and contemporaneity? Is it just a matter of precision? In Chapter 1 we saw how Bergson made a distinction between the two, where contemporaneity referred to a primordial experience of things co-occurring while simultaneity was an abstraction based on an external measure. It is Bergson’s definitions that I will follow here, although with some modification. Let us start with a really basic question: what do we mean when we say two sites or two features or two artefacts are from the same time?1 Almost the whole of Chapter 2 was spent discussing the idea of a singular time, of the use of an absolute chronology as being underwritten by a singularization of time so that all of history – human and

The same time 85

non-human – can be brought within a single, temporal register. In that sense, everything that ever happened belongs to the same time. This is clearly not what we mean by contemporary. No, surely we mean some kind of alignment so that within any segment of this singular time, if two things both happen within the same segment, then they are contemporary. Two events occurring in the year 1786 for example, we would say they are contemporary. But still this is surely not right either. Because absolute chronology is scalable, we can scale up our units and the concept of contemporaneity should still hold; thus two events that occur in the 18th century are contemporary, even if one occurred in 1712 and the other in 1786. Indeed, two events occurring in the same millennium are contemporary by that logic. This is surely wrong; no historian would accept this. And yet, as archaeologists we do it frequently. If we can place two sites in the same century, we are often very happy with that resolution, especially in prehistory, though Bayesian techniques are now changing our expectations and raising the bar. But we commonly use contemporaneity on a coarse level of resolution. But even we have our limits. I doubt many archaeologists would be happy to call two sites contemporary if the unit is the millennium, except perhaps those working in the Palaeolithic. What is going on here? It does seem as if our standards of what counts as contemporary shifts according to the context and most critically, according to the objects or events which are being compared. We might be very happy to say that two settlements are contemporary if they both can be placed in the 3–500-year span, but more cautious in calling two artefacts contemporary using the same scale of unit, simply because settlements usually last a long time while the life-cycle of most artefacts is much shorter lived. Of course, some artefacts have long use lives, some even longer than settlements, but my point here is not to make generalizations about the longevity of settlements versus finds, but rather that the longevity of anything directly relates to the appropriateness of the way we use the term contemporary. This brings me back to a point I made in Chapter 3 on scale, about the importance of not conflating units of measure with that which is being measured. Contemporaneity relates not to our units of measurement: years, centuries, millennia; but rather to that which is being measured, the duration of the events or objects under study. Two things are contemporary with each other, not contemporary with an abstract unit of time; the unit of time is what is used to measure contemporaneity which is why we also use the units of measurement appropriate to the duration of the object or event, but it is important to keep the two analytically separate. Similarly, this may now also give us the basis of distinguishing simultaneity from contemporaneity; simultaneity is, conversely precisely about the units of measurement – about knowing whether two C14 dates refer to the same time or not for example. This is why C14 requires calibration, to make sure all our dates refer to the same time system. Now this distinction between contemporaneity and simultaneity might seem obvious, but I think we routinely and unwittingly conflate it as is evident by the fact that we tend to think of contemporaneity as an either/or relation, which is rather solely a

86 The same time

property of simultaneity. Either two events are simultaneous or not. We cannot say this about contemporaneity. Why? One of the problems with conflating the unit of measure with that which is being measured is that it reduces contemporaneity to simultaneity; that is, two events or objects appear perfectly in step with each other just because they have both been dated to the 17th century or the 1830s. As such, two events are either contemporary or not, depending on whether they both can be assigned the same date range. But there are many more ways for two objects or events to be contemporary than being simultaneous – in fact, simultaneity is probably extremely rare. James Allen’s work on time-interval algorithms developed in the context of research on artificial intelligence illustrate the multiple ways in which contemporaneity can manifest itself, especially the various forms of overlapping contemporaneity as opposed to strict synchrony.2 Allen’s algorithms are being adopted now by many archaeologists working on digital database structures and archives (see Figure 5.1).3

FIGURE 5.1

The main temporal relationships under Allen’s temporal logic; six of them can be inverted, resulting in a total of 13 possible relations.

The same time 87

And yet archaeologists have always been aware of this multiplicity and exploited it to good purpose. The basis of many relative chronologies uses the idea of overlapping contemporaneity to build up longer sequences than can be gained by stratigraphy alone. The Scandinavian method of find combination and the methods of seriation both exploit this feature. These techniques were developed in the 19th and early 20th century and so have been with us a long time. But what these methods also offer us is a different version of historical time – one that is not a singular, segmented line but more a braided rope made of intertwining, overlapping threads of different length, like Kubler’s fibres mentioned in the previous chapter. This is also a very different kind of multiplicity to that implicit in a scalar model discussed in Chapter 3 although some scholars who have discussed scale, have used similar analogies.4 The problem here, as I argued in Chapter 3, is not with these analogies, but using scale as a term to articulate them with.

Polychronic ensembles Let’s explore this through an important paper by the French archaeologist Laurent Olivier on the Hochdorf Princely Grave.5 Olivier’s paper, which was written in the 1990s, addresses the problem of a chronological fault-line in Late Iron Age sequences in central Europe, specifically a disagreement between traditional chronologies established through cross-dating of Mediterranean imports and new dating provided by dendrochronology. The discrepancy is of the order of c. 70–100 years. Not a lot you might think, but the relative chronologies were considered quite accurate nonetheless. How should one deal with this discrepancy? Olivier examines one grave from this sequence – the Hochdorf princely grave from southwest Germany dating to the second half of the 6th century BC – to illustrate what he suggests is the key problem here: the existence of multiple temporalities even within a single event. Burials in archaeology have typically embodied the ideal dating assemblage: they occur over a short period of time and once buried, tend to remain sealed and undisturbed. They represent what is often called a closed context or find and contrast sharply with open finds/contexts on settlement sites which may represent the accumulation of multiple activities over a long period of time – decades at least. What Olivier does is show how even a closed find such as a burial does not provide the ideal situation we often take it to be. The Hochdorf grave is one of around 100 such richly furnished graves known and characterized by burial in a wooden chamber, covered by a mound. Accompanying the corpse in the chamber is, typically, a wagon or chariot and items associated with drinking, grooming and hunting. In the particular example Olivier looked at, he identified how the ostensible single event of the burial actually incorporates three different periods (see Figure 5.2). The first period of time is covered by the objects used by the deceased over their lifetime, some of which may be very old, even when the deceased had them, if they had been inherited. We can all relate to this – just take an inventory of your own possessions and think of the oldest object you have and the youngest and consider what duration of time is involved in the interval between these two. The

88 The same time

FIGURE 5.2 The multi-temporal dimensions of the Hochdorf grave. Source: Image courtesy of Laurent Olivier.

second period of time addresses objects which had been modified or introduced between the period of death and inhumation. In this example, some of the objects such as shoes, a dagger and drinking horns had been gold-plated in a manner to render them non-functional, suggesting post-mortem modification. The third and final period refers to the time of actual interment and objects introduced here, including of course, the funerary chamber itself among other things, but also the whole tradition of burial of which this was a particular manifestation. Because different objects themselves have different ages, even if they are interred together, there remains a sense in which the notion of a closed find is a fiction. How old is this grave? This is a nonsensical question as it all depends. Do we date it to the act of deposition or do we date it by the finds associated with the deceased, each of which will give slightly different dates depending on their age. Now of course, archaeologists have been aware of these issues long before Olivier pointed them out; one of the basic rules of dating archaeologists use is that of terminus post quem or TPQ, the date after which a deposit must have been formed. So we might have a deposit – even a so-called closed context like a grave – which will have various objects dated to slightly different periods. But we always take the

The same time 89

youngest date as the TPQ and that becomes the de facto date. But what Olivier is saying is: why do we do that – why do we strive to think about the grave as belonging to only one particular moment or period in time, despite the evidence? In a sense, the answer depends on what we are interested in: the act of interment or deposition or the general style of burial of which this is an exemplar? In the context of Olivier’s discussion, it is the latter and because this is a much less closed system than the former, discrepancies such as those given through dendrochronology and cross-dating of imports are much easier to understand. No amount of better data or increased resolution will resolve this. The very elasticity in the temporalities of different objects and practices means that such correspondence is unlikely to be found, especially at resolutions of less than a century. Moreover, for Olivier the very variability of these temporalities is something we should be foregrounding, not trying to overcome or regulate into a singular chronology. Olivier has since gone on to develop these ideas into a different vision for what archaeology should be; I will come to this later in the chapter but for now, let’s tie this back to my previous discussion on contemporaneity. All the objects found in the Hochdorf grave are contemporary in the sense that they co-exist, but as we just saw, this is an overlapping contemporaneity, not a synchronicity. Each object or element of the grave had its own life before and so was entangled in a different set of temporal relationships. Another way of framing the problem Olivier discussed regarding the discrepancy between dendrochronology and cross-dating is to suggest that archaeologists were too fixated on seeing contemporaneity as if it were synchronicity, instead of being more attuned to diverse forms of contemporaneity evident in these princely graves. What gives this example the force it does, is precisely the illusion of a tight chronological resolution, both in terms of the sequence of events represented and the dating of these events. Let us recall the example of Boxgrove from Chapter 3, a Palaeolithic site in southern England. There we had a case of very high resolution in terms of the events evident: flint-knapping episodes of a quarter of an hour set in a very coarse resolution of dating, a 46,000-year window of time. I used Cristián Simonetti’s analogies of digital and optical resolution to characterize this difference where Boxgrove offers us very high digital resolution but extremely low optical resolution.6 Now with the Hochdorf grave, we also have a high digital resolution – the grave was well preserved, a sealed moment in time, even if the actual construction of the chamber and its sealing by a mound are estimated by Olivier to have taken a few weeks. But we also have a fairly high optical resolution – based on various dating, the burial has been placed within a half-century window of the late 6th-century BC. Olivier’s point of course, is that even with this close dating, the temporality of grave still exceeds these boundaries when looked at from a plural perspective. But what do we do in cases where we don’t have good digital resolution – even if the optical resolution is not bad? In fact, this is very common. Those open contexts I mentioned earlier, like settlement layers – as opposed to the closed context of a grave – entrain a different set of problems than those Olivier addresses. Indeed, Olivier’s criticism of the

90 The same time

distinction of open and closed contexts is somewhat selective in focus. It tends to be oriented mostly to the formation of artefact assemblages and insofar as closed contexts are used in that sense only, this is fine. Olivier is primarily thinking of his site as a once-living system, where different objects will come together at different times and bring different histories with them. But any archaeological site is composed of deposits as well as assemblages and another way to think about open and closed contexts is in terms of deposit formation, not assemblage formation; here it is about the extent to which new objects or finds can be incorporated into a deposit after or while it is still forming. Now Olivier does discuss deposits in his study of the Hochdorf grave but these are treated as part of the assemblage formation of the grave as whole; deposits sealing the chamber and the mound construction for example are treated in the same way as artefacts deposited in the chamber. This is a live action, re-run of the whole sequence from start to finish. What is missing from Olivier’s discussion is the tension between the different temporalities of deposit and assemblage formation and a completely different set of problems this entails. His account does not necessarily preclude this issue, but it does not include it either. To broaden the problem we need to look to the theory of time perspectivism which also raises another dimension to contemporaneity we have yet to consider.

Time perspectivism Time perspectivism emerged in archaeology in the 1980s, mainly through the writings of Geoff Bailey though it was also related to similar discussions in North America on formation theory, especially debates between Binford and Schiffer on the Pompeii Premise.7 The Pompeii Premise, as I mentioned in Chapter 3, involved assuming that an archaeological site represents a moment frozen in time as if it was like viewing a scene where all the people had just upped and left, leaving things much as they were when they were in use. Most sites aren’t like that; Pompeii is, but only to an extent, and so is Boxgrove and so is the Hochdorf grave. All, to an extent, mind you. The reason we can think of them like this is that they were rapidly covered, preventing subsequent disturbance – by volcanic ash, by a freak landslide or by deliberate burial. But most archaeological sites don’t exhibit this quality – they are the accumulation of continuous activity, each event partially or wholly erasing traces of earlier events. And when a site is eventually abandoned, it may be gradually so and even then, remain exposed to disturbance by non-human agents. This is not to say most sites won’t have a certain number of features that have a Pompeii-like quality; a simple posthole is often a feature made in a very short period of time and may preserve its form, unaltered. But when you have a series of postholes dug at different times, it can be very hard to know which came first or how they relate to each other, if at all. It is this quality which encouraged Geoff Bailey to think of archaeological sites as palimpsests, a term which has been used by archaeologists before, especially to

The same time 91

describe the landscape yet with slightly different intent. A palimpsest is, literally, a manuscript on which layers of different text are superimposed upon each other, each layer erasing or obscuring the earlier one. It is a nice analogy for the archaeological record, except it tends to still preserve a sense of stratigraphy, of sequential layering, albeit disturbed and obscured. An archaeological palimpsest however, especially as evoked in time perspectivism, often involves quite different processes to that observed on a piece of parchment – at least in some cases. Bailey has distinguished between different types of palimpsests and while some do work with the parchment metaphor, the most common type – what he calls a cumulative palimpsest – most certainly does not. With such a palimpsest, it is as if the different events of writing are happening while the parchment is still being made. This, of course, does not make any sense which is why the palimpsest analogy is limiting. A closer analogy would be with fresco painting, done when the plaster is still wet – and it stays wet for a long time, allowing constant modifications to be made to the painting. However, the best way to think about it is with an archaeological example. Think of a slow-forming, cumulative deposit, like a midden or even a floor layer composed of hearth ashes periodically replenished. Now think of the artefacts that end up in that midden or floor. They represent multiple events of different duration to the formation of the midden itself; remains of feast here, remains of quotidian dining there for example, but all parcelled up into a single excavated deposit. Of course we have techniques for discerning variations in these long-term deposits using microstratigraphy, but usually there is mixing and disturbance to the layer while it is still being formed or in use so in practical terms, many of the deposits we routinely excavate comprise a palimpsest of activities or events represented by the residues of finds embedded in them. Moreover, the durations of deposit formation and assemblage use are not equivalent, one is much longer than the other. As a result, the data recovered from most deposits are what we call time averaged: they are aggregates of multiple individual events. They have rather poor digital resolution, even if their optical resolution is quite good. For example, assume I have a trampled ash floor layer which I can estimate was in use over 30 years – maybe I can even date it quite closely to the third quarter of the 17th century. I have examples of this from the Icelandic site I discussed in previous chapters. But the events associated with that floor as indicated by the objects trampled into it over this 30-year period – well, I cannot easily disentangle them from each other but almost invariably have to treat them in aggregate. As if they were all contemporary. No 15-minute knapping episodes are visible here. Now this could be a problem. Consider the pottery found in the floor from this hypothetical room; it might consist of 50 per cent cooking wares, 50 per cent tablewares. From this I might assume that both activities of cooking and dining occurred here to a similar extent. But if we recall that these percentages are time averaged, they could be concealing other patterns. Maybe the room was a kitchen for 15 years and then turned into a separate dining room in the second 15 years. How could we know which scenario it was – and what implications would the difference make to our wider interpretations of the site?

92 The same time

This is a hypothetical example of course and in the real world, we would use other lines of evidence to help us adjudicate between options. We would also use all kinds of other inferences to reflect on what these ratios mean, including the use life of cooking vessels to tablewares – that is, is one category more prone to breakage and replacement than the other, giving it a faster or slower replacement cycle. Is one category used in higher quantities than another? I know I have more plates than saucepans in my kitchen! All of this constitutes an important understanding of assemblage formation theory in archaeology, even if we don’t always give such considerations the attention they deserve. But none of these considerations can get round the fact that we are dealing with a context of fairly low digital resolution, even in situations where our optical resolution might be up to making such discriminations. Most Palaeolithic sites have both poor digital and poor optical resolution and it is in these contexts that time perspectivism was largely developed. But even in later prehistoric and historical archaeology, the issue of poor digital resolution still has to be engaged with, even if our optical resolution is good, whether through the new Bayesian techniques applied to C14 or because we simply have closely dated finds. So how does time perspectivism suggest we deal with this problem? The answer is familiar; we enlarge our scale of analysis. Because archaeological sites rarely give us snapshots of life in action but only offer aggregate patterns, we can only offer histories at a large scale. Time perspectivism in particular is very sceptical of attempts at ethnographic style archaeologies, narratives which attempt to write about the past as if we had access to time as it is humanly experienced. The palimpsest nature of the archaeological record simply does not make this possible in most instances. This sounds reasonable except for one thing; how do we know that the aggregate or time-averaged data is reflecting larger scale processes? Could it not just be noise? I think it is useful here to think about what time averaging implies. One way to think of it is simply in terms of missing information. The geologist Charles Lyell’s famous metaphor of the fossil record as like an annual census but with gaps for some years, captures this.8 But of course it isn’t just that some information is missing, but rather the surviving information has also got jumbled up. Why should aggregation lead to larger scale patterning as opposed to increased entropy? This is just an assumption. Put this way, the unintended implications of time perspectivism actually seem even more gloomy; the archaeological record is just noise. And yet we know it isn’t – we do find patterns, we do manage to make a great deal of sense of this record. No doubt it is harder in some cases and the greater the difference in rates between deposit and assemblage formation, the more constrained we are, such as in Palaeolithic archaeology. But for some reason, there is patterning, even in time-averaged data that seems to relate to the individual events which we cannot see. And the reason is really quite straightforward. All those different events that cannot be disentangled in our palimpsests – most of them have an element of routinized behaviour behind them. This is how humans behave: we have sets of practices we repeat and reproduce which is why, even if we cannot dissect each event, in aggregate, the pattern or routine informing the event is still visible.

The same time 93

Of course there will still be ambiguities, elements missing; we never will be palaeo-ethnographers in its truest sense; but that does not mean we cannot understand the archaeological record in similar terms to ethnography. Or indeed, to history. At this point I want to return to Olivier because in a way his solution to the dilemma of multiple temporalities evident in the archaeological record is more appealing. Although he too, has sometimes evoked the language of scale, on the whole he characterizes the matter in very non-scalar terms. For him, the palimpsest is not a problem, one that points to low temporal resolution and the need for larger scales of analysis; rather the palimpsest is a very condition of the possibility of archaeology, and draws on a conception of time that is more like memory than linear history.

The contemporary past Memory became a hot topic in archaeology in the late 1990s and still is to some extent; but Olivier’s discussion of memory is not really part of this mainstream, which mostly addresses memory in relation to collective or social memory in the past and whose intellectual ancestor is Maurice Halbwachs.9 Olivier’s discussion of memory rather takes inspiration from Halbwachs’ former and repudiated teacher, Henri Bergson and is more focused on the way the archaeological record is a polychromic ensemble (to borrow Michel Serres phrase): a mixture of things from different times and with different life histories but which co-exist here and now.10 Olivier has drawn out these ideas in most detail in his book The Dark Abyss of Time, the original version in French was published about a decade after his paper on the Hochdorf grave.11 For Olivier, it is precisely the interplay and paradox of the archaeological record as both present but of the past that leads him to reflect on archaeology as a form or memory practice rather than historical reconstruction. Rather than pull apart the archaeological record and arrange it as a series of ordered segments as implicit in chronological time, Olivier asks us to consider the other ways in which these elements temporally co-exist. The handkerchief metaphor works well here. Many years ago I had a discussion with an eminent archaeologist about two types of handkerchief users, the folder and the scruncher depending on how they retained the handkerchief in their pocket for use. The folder always has the handkerchief neatly folded over on itself in a flattened square or rectangle, while the scruncher has a messy ball. Our conversation did not shift into one about time, but the distinction is an interesting one to use when the two sorts of handkerchiefs are viewed as representing two different views of the topology of time. In the folded handkerchief, time is successional through the neat layers of the folded handkerchief. What belongs in one fold, belongs there and nowhere else. This object is Neolithic, not Bronze Age or Iron Age. With the scrunched handkerchief, time is messy and any two points on it can touch. An object made in the Neolithic can also erupt into the Iron Age or, in fact, our own present. The analogy of the scrunched handkerchief is actually a famous metaphor used by the French philosopher Michel Serres in his conversation about time and contemporaneity

94 The same time

with Bruno Latour and one which has often been quoted in archaeology.12 With the folded handkerchief, contemporaneity is clearly defined in relation to an era or period, corresponding to a fold in the handkerchief. With the scrunched handkerchief however, contemporaneity is defined by the particular relation between any two or more points on the fabric. It is a point of contact. Serres has also used another metaphor, that of percolation, where time not only folds back on itself, but also where time is filtered as through a sieve.13 Some events or objects persist in their effects while others cease. These might sound like rather vague metaphors and indeed, perhaps they are – but that is also because we still lack an adequate vocabulary to articulate this new conception of time. This is what Serres was searching for. The idea of succession seems more concrete because it has been made so through centuries of use. The idea of percolation seems abstract and vague because it is still an idea; it needs working through. Such work has already begun, for in reflecting on the archaeological record, percolation seems an eminently appropriate concept: some objects from the past irrupt into the present, others slip away forever, others simply wait or pause – they may, or may not, re-emerge.14 In short then, Olivier asks us to take more seriously the oft-stated idea that the archaeological record is a contemporary phenomenon. Binford famously made the same point in the 1980s, but with very different intentions; for Binford, this was an epistemological issue tied up with his drive for middle range theory and that Pompeii Premise I keep mentioning. But for Olivier, it is more an ontological statement, one also voiced by Michael Shanks when he says we don’t work with the past, we work with what remains of the past.15 Now, you can read this statement in Binfordian terms, as a reminder to conduct proper source criticism on these remains; but this is what neither Shanks nor Olivier are saying. They argue that it is the very quality of ‘remaining’ itself that should occupy our attention. But how does this recognition change or affect the way we do archaeology? Olivier’s discussion of archaeology as memory practice sets up the question but does not really offer an answer.16 Other archaeologists such as Chris Witmore or González-Ruibal who have talked about the persistence of older ways of doing things, provide a bit more direction. Both for example, have suggested that the Neolithic is still with us today, it is not just a period of human history that happened so many thousands of years ago.17 At first blush, these arguments sound horribly reminiscent of 19th-century accounts of survivals and I admit, I sometimes get a little uncomfortable when I hear them. But their purpose is actually the exact opposite of those Victorian stories of progress. It is really intended to disrupt any notion of modernity and show how we have never been modern. There is a great book called the Shock of the Old by historian David Edgerton which makes similar points.18 So with an example like the Neolithic revolution, we tend to think of that as in the past, it happened thousands of years ago. Yet we are still living with its consequences – our reliance on domesticated plants and animals, our whole way of life is in many ways, still deeply affected by those events which happened millennia ago. Can we really say then that the past – any past – is over and done with? What both Witmore and González-Ruibal argue, along with Olivier, is that the present is replete with pasts and it is precisely this mixing and folding together of

The same time 95

objects and practices from various earlier times that should hold our attention. They stress the need to resist any urge to purify and separate these pasts into their separate periods but rather, to retain their co-existence as the true matter of concern for archaeology. To keep the AKS-74 rifles and a stone axe used by the Ethiopian Gumez villagers together, to think about the relation between an ancient temple and modern highway in Greece. The most extended illustration of this approach can be found in Witmore’s recent book Old Lands which describes a ‘journey’ through the Peloponnese over 27 segments: Segments have been marked by differences of date and tense, with various presents, recollected pasts, and projected futures. Segments have moved back and forth between the ground of the chorographical present and the historical past with earlier travellers. At various turns they have fallen out of time altogether, weaving stories and experiences without the temporal coordinates, broken by discrete memories.19 The book thus folds and mixes time at multiple levels; at a coarse level, the ‘journey’ does not even take place at one time, rather each segment recounts a journey that took place at different times and not all by the author, but often of earlier travellers. Each segment also engages with a different part of the past: sometimes the Bronze Age, sometimes the 17th century, sometimes today, depending on the locale being visited. And even within a segment, different pasts are frequently juxtaposed. This subversion of chronology, even the linear time of a normal journey or travel, is why Witmore describes this work as a chorography, a study of how time is folded into space or place. To some extent, the kind of archaeology that Olivier and Witmore offer us is radically different to what we think of as archaeology; they are suggesting nothing less than a complete re-orientation of what it is we can and should be doing.20 It may not appeal to the majority of the discipline, but it certainly ought to be reflected on because it has implications even for those who consider themselves doing traditional archaeology. Thus the same themes recur in the French school of archéogéographie – a school of landscape archaeology that addresses the way earlier land-use and landscape organization structures and partially contrains later land-use; how history is still alive in the present by the way its effects still have the power to act and channel contemporary practices.21 Gérard Chouquer’s work on the longterm agency of Roman centuriation is a seminal study in this school, showing how patterns of Roman land divisions are not fossilized remnants of the past but have been actively modified and changed over time while simultaneously structuring subsequent land-use.22 Thus, rather than see the landscape as a series of freeze frames, or foundational networks (réseau de fondation), it is better viewed as formational network (réseau de formation) which involves the mutually constitutive, dual processes of transmission and transformation expressed through the neologism transformission.23 Moreover, this is not simply an academic exercise as such processes deeply affect the contemporary experience of time and space, especially in

96 The same time

urban environments. Cédric Lavigne’s archaeogeography of Bordeaux is exemplary in this regard as it reveals how the city’s inhabitants’ mental perception of the place is subtly coloured by its history.24 Ultimately, I would suggest the central concept at work in all these cases is that of persistence, an issue also discussed at the end of Chapter 3. One might see the task of a contemporary archaeology as one of exploring modes of persistence. The reason being, we are talking about the temporality of things in relation to one another, not time per se. Thus the contemporaneity of the archaeological record is not about its existence in our present, but rather about its particular mode of persistence that interconnects past, present and future. In concluding however, I want to iterate one key point. That working through the concept of contemporaneity and recognizing the polychronic nature of archaeological assemblages offers us a much better way to retain a notion of temporal multiplicity than the concept of scale. The braided rope metaphor I used earlier preserves the notion of multiple temporalities without reverting to scale or a singular, segmented line of time. Instead of zooming in and out, we follow the imbrication or overlapping of time lines. Moreover, in seeing the contemporaneity of the archaeological record as a particular mode of persistence that inter-connects past and present, we are reminded that such polychronic ensembles don’t just work backward, from the present to the past, but also forward into the future. Indeed, the future has all too often been a missing third tense from most archaeological discussions of time, where the emphasis has been on the present–past relation. Yet to address time without invoking the future is leave out a large part of what time is. Even for a discipline ostensibly concerned with the past like archaeology, the future cannot be ignored.

Zombie archaeology The future has not traditionally figured much in the discipline of archaeology – or at least not explicitly so. Why should it? After all, archaeology as ordinarily conceived is concerned with the past, not the future. Even if there has always been a concern for the contemporary relevance of archaeology, this is more about the relation between past and present where the future exists perhaps as a shadowy appendage to the present. At the same time, it is rather odd that as the discourse about the relationship between past and present accelerated from the 1980s, no one seemed to notice this missing third tense – the future. The only time it tended to be raised is for those occasional, yet persistent, reflective moments where an archaeologist ponders the question: whither archaeology? Prophetic statements on where archaeology is going are easy to find in the literature and cover the whole spectrum from general theory to specific regional or period reviews. I am not going to dwell on this genre except to perhaps note that its very existence should alert us to something only obliquely on our radar. However, one of the recurring concerns of archaeologists has been the issue of anticipating future uses of data we collect now. Now in some ways this is not a new concern; ever since archaeologists have recognized that fieldwork is selective

The same time 97

and biased by present interests, the issue of what future archaeologists will make of our choices has been subject to reflection. Just as we bemoan earlier archaeologists for not recording this or retrieving that, we know – or ought to know – in the same breath that we ourselves may be subject to the same charge in the future. I suppose the common response to this is just to accept we will always be bound by such constraints and not worry about it; we should just get on and do the job to the best of our ability and cut our predecessors the same epistemological slack. However, a more general concern is that archaeology is about the active preservation of the past into the future; that whatever form our archives take, they are as much future-assembling practices as they are attempts to reconstitute past fragments.25 This notion lies at the heart of the Heritage Futures project led by Rodney Harrison, Cornelius Holtorf, Sharon McDonald and Caitlin DeSilvey,26 which explores how heritage can be seen as part of future-assembling practices: about how the active conservation of present objects is performed as part of an anticipation of particular futures. There is the wider sense here that like fieldwork archiving, heritage is always inherently future-oriented but unlike fieldwork archiving, heritage practices engage with a much wider group than archaeologists, namely society at large, which is why this also connects to the concerns of a futurist archaeology. It engages with a broad set of concerns, including issues such as long-term future communication relating to final repositories of nuclear waste, seed banks and other archives as well as issues around curated decay and discard. One theme in particular resonates with the focus of this chapter and that is how conceptions of uncertain futures condition how we value and manage materials in the present. Indeed, there is almost a deep paradox at the heart of heritage practice insofar as it is actively and materially shaping the future through the objects it deems worthy of preservation on the one hand, and on the other how the nature of this future is simultaneously unimaginable in the present. Who and what this future will look like is almost never articulated. I would like to develop this notion of archaeology as a future-assembling project in a slightly different direction though and connect it back to the earlier discussion of contemporaneity: by thinking about not only how multiple pasts persist into the present, but how potential futures also remain locked within past material culture. In his book The Politics of Time, which is largely an analysis of the contradictions of modernity, Peter Osborne talks about the accelerated pace of consumption and technological innovation characteristic of modernity.27 At one point, he makes a rather interesting point in passing about the temporal nature of commodities in such contexts. Because commodities are constantly being replaced by something new, their own novelty never gets fully exhausted – they are always superseded before that can happen. Osborne suggests we can see commodities as time capsules, with residual novelty still locked in. Indeed, it is very easy to see how this might be the case and why the fashion for retro or vintage styles is almost a core current of contemporary material culture. The sequential revival of earlier decades – 1970s, 1980s or 1990s – in contemporary culture reveals not only yet another sign of our obsession with the past, but also perhaps an indication that we did not quite

98 The same time

exhaust all the potential the material culture of these decades held. After all, these revivals are never quite the same and no one is pretending they are; we put them to subtly new uses, locate them within different contexts. But what happens if we treat antiquities in the same way? Not as repositories of past lifeways but future ones? As banks or reservoirs of unrealized potential? This provocation is not as strange as it might seem. In fact there is already a sub-discipline and set of practices which are realizing this right now. A branch of media archaeology which investigates dead or zombie media in order to draw out unrealized or imaginary possibilities that were never actualized.28 As Hertz and Parikka define it, ‘Zombie media is concerned with media that is not only out of use, but resurrected to new uses, contexts and adaptations.’29 Indeed, the media theorist Siegfried Zielinski summed this up well, by challenging us: ‘do not seek the old in the new, but find something new in the old’.30 In other words, not to see how contemporary material culture is the product of the past, of historical precedent, but rather how novel, future possibilities might be contained in these older media technologies. As an example, Hertz and Parikka draw on the concept of circuit-bending, which literally refers to the repurposing of and tinkering with obsolescent or defunct electrical circuits. Picking up a discarded electrical device from a junk shop or garage sale, opening it up and experimenting with it, making it do things it was not originally designed to do. Although not quite the same phenomenon, there is nonetheless some common ground with the sub-cultural movement of clockpunk or steampunk.31 Media archaeology is not a sub-discipline of archaeology, more a sub-discipline of media studies, though dialogues between the two have been broached32 and if one pursues the suggestions made above, then there is a real connection to be drawn between zombie media and what we might call, zombie archaeology. If artists, designers and media thinkers can unlock the unused potential of material culture just a few decades old, perhaps archaeologists can unlock the unused potential of material culture thousands of years old? In a way, archaeology itself, as a practice, already reveals unrealized potential in past materialities by the very way it interacts with them. Taking fragments of broken pottery, measuring them, drawing them, classifying them – these are operations performed on objects which were – one can more or less safely assume – never done in the past. On the other hand, some archaeological practices are explicitly designed to try and reproduce, or at least test, past possibilities, especially the sub-discipline of experimental archaeology. Even though this works from replicas or even makes replication the point of the study, there is clearly a sense of trying to work out just what or how past technologies were supposed to work. But what if we expand experimental archaeology to engage, not with just what might have been, but with what might still be? Perhaps the closest example of such work is in the re-vitalizing of aDNA; Jurassic Park might be fiction, but there are companies that will perform aDNA sequencing as a way of exploring the potential benefits they might offer for genetically modified organisms in the future. Although there are commercial interests involved here, there are also arguments

The same time 99

about lost genetic diversity and resilience that address the challenges we face in the Anthropocene.33 The case of aDNA clearly raises the politics around revitalization and reminds us that such experiments in actualizing the unrealized potential of past things need to be contextualized: why are we doing this? How will this affect our world and our future? The line from playful circuit-bending to repurposing aDNA may be a short one and distinctions not always easy to make. Approaches such as those I have been discussing in this chapter, whether Witmore’s chorographies or my more fanciful zombie archaeologies, present quite a radical departure from mainstream archaeology. We can use them indeed to re-invent what we think archaeology is or could be, or we could accept them as alternative archaeologies. But either way, they critically challenge conventional archaeologies that, for all intents and purposes, try and reconstruct or offer a representation of the past through a linear, chronological narrative. In what way is it possible to justify or continue with the more conventional mode of archaeology in the light of all that I have discussed in this chapter? It is to that question I now wish to turn.

Notes 1 This section draws from an earlier publication, G. Lucas, ‘Archaeology and Contemporaneity’, Archaeological Dialogues 22, no. 1 (2015). 2 J.F. Allen, ‘Maintaining Knowledge about Temporal Intervals’, Communications of the ACM, 26, no. 11 (1983): 832–843. 3 C. Binding, ‘Implementing Archaeological Time Periods Using CIDOC CRM and SKOS’, in L. Aroyo et al. (eds), The Semantic Web: Research and Applications: 7th Extended Semantic Web Conference, ESWC 2010, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, May/June 2010. Proceedings Part I. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 6088 (Berlin Heidelberg: SpringerVerlag, 2010). 4 See, for example, J. Robb and T. Pauketat (eds), Big Histories, Human Lives: Tackling Problems of Scale in Archaeology (Santa Fe: School of Advanced Research, 2013). 5 L. Olivier, ‘The Hochdorf “Princely” Grave and the Question of the Nature of Archaeological Funerary Assemblages’, in T. Murray (ed.), Time and Archaeology (London: Routledge, 1999). 6 C. Simonetti, ‘Timescales and Telescopes: Optics in the Study of Prehistory’, in S. Souvatzi, A. Baysal and E. Baysal (eds), Time and History in Prehistory (London: Routledge, 2019). 7 G.N. Bailey, ‘Time Perspectives, Palimpsests and the Archaeology of Time’, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 26 (2007); S. Holdaway and L. Wandsnider (eds), ‘Time in Archaeology’, in Time Perspectivism Revisited (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2008). 8 See G. Bowker, Memory Practices in the Sciences (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), p. 55. 9 For a recent summary, see R.M. van Dyke, ‘Archaeology and Social Memory’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 48 (2019): 207–218. 10 See M. Serres and B. Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture and Time (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). 11 L. Olivier, Le sombre abîme du temps: mémoire et archéologie (Paris: Seuil, 2008); L. Olivier, The Dark Abyss of Time: Archaeology and Memory (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2011). 12 Serres and Latour, Conversations on Science, p. 60; C. Witmore, ‘Vision, Media, Noise and the Percolation of Time: Symmetrical Approaches to the Mediation of the Material World’, Journal of Material Culture 11, no. 3 (2006): 267–292; C. Holtorf, ‘Excavations at Monte da Igreja near Évora (Portugal). From the Life-history of a Monument to Reuses of Ancient Objects’, Journal of Iberian Archaeology, 4 (2002): 177–201.

100 The same time

13 Serres and Latour, p. 58. 14 For example, Witmore, ‘Vision, Media, Noise’; C. Witmore, ‘Prolegomena to Open Pasts: On Archaeological Memory Practices’, Archaeologies 5, no. 3 (2009): 511–545; C. Witmore, ‘Which Archaeology? A Question of Chronopolitics’, in A. González-Ruibal (ed.), Reclaiming Archaeology: Beyond the Tropes of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2013). 15 For example, M. Shanks, ‘Symmetrical Archaeology’, World Archaeology 39, no. 4 (2007): 589–596. 16 However his recent work on Iron Age saltworks in eastern France (Briquetage de la Seille) has been more productive in this regard; Laurent Olivier, pers. comm. 17 C. Witmore, ‘The End of the Neolithic? At the Emergence of the Anthropocene’, in S. E. Pilaar Birch (ed.), Multispecies Archaeology (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 26–46. See also A. González-Ruibal, ‘The Past is Tomorrow: Towards an Archaeology of the Vanishing Present’, Norwegian Archaeological Review 39, no. 2 (2006): 110–125. 18 D. Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2006. 19 C. Witmore, Old Lands: A Chorography of the Eastern Peloponnese (London: Routledge, 2020), p. 493. 20 See A. Nativ and G. Lucas, ‘Archaeology without Antiquity’, Antiquity 94, no. 376 (2020), for a broader discussion of this issue. 21 See G. Chouquer and M. Watteaux, L’archéologie des disciplines géohistoriques (Paris: Errance, 2013); also M. Watteaux, ‘ What do the Forms of Landscape Tell Us?’, in J-M. Blasing, J. Dreissen, J-P. Legendre and L. Olivier (eds), Clashes of Time: The Contemporary Past as a Challenge for Archaeology (Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2017). 22 G .Chouquer, L’Étude des paysages: Essais sur leurs formes et leur histoire (Paris: Errance, 2000). 23 Watteaux, ‘What do the Forms of Landscape Tell Us?’ p. 198. 24 C. Lavigne, ‘Modernity’s Threat to Memory within the Ecumene’, in J-M. Blasing, J. Dreissen, J-P. Legendre and L. Olivier (eds), Clashes of Time: The Contemporary Past as a Challenge for Archaeology (Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2017). 25 Witmore, ‘Prolegomena to Open Pasts’. 26 R. Harrison et al., Heritage Futures: Comparative Approaches to Natural and Cultural Heritage Practices (London: UCL Press, 2020); C. Holtorf and A. Högberg (eds), Cultural Heritage and the Future (London: Routledge, 2020). 27 P. Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 2010). 28 G. Hertz and J. Parikka, ‘Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media: Archaeology into an Art Method’, Leonardo 45, no. 5 (2012): 424–430. 29 Hertz and Parikka, ‘Zombie Media’, 429. 30 S. Zielenski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Seeing and Hearing by Technical Means (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), p. 3. 31 J. Parikka, What is Media Archaeology? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), pp. 1–2; S. Dawdy, ‘Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity’, Current Anthropology 51, no. 6 (2010): 765–766. 32 See A. Piccini, ‘Media Archaeologies Forum’, Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 2 (2015): 1–147 and A. Piccini, ‘The Cube: A Cinema Archaeology’, in B. Roberts and M. Goodall (eds), New Media Archaeologies (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2019). 33 See, for example, G. Hambrecht, ‘Ancient DNA as a Tool for Navigating the Anthropocene’, Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment 39, no. 2 (2017): 109–115.

References Allen, J.F. ‘Maintaining Knowledge about Temporal Intervals’. Communications of the ACM 26, no. 11 (1983): 832–843. Bailey, G.N. ‘Time Perspectives, Palimpsests and the Archaeology of Time’. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 26 (2007): 198–223.

The same time 101

Binding, C. ‘Implementing Archaeological Time Periods Using CIDOC CRM and SKOS ’. In L. Aroyo et al. (eds), The Semantic Web: Research and Applications. 7th Extended Semantic Web Conference, ESWC 2010, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, May/June 2010. Proceedings, Part I. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 6088. Berlin Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2010. Bowker, G. Memory Practices in the Sciences. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. Chouquer, G. L’Étude des paysages. Essais sur leurs formes et leur histoire. Paris: Errance, 2000. Chouquer, G. and M. Watteaux. L’archéologie des disciplines géohistoriques. Paris: Errance, 2013. Dawdy, S. ‘Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity’, Current Anthropology 51, no. 6 (2010): 761–793. Edgerton, D. The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. González-Ruibal, A. ‘The Past is Tomorrow: Towards an Archaeology of the Vanishing Present’. Norwegian Archaeological Review 39, no. 2 (2006): 110–125. Hambrecht, G. ‘Ancient DNA as a Tool for Navigating the Anthropocene’. Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment 39, no. 2 (2017): 109–115. Harrison, R., C. DeSilvey, C. Holtorf, S. Macdonald, N. Bartolini, E. Breithoff, H. Fredheim, A. Lyons, S. May, J. Morgan, and S. Penrose. Heritage Futures: Comparative Approaches to Natural and Cultural Heritage Practices. London: UCL Press, 2020. Hertz, G. and J. Parikka. ‘Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method’. Leonardo 45, no. 5 (2012): 424–430. Holdaway, S. and L. Wandsnider. Time in Archaeology: Time Perspectivism Revisited. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2008. Holtorf, C. ‘Excavations at Monte da Igreja near Évora (Portugal). From the Life-history of a Monument to Re-uses of Ancient Objects’. Journal of Iberian Archaeology 4 (2002): 177–201. Holtorf, C. and A. Högberg (eds), Cultural Heritage and the Future. London: Routledge, 2020. Lavigne, C. ‘Modernity’s Threat to Memory within the Ecumene’. In J-M. Blaising, J. Driessen, J-P. Legendre and L. Olivier (eds), Clashes of Time: The Contemporary Past as a Challenge for Archaeology. Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2017, pp. 165–182. Lucas, G. ‘Archaeology and Contemporaneity’. Archaeological Dialogues 22, no. 1 (2015): 1–15. Nativ, A. and G. Lucas. ‘Archaeology without Antiquity’. Antiquity 94, no. 376 (2020): 852–863. Olivier, L. ‘The Hochdorf “Princely” Grave and the Question of the Nature of Archaeological Funerary Assemblages’. In T. Murray (ed.), Time and Archaeology. London: Routledge, 1999. Olivier, L. Le sombre abîme du temps: Mémoire et archéologie. Paris: Seuil, 2008. Olivier, L. The Dark Abyss of Time: Archaeology and Memory. Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2011. Osborne, P. The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde. London: Verso, 2010. Parikka, J. What is Media Archaeology? Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012. Piccini, A. ‘Media Archaeologies Forum’. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 2 (2015): 1–147. Piccini, A. ‘The Cube: A Cinema Archaeology’. In B. Roberts and M. Goodall (eds), New Media Archaeologies. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2019, pp. 177–203. Robb, J. and T. Pauketat (eds), Big Histories, Human Lives: Tackling Problems of Scale in Archaeology. Santa Fe: School of Advanced Research, 2013. Serres, M. and B. Latour. Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Shanks, M. ‘Symmetrical Archaeology’. World Archaeology 39, no. 4 (2007): 589–596. Simonetti, C. ‘Timescales and Telescopes: Optics in the Study of Prehistory’. In S. Souvatzi, A. Baysal and E. Baysal (eds), Time and History in Prehistory. London: Routledge, 2019, pp. 42–57.

102 The same time

Van Dyke, R.M. ‘Archaeology and Social Memory’. Annual Review of Anthropology 48 (2019): 207–225. Watteaux, M. ‘What Do the Forms of the Landscapes Tell Us?’. In J-M. Blaising, J. Driessen, J-P. Legendre and L. Olivier (eds), Clashes of Time: The Contemporary Past as a Challenge for Archaeology. Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2017, pp. 195–220. Witmore, C. ‘Vision, Media, Noise and the Percolation of Time: Symmetrical Approaches to the Mediation of the Material World’. Journal of Material Culture 11, no. 3 (2006): 267–292. Witmore, C. ‘Prolegomena to Open Pasts: On Archaeological Memory Practices’. Archaeologies 5, no. 3 (2009): 511–545. Witmore, C. ‘Which Archaeology? A Question of Chronopolitics’. In A. González-Ruibal (ed.), Reclaiming Archaeology: Beyond the Tropes of Modernity. London: Routledge, 2013. Witmore, C. ‘The End of the Neolithic? At the Emergence of the Anthropocene ’. In S.E. Pilaar Birch (ed.), Multispecies Archaeology. London: Routledge, 2018, pp. 26–46. Witmore, C. Old Lands: A Chorography of the Eastern Peloponnese. London: Routledge. 2020. Zielinski, S. Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Seeing and Hearing by Technical Means. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006.

6 ANOTHER TIME

Memory, recollection and representation One of my habits when acquiring a new book is to inscribe my name and the year inside the front cover. I am not sure why I do this beyond some vague impulse common to our era to archive our own lives. But actually, the inscription of the year is somewhat misleading as I may not read the book until many years after the purchase. Or more perversely, I may have already read it (a library copy perhaps) but decided it was later worth owning because it is a book I feel sure I will want to refer to or re-read in the future; or that I simply couldn’t afford to buy it at the time of reading. This discontinuity between the time of acquisition and time of reading overlies yet another discontinuity though; that between the year I obtained the book and the year it was published or printed. I have many second-hand books and even the new ones might have been printed a few years before I bought them. Most of the second-hand books will also have inscriptions made by their previous owner(s), or a price written in pencil by the bookseller and the pages will show various degrees of wear and tear. My books therefore, have at least three different temporalities: their production (which one could split again into original publication and re-print), their acquisition and their reading (which again, might be multiplied depending on how often they are re-read). Multiple temporalities overlaid in one object. This example of course, simply repeats some of the points made in the last chapter, specifically with Olivier’s case study of the Hochdorf grave which illustrates the same issues with a more archaeological example. Each moment or period of the past leaves a trace however faint, which accumulates in the book like a palimpsest. This material persistence of the past into the present is what makes archaeology possible at all and as discussed in the last chapter, such persistence – albeit partial and fragmentary – is what makes the past contemporary with the present. Viewed this way, the past is already part of the present, continuous with it. It is a powerful antidote and

104 Another time

corrective to the more conventional view which would place the past at some remove from the present. The normal assumption in archaeology is that the past is past, and that our job as archaeologists is to try and bridge the chasm that separates that past from the present. A kind of reverse engineering, to work from the residues of a former living, dynamic context and reconstruct the ways in which this past was alive. And yet, is this conventional view so wrong? And how might we square this perspective with the idea of a past which lives on in the present? Let’s go back to my books for a moment. Recently my office was refurbished so all my books had to be packed away and when I moved back in, I had to re-shelve them. In the process, unsurprisingly, I would often pick up a book and pause to look at it before adding to others in the bookcase. Occasionally, I would even realize I had not read it yet. One of these I did decide to finally read so I took it home.1 Inside, is my name though this time I must have forgotten to add the date. But based on what else I was reading at the time, I can guess it was bought in the mid-1980s. There it is: the material trace of an event that happened about 35 years ago. But the exact memory of the purchase has long gone – or just buried in my unconscious. Other objects are better at eliciting personal memories and then, the material trace of the past is linked to a more vibrant recollection, a living past. Photos, mementos, that kind of thing, it doesn’t matter if this recollection is a reconstruction in the present – though very rarely, one might have those moments of pure transport, as if the past had literally burst into the present for a few fleeting seconds. The recollection though, as a reconstruction, evokes the past in a very different way to the persistence of the past in the present. So when I pick up this book that I bought all those years ago, there is a contradiction or tension felt; on the one hand, its presence in my hands right now confirms the veracity of its past, my name and date inside confirms this past was my past. And yet I cannot remember the details of how it came to be with me. Isn’t this gap, this fracture similar to what we face as archaeologists? We unearth finds, their presence attests to the reality of the past and the fact that I recognize them as human artefacts, confirms this past is part of my past too. And yet there remains no social memory of these things, hence this gap or chasm used to characterize the challenge facing all archaeologists. Of course, oral traditions, written texts, even personal memories for recent remains could all be said to operate as a social form of recollection. The gap is never total, but always exists in gradations. Just acknowledging something as a trace from the past is already to have created a connection. And just as Freud would argue my individual forgetfulness is simply due to an obstruction in my unconscious, Halbwachs would argue that historical forgetfulness is simply due to a breakdown of transmission, the demise of living memory (and its substitution by dead memory, i.e. history/archaeology). But my point is not really to draw parallels between individual and collective memory, but rather to point to an importance difference between what we might term memory and recollection. The reason why we can say that the past persists in the present and yet also paradoxically affirm that the past is separate from the present is that we are talking about two different

Another time 105

processes. The discussion in the last chapter of the persistence of the past in the present, the contemporaneity of the past and present, is largely about memory, not recollection. Arguably, recollection is dependent upon memory, but it is not reducible to it. Archaeology relies on the persistence of the past into the present; that is what constitutes the very existence of the archaeological record. Sometimes we are lucky to work with these traces alongside collective memories in the form of texts or oral traditions, sometimes not. But even when we are lucky, there will always be gaps, fractures, inconsistencies maybe. But regardless of all these things, what we do with these material memories, what ‘recollections’ we construct from these traces, involves a very different set of operations and involves a different temporality. Perhaps the best way to articulate this is to go back to that unread book I discovered on my shelves. Whatever temporalities are inscribed in it as a material object (and there are many more than I discussed), when I opened the book and started reading it, all of those melted away and a completely different world of time opened up. Another time. The time of the story. If in the last chapter, I explored the temporality of archaeology as memory, in this one my aim is to examine the temporality of archaeology as representation. To begin this examination, it is important to outline the basis of historical representation: how it is that our ‘deep time’ consciousness has been framed.

Deep time and the present The emergence of deep time in the 19th century, that is, the recognition that the antiquity of humankind was not 6,000 years but hundreds of thousands, if not millions, marked a momentous change as we briefly related in Chapter 2. It ultimately inaugurated the discipline of prehistory. But this development of a deep human history was really the tail end of an expansion of deep time for the earth and the universe which began to be proposed widely among scholars from the later 18th century.2 Suddenly there was a past which seemed to stretch far back than any human memory, a past which seemed very remote and disconnected from the present. But just as the notion of a deep past emerged, so did the idea of a deep future. And I don’t think it is a coincidence. To see the connection, we must look at the work of Reinhart Koselleck on the emergence of the modern historical consciousness.3 Koselleck argued that the 18th century ushered in a new historical consciousness, one that disconnected both the present and the future from the past. The expansion of time was connected to this, especially in its relation to the future. Prior medieval historical consciousness operated under the idea that the past provided a relatively good guide to the present, one where present experience – or the space of experience as he called it – dominated notions of history. This is why a lot of medieval history followed the typical mode of a moral lesson: history as the teacher of life (historia magistra vitae). The future was largely subordinate to this weight of the past. Moreover, it was finite. Under a Christian eschatology, even if one could never be sure when the Day of Judgement would come, that it would

106 Another time

come was a given. Just as we don’t know when we will die, our death is still a certainty. But starting in the 16th and culminating in the late 18th century, a new historical consciousness took shape, one dominated no longer by the space of experience, but rather by the horizon of expectation. The past was no longer a guide to the present while the future suddenly opened out and became limitless. The present no longer looked to the past, but to the future and its most dominant mode of thinking this future, was of course through the trope of progress. For Koselleck, the French Revolution marked the decisive moment when this modern notion of historical consciousness was fully in place. It was an open future where anything was possible. It seems to me that we cannot understand the recognition of deep time, or deep history without also connecting it to the recognition of a deep and potentially limitless future. But if deep time and a deep future are connected, for Koselleck there was also a difference insofar as the past became increasingly detached from the present and future. Indeed, that was the essence of modernity for Koselleck: the past no longer mattered, it was to the future we should go for our moral lessons and for guidance on how to deal with our present. Koselleck was writing about this in the 1970s and 1980s, but more recently, it has been suggested that even our future has been disconnected from the present. Contemporary historical consciousness is no longer modernist, it is now presentist. The main proponent of this idea is François Hartog, whose thesis is that our contemporary historical or temporal consciousness is structured by an all-enveloping present, whereby the past and future have become both simultaneously indistinguishable from and yet radically alien to the present.4 He calls this Presentism. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has made similar claims in his work, defining our period as a broad present, one where we are caught between a flood of pasts saturating our present and a closed future that seems devoid of possibilities.5 We are reduced to living in a vast moment of simultaneities. Symptoms of this particular regime of historicity are easy to spot in the way the past and future are conceptualized and articulated in cultural practices. Let me give some examples to clarify this. There is the current obsession with heritage, where the past is argued to take the form of what Halbwachs called dead memories and Nora, sites of memory, both of which are taken to have no connection to living forms of memory, that is memories which are embedded in everyday practice.6 They are histories with no real or substantial connection to our lives but exist as a focus of intellectual engagement or a fun day out. In contrast, living memories are largely localized to families or small communities and are simply embedded in our daily routines. But society as a whole has no living memory; indeed, the institutionalization of dead memory through the academic disciplines of history and archaeology is the clearest sign of this state of affairs. The concept of dead memory captures the duality I mentioned earlier insofar as the past is both indistinguishable and yet radically alien from the present: a heritage site like Stonehenge exists here and now, all its meanings and uses are bundled in contemporary concerns and interpretations. Yet at the same time, we acknowledge its historicity, its age, not least through archaeological narratives;

Another time 107

but as the past, as history, Stonehenge remains part of a completely different world to our everyday lives. It is like a parallel world, only one that existed long ago. We can of course build bridges between these worlds, such as the adoption of a single chronology linking our present to the past of Stonehenge or drawing parallels between our lives in terms of relatable practices or political configurations. But the very fact that we build such bridges only reveals the underlying chasm that separates us. Indeed, the rise of the heritage industry in the late 20th century tells of an increasing concern for recovering and remembering a past which we are afraid to forget or to acknowledge that we have already forgotten. What Hartog and others suggest is that ironically, the more the past is visible in contemporary culture – whether visiting archaeological sites or buying and selling vintage and antique objects– the more it reveals an underlying anxiety about our disconnection from the past.7 But such anxieties are not just confined to the past but also infect the future. Thus the same schisms are evident here too, where the future is both simultaneously indistinguishable from the present and yet radically other. The future is here already; this was the argument of Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book Future Shock, referring to the effect of technological revolutions entering society, especially in information technology.8 For Toffler, a classic sign of the conflation of present and future is the accelerating nature of change: new technologies, new fashions come so fast that old and new exist side by side; when Toffler was writing, such juxtapositions produced what he called future shock. Today, I doubt we feel any sense of temporal displacement which argues for Hartog’s point. The next generation of iPhone or microprocessor is coming, is here, and has been superseded – all within the blink of an eye. The only thing you can be sure of, is that if the future is here already, it will be unevenly distributed: who has the new iPhone first, who can afford the future now and who has to wait? The future itself has become a currency – and in more ways than one, if you follow the stock markets and the trade in financial futures and hedge funds. But just as the future is already here, so it is also totally alienated from the present in the sense that what the future will be like, is unimaginable. By that, I do not mean we cannot conjure up stories to fill up this phantom of the future; there is a constant stream of films and TV programmes which play out these imagined futures for us. The problem is that all our imagined futures cannot think outside the present. Either the future is just an indefinite extension of the present; or the future simply marks the end of human civilization. Our most popular futures are either extensions of current technologies (such as artificial intelligence, space travel) or near total obliteration through war or asteroids – or best of all, ones which combine both: apocalypse through AI. The rise of the machines. This closure of the future – or our imagined futures – was basically the message of Fukuyama’s widely read and cited paper and book, The End of History. 9 The end of history refers not to the end of events in time, but to the end of any new forms of society; in its most succinct expression, it is the inability to conceive of any other social order after capitalism.10 With capitalism, humanity has reached its final

108 Another time

destination. The collapse of the Berlin Wall and of Communism in the Soviet Union, marked for many the end of any real, viable alternative to capitalism. The future has no shape other than capitalism – except apocalyptic self-destruction, through capitalism itself, which is after all, what the politics of global warming is perhaps all about. So, surrounding and lying between dead history and the end of history, is the present. Hartog presents us with a compelling narrative, though even he is ambivalent about whether these are symptoms of a new regime of historicity or simply transitional, birth pangs on the way to something completely different. But what interests me here, is how this discourse ties up with the issues addressed earlier about the difference between memory and recollection. At one level, the present is elevated as the only tense that really exists as a meaningful time; that the past and future are only real insofar as they are manifest as dimensions of the present. And yet at another level, Presentism (and Modernism after Koselleck) seems to suggest a severance of the present from the past; that the past as a time before the present, is so radically disconnected it has little meaning. This ambivalence in many ways mirrors the same tension I discussed at the start of this chapter, between the past as memory and the past as recollection. The past as memory exists here with us in the present, but as a dead memory, disconnected from any narrative ‘recollection’. History and archaeology, as modes of recollection have, in other words, become deeply ineffectual.11 Whether this is true or not, in some ways is beside the point however. Recollection is still possible as a creative act and if it is or has become ineffectual, this only points to a deficiency in our mode of recollection, not the act itself. This is important because at stake is really the whole raison d’être of archaeology.

The archaeological present The recognition of the persistence of the past into the present – and future – has been an important one for archaeology and, as related in the last chapter, for some this signals a new way of doing archaeology. The idea that past, present and future are all connected suggests that maybe we can no longer even pretend to do archaeology as it has always been done; namely, to use it to give accounts of how things used to be: We have been chasing a mirage, a pipe dream. We’ll never find the past. For when the past, as a material entity, as a world of things, was the past – for example, when the Romans lived in Roman times – it was just some other material present, one that was just a bit older and somewhat less agglomerated than our own. Like today’s present, that former present was filled with the material persistence of the pasts that had preceded it, those of proto-history and prehistory. And the same holds true for all the presents of the past, for, archaeologically speaking, the present is just an agglomeration of the material remains of what once was. There never was an originating present.12

Another time 109

This is the argument Olivier makes within the broader context of discussing Presentism. But I think we need to pause for a moment and consider in more detail the implications of what Olivier is saying. If we dig up a Roman site, it exists here and now in our present; it is from the past but a past which has partially persisted into our present. For Olivier, all archaeology can do is engage with this; it cannot try and re-constitute the Roman site as it was, when it was a present simply because that present no longer exists and its material structure has been re-configured. Moreover that past present – like our own – was always in flux, like a moving target. What ‘present’ in the past can we try and go back to, even if we could? Lewis Binford made the same point many years ago in his critique of the Pompeii Premise which I discussed in Chapters 3 and 5. Excavating a site is not like getting into a time machine and travelling back to 249 AD; all archaeology comprises a palimpsest, an admixture of times. And yet we can say, for example, that these remains of a Roman settlement date to say, c. 240–330 AD and within that time period, we can distinguish different episodes of activity and possibly even date them. That we can treat what we know, as an extended past present, within which are folded persisting pasts and anticipated futures. It is bound to be partial, fragmented, but nonetheless is discernible. Instead of calling it the past, by all means let us call it a past present; but apart from that name change, it seems to me that this is what most archaeologists have always been and are still doing. Is this really a mirage or pipe dream? In one sense, such past presents are nothing like our present; it is not a present we experience or live through. It is an imagined present, a represented present. But then we also imagine or represent our present to ourselves too: in newspapers, on television, in academic papers. There is no real difference here. So what is the problem? To state it boldly, the dilemma is this: the past only exists insofar as it lives in the present. To conduct an archaeology which aims to represent the past, it has to do it by creating another present alongside our present – a doubled present we can call the ‘past present’. It has to create another time besides the time of our present. As a result, to do conventional archaeology in the sense of reconstructing the past, means creating a bifurcation – not between the present and the past, but between our present and other, past presents. And not just one past present, but a multitude of them insofar as those past presents can be multiplied indefinitely due their nature as localised, extended presents. If archaeologists have been trying hard over the past 150 years to make the study of the past relevant and connected to the present, have contested the separation of past and present, to what extent do the existing solutions to this divide work, now that the grounds of separation have shifted? How do we bridge, not the past and present, but multiple presents? Re-defining archaeology as the discipline which engages with other presents should immediately evoke similar problems in anthropology with its adoption of the ethnographic present. This has been explored most famously by Johannes Fabian in his book Time and the Other which examines the way anthropology uses time to create a distance between itself and its object.13 Anthropologists in the 19th and early 20th century clearly co-existed with the people they studied whether

110 Another time

they were Indigenous Australians or Trobriand Islanders and yet they wrote about them as if they lived in a different time, what Fabian refers to as allochrony. At its height, contemporary peoples around the world were described as if they were still living in the Stone Age, or in a distant past, an era long before modernity; sometimes scholars were even very explicit about this era, conjuring up the idea of Palaeolithic or Neolithic societies still alive today.14 It was this same assumption that permitted ethnographic analogies to be used directly to put flesh on the dry bones of archaeology. But it also impacted the fieldwork of anthropologists, causing them to selectively ignore aspects of the culture they were studying which did not fit the image of a ‘primitive society’.15 Fabian called this assumption the denial of co-evalness; that is, between the experience of doing fieldwork and writing up the ethnographic monograph, anthropologists inserted a temporal fracture between themselves and the people they studied, engendering the sense that the present, was in fact not singular but split in two. They invented a new term for this other present in which their subjects lived: the ethnographic present, to distinguish it from their present. Now we might think we have got past these Victorian prejudices and perhaps in the case of most academic disciplines, this is true.16 But the language of allochronism still haunts much of popular culture. Just think of how often the terms ‘medieval’ or ‘prehistoric’ are used to describe something backward. All of these phrases still play off this same ideology which lingers on. But the dangers of allochrony also affected archaeology and in many ways was present at its birth where the very ideas I discussed in the last chapter about the persistence of the past into the present, were also raised. We have been here before, only then, such persistence was inflected by the denial of co-evalness that was central to anthropology. Various words have been used to characterize the nature of the archaeological record: remains, vestiges, ruins, relics, traces and fragments. The list could go on, and while many terms are still current, some have a certain antiquarian ring to them (e.g., vestiges). What is striking however about these antiquarian terms is that they foreground an aspect of the archaeological record that was of great theoretical concern in the 19th century, but one we completely bypass today. What characterizes the terms relic or vestige is their untimeliness; they are from another era, anachronisms, survivals. Indeed it is no coincidence to observe in texts from the mid- and late 19th century the close relationship that existed between material remains and what came to be called survivals, that is extant customs or practices which no longer have any obvious purpose, like vestigial organs.17 In fact, up to the middle of the 19th century, the word antiquities was commonly used to refer to both; it was only with the crystallization and separation of academic disciplines in the last quarter of the 19th century that such differences also started to emerge and with it, a loss of sensibility to issues such as the temporality of the archaeological record. It is very instructive to read Edward Tylor’s work on survivals in this regard, because he quite explicitly saw survivals and relics (terms Tylor himself used) as the twin pillars of the study of the past.18

Another time 111

What is important about this characterization of the archaeological record is that it is very much defined in relation to the contemporary; what makes relics and survivals significant is their non-contemporariness to other objects or customs. Their status as anachronisms formed the very basis and possibility of studying the past. This idea of relics being anachronisms might sound simply strange or quaint to us today but it has a darker side, especially if we remember that the idea of anachronism worked not just on relics but also on survivals. The crux of an anachronism refers to an object or custom or way of thought which is out of its proper time. And this begs the question of what constitutes the ‘proper’ time for an object or thought. No doubt archaeology itself has helped to create the perceived proper temporal order for things, but, more generally, this is probably the legacy of modernist thinking insofar as the trope of modernity defines the very possibility of something being untimely. What makes something untimely is an idea of contemporaneity which works off the notion of the present as an era, or period. For 19th-century antiquarians, archaeological remains were non-contemporary because they did not belong to the present, that is, the modern era. The present, as distinct from the past, or the modern as distinct from the ancient or pre-modern, are the classic chronoschisms of modernity. So although the idea of thinking about how the past lingers on into the present was central to the birth of archaeology and anthropology, because this lingering was framed in terms of a progressive, evolutionary narrative, it resulted in a bifurcation of the present, of contemporaneity into two kinds of present: modernity and non-modernity. Scholarly reactions to this evolutionary narrative in the 20th century resulted in its excision from archaeological discourse; yet as we now are resurrecting the recognition of the past persisting into the present as defining the very possibility of archaeology, we have to be vigilant in how we articulate this. Specifically, how do we uphold the idea of a past present, different from our present; is there any way in which allochrony and the idea of an archaeological present, akin to an ethnographic present, can have any ethical or political justification after Fabian? To help answer this, I think there is an important connection to make to Giorgio Agamben’s definition of contemporaneity as ‘that relationship with time that adheres to it by means of being out of sync and anachronistic’.19 For Agamben, to be able to understand the time in which you live, you must be able to exist outside of it; that in other words, to be contemporary, there has to be a disconnection. Those who simply inhabit their time, are merely coincidental with it, not contemporary. Agamben gives the example of fashion as an archetypal case of contemporaneity: it is always ahead of itself and yet also always too late. What this suggests is that actually to live in the present responsibly, requires an ability to project oneself out of that present into a past or future present. I would suggest that one way of doing this, is thus precisely to imagine other presents – ethnographic, archaeological, fictional. In a similar way, several anthropologists later defended the idea of the ethnographic present contra Fabian; this was not because they disagreed with his argument, but because they felt there were redemptive

112 Another time

aspects of the ethnographic present that Fabian ignored.20 Hastrup’s claim that ‘using the ethnographic present to speak from the center of another time-space’ is a way of constituting a shared space, not separating ethnographers from their subjects;21 that the adoption of an ethnographic present in writing was rather a way to stress co-evalness between an ethnographer and their community who otherwise lived very separate lives. In a sense, what is important here is the role of writing or representation in general in constituting this other present, this other time. Writing opens up an alternative, parallel world, another time – both for the writer and the reader. When you are reading a novel (or watching a film) you are immersed in another world, another time (and place), even while your body still inhabits its own present. It is important to stress that it is not the text itself that constitutes this other present, but the interaction of writer/reader and text. And that it is precisely though this act that two worlds become joined: ours and those living on the other side of the world. If this holds for ethnography, surely it equally holds for archaeology or people living in a past present. To elaborate on this further then, we need to turn to the relation between time and writing.

Narrative time Narrative received a lot of attention in archaeology in the 1990s but apart from some rather banal connections about the relation between chronology and the linearity of narrative, little attention was devoted to narrative time.22 There were exceptions such as Hodder’s use of Hayden White and Rosemary Joyce who drew on Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope;23 but these tended to adopt a rather coarse, taxonomic approach. I will return to chronotopes shortly but here I want to focus on other aspects of time and narrative, especially the pioneering work of Gérard Genette.24 Genette devoted the greater part of his analysis of narrative to issues of time; what he called narrative tense was fundamentally about how the composition of a narrative played with the difference between the temporality of the story (i.e., the world portrayed in the narrative, whether real or imagined) and the temporality of the narrative (i.e., the discourse about that world as it manifests itself in the text). For example, the story might be a murder mystery where events unfold in a linear, irreversible order, but the narrative can bend and distort this chronology for artistic affect; the narrative might begin at the end, and go back and forth with a series of flashbacks or flashforwards; it might skip over certain periods, summarize several years on a page or devote a whole chapter to a ‘real time’ scene; it might come back to the same event several times to reveal something new, or refer to multiple occasions through a single description. In short, Genette offered a detailed examination of the ways in which ‘interpolations, distortions, temporal condensations’25 act to structure a narrative. Genette’s micro-analysis of the temporality of narrative has, as far as I am aware, never really been explored in archaeology and possibly for good reason. I have previously suggested that narratives are actually quite rare in archaeology, if we

Another time 113

understand by narrative, a form of textual composition that has time at its centre.26 Yet the basic approach of Genette is applicable to many archaeological texts so it might be helpful to give a short example, for which I will use Richard Bradley’s textbook of British prehistory.27 In some ways this is very safe choice being a textbook, but it has the advantage of illustrating Genette’s approach in a clear way. Genette divided his analysis into three themes: temporal order, duration and frequency. The first refers to how narrative time follows or distorts the time of actual events (story time). At a coarse level, in Bradley’s book. narrative time mimics historical time as the progression of chapters follow chronological order: early Neolithic (Chapter 2), later Neolithic/early Bronze Age (Chapter 3), later Bronze Age (Chapter 4) and Iron Age (Chapter 5). However, within the chapters there is a bit more flexibility as sometimes the text will zig-zag as it covers different themes or parts of Britain and of course sometimes there are occasional flashbacks and flashforwards. Genette’s second theme of duration refers to the pace of narrative time against story time – does it follow the same rhythm? One way to measure this is to compare the number of pages in each chapter against the number of years that chapter covers; in Bradley’s book, the ratio is fairly even except for the first which is about two-thirds the ratio of the other three. In other words, Bradley ‘narrates’ the early Neolithic at a slightly faster pace than other periods. Genette however, also examines more subtle indications of duration such as the presence of pauses in the narrative and also ellipses, that is, leaping over periods of time and so, for example, in the shift from Chapter 2 to 3, Bradley skips over 300 years at least in terms of the explicit chronological ranges the chapter are said to cover. The third and final theme is frequency by which Genette means the way a narrative repeatedly tells the same event (perhaps from different perspectives each time) or conversely, condenses multiple events into a single scene. Archaeological narratives of course deploy both but the latter is particularly common; when one describes ritual deposition at a site or foodways on a settlement, one is essentially characterizing what was presumably a routine or multiple of several events in a single generic description. Behind all this diversity though, the most important point is that Genette’s analysis works off this fundamental distinction between story time and narrative time, which in relation to archaeology and history, refers to the distinction between events as they ostensibly happened in the past (res gestae) and the events as they are related in the archaeological narrative. Now this narrative can simply mimic the storyline: it can follow the order of events in proper chronological fashion and attempt to maintain some parity between the length of text devoted to a time period and its duration, avoiding repetition. This would probably however make for a very dull narrative and is moreover probably impossible to achieve given the fact that any archaeological or historical narrative is working off a very fragmented record. It is the literary equivalent of Borges’ map which is as large as the territory it is supposed to represent. Thus even with a textbook like Bradley’s analysed above, where one might expect it to follow this formula, it is not fully possible. But even if it was, it may not be the most appropriate. In our everyday

114 Another time

lives, we make sense of the world through recollections (flashbacks) and anticipations (flashforwards), we jump over time and ignore intervening periods, and we condense past routines into singular episodes. In short, we perform exactly the kinds of operations Genette describes for narrative and in that sense, narrative temporality is much more like time as we experience it, one that juxtaposes pasts, presents and futures, that condenses or stretches time, that elides it and so on. If we were to analyse Witmore’s book Old Lands which we discussed in Chapter 5 using Genette’s methods as we did for Bradley’s, we would see a very different narrative time in play, one which bends and twists chronology so much that it is no longer barely recognizable. At this point we might also relate the extent to which narrative time follows story time, to the idea of chronotopes. The notion of a literary chronotope was developed by the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin who used it to refer to the way narratives construct space and time.28 His work became known in the west after the 1960s and was taken up by many archaeologists in the 1990s, most notably Rosemary Joyce in her book Languages of Archaeology, where she discussed what she saw as two dominant chronotopes in archaeology – that of progress and that of discovery.29 Bakhtin’s own discussion of chronotopes was somewhat fluid but later scholars have adopted a more analytical approach, especially Bart Keunen whose book Time and Imagination, develops Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope in a way that will have some relevance here.30 Keunen suggests that western writing has essentially operated under two main chronotopes, what he calls monological and dialogical. The former are characterized by a singular sequence that ends in a final resolution, what he calls the eschaton or telos. This is the classic, west European narrative. Joyce’s archaeological chronotopes of progress and discovery both fall under this; they both lead towards a final resolution. To these, we might also add the anticipatory tope of endangerment which suffuses most traditional heritage work and has been the subject of much critique.31 The second type of chronotope is less structured by the ending than by the conjunction of events which recur throughout a story, what Keunen calls kairos. Kairos as the Greek word for timeliness – that sense of timing, of events happening at the right (or wrong) time and I have already discussed this in earlier chapters. Dialogical chronotopes are less common but certainly still present in the European tradition. Conceivably, one could see many artefact biographies in archaeology as an exemplar of this chronotope; the lives of things have no ultimate goal, rather it is the stories and connections they accumulate along the way that matter. Witmore’s Old Lands certainly exemplifies such a chronotope. Similarly, but perhaps more ambiguously, we could also place narratives of revolution or transition in this group, insofar as they frame the events in terms of conjunctions, of a coming together of multiple different elements at a certain place and time. Yet many accounts of revolutions and transitions are just as likely to be drawn into framing these historical moments in terms of origins or ends, and as a consequence, ultimately belong to the monological chronotope. In some ways, the link between kairos and revolution is stronger in political discourse than historical or archaeological accounts.32

Another time 115

The notion of chronotope is a useful one but I think there is a danger that one gets caught up in a game of taxonomy: of trying to classify narratives into different types of chronotope. Yet I think we can still use Keunen’s distinction and put it to a new use; rather than see the monological and dialogical as two distinct chronotopes, we might rather view them as exemplars of two poles on a continuum. Monological chronotopes ultimately subsume narrative time to story time, where, whatever wandering narrative time makes around the linearity of story time, at the end it always joins up with it. Conversely, dialogical chronotopes resist such final conjunction, narrative time never fully collapses back into story time but remains in constant tension with it. In many ways, this offers us a useful way to conjoin ideas of Bakhtin and Genette and perhaps, more interestingly, to resurrect the distinction between chronos and kairos as the more useful opposition than telos and kairos. Some narratives are more chronological, others more kairological; or better perhaps, all narratives are differently kairological. For any chronotope only makes any sense by juxtaposing narrative time to the chronos of the story time; without having a sense of linear, regular chronological time to disrupt or play off, the temporal effects of narrative would not work. It is precisely this paradox – that narrative time both subverts yet depends upon chronological time – that Paul Ricoeur used as the basis of his major three-volume work on time and narrative.33 Because even if we argue that this chronological time of the story is a fiction, that events in history or the real world don’t really have this linear, regular, sequential character, it is still a necessary fiction to make sense of the temporal operations we form in our experience of time. For Ricoeur, narrative time occupies the gap between physical (i.e., Newtonian) and felt time that we discussed in Chapter 1, or what he calls cosmological and phenomenological time, thus acting as a bridge between the two.34 In relation to time, this distinction might best be expressed as the split experience of being both inside and outside a story at the same time. Let me quote the novelist Hilary Mantel on this, a quote I have used before but cannot suffer by repetition because it encapsulates this point so well: It’s the same with the people in history. Our attention is transfixed, as we watch someone stride towards the edge of a cliff, when we can see the edge and the character can’t. The reader becomes a small, conflicted god, or a disbelieved prophet. He is in two places at once. He is at the foot of the cliff, wise after the event, and he is also on the path, he is before the event; he is the observer, and he is also the person who steps into air. Only fiction can do this. It’s the novelist’s job: to put the reader in the moment, even if the moment is 500 years ago.35 In essence, this is what narrative does, according to Ricoeur: it juxtaposes a sense of time as external (cosmological, objective, physical time) which is represented by our ability to situate ourselves outside the events of a narrative, with a sense of time as internal (phenomenological, subjective, felt time), represented by our experience

116 Another time

of being inside the story, part of the events unfolding. Thus, rather than resolving this tension in any philosophical or logical sense, narrative is simply a way of holding both senses of time together without any feeling of contradiction.36 The work on narrative and time by Genette and Ricoeur gives us a deeper appreciation of how other presents, whether ethnographic or archaeological, when they are constructed through narrative, can actually perform that sense of a shared time-space that Hastrup discusses. That through writing or reading such narratives, we conjoin our present with a past present. As I am reading about life in a Neolithic village in Italy, I am in another world; but this other world is not the past, it is not that Neolithic village as it was experienced thousands of years ago. But neither is it the present, my present. It is a third world, a third time, a third present which is constituted through the re-presencing of past things in another time: a narrative present. In this way we can now finally appreciate how the temporality of recollection or representation with which I opened this chapter is different to the temporality of memory. With memory, the past is contiguous with the present, as material residues or traces of past activities persist into the present. The problem there lay with the way time is constituted in the archaeological record. But with recollection, the problem is of a different nature; it is about how to translate time from one medium to another. It is not about the contiguity of the past in the present, but a doubling of the present as part of the mimetic function of representation. So far, I have exclusively considered this act of translation or recollection through the medium of text, specifically narrative. However, time can be constituted in other media as well and it is to this topic I now turn.

Notes 1 The book was the Fly and the Fly Bottle by the Indian writer Ved Mehta; it was a series of conversations with Oxford philosophers and historians and others from the early 1960s and I had bought it because at the time I was deeply into Wittgenstein. The title of the book comes from a Wittgenstein quote. 2 S.E. Toulmin and J. Goodfield, The Discovery of Time (New York: Harper & Row, 1966). 3 R. Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 4 F. Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and the Experience of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 5 H. Gumbrecht, Our Broad Present: Time and Contemporary Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). 6 M. Halbwachs, ‘Historical Memory and Collective Memory’, in M. Halbwachs, The Collective Memory (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), pp. 50–87; P. Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations 26 (1989): 7–24. 7 On the rise of vintage, see J-P. Legendre and L. Olivier, ‘ “Let’s Get Rid of That Old Stuff!”: Family Heritage Objects in France at the Age of Presentism’, in M. Tamm and L. Olivier (eds), Rethinking Historical Time: New Approaches to Presentism (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), pp. 163–177. 8 A. Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970). 9 F. Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest, 16 (1989): 3–18 and F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992).

Another time 117

10 See M. Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (New York: Zero Books, 2009). 11 See Tamm and Olivier, Rethinking Historical Time, for a collection of papers on the impact of Presentism on these disciplines. 12 L. Olivier, ‘The Future of Archaeology in the Age of Presentism’, Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 6, no. 1 (2019): 20. 13 J. Fabian, Time and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 14 The classic text on this is W.J. Sollas, Ancient Hunters and their Modern Representatives (London: Macmillan, 1911). 15 Also see D. McKnight, ‘The Australian Aborigines in Anthropology’, in R. Fardon (ed.), Localizing Strategies: Regional Traditions of Ethnographic Writing (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990), for more concrete examples of this. 16 The exception probably remains economics, one of the most conservative of the social sciences which still talks in terms of development and under-development. 17 See G. Lucas, Understanding the Archaeological Record (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), for an extended discussion of this issue. 18 E. Tylor, Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization (London: John Murray, 1865). 19 G. Agamben, ‘What is the Contemporary?’, in What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), p. 41. 20 For example, K. Hastrup, ‘The Ethnographic Present: A Reinvention’, Cultural Anthropology 5, no. 1 (1990): 45–61; R. Sanjek, ‘The Ethnographic Present’, Man (NS) 26, no. 4 (1991): 7–24. 21 Hastrup, ‘The Ethnographic Present’, 51. 22 I review much of this in my book Writing the Past (London: Routledge, 2019). 23 I. Hodder, ‘The Narrative and Rhetoric of Material Culture Sequences’, World Archaeology 25 (1993): 268–282; R. Joyce, The Languages of Archaeology: Dialogue, Narrative and Writing (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002). 24 G. Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980); although now nearly half a century old, Genette’s work still largely frames the discussion about time and narrative in literary studies, see for example, M. Bal, Narratology: An Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 4th edn (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017). 25 Genette, Narrative Discourse, p. 157. 26 Lucas, Writing the Past. 27 R. Bradley, The Prehistory of Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 28 M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: Texas University Press, 1982). 29 Joyce, The Languages of Archaeology. 30 B. Keunen, Time and Imagination: Chronotopes in Western Narrative Culture (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011). 31 See C. DeSilvey and R. Harrison, ‘Anticipating Loss: Rethinking Endangerment in Heritage Futures’, International Journal of Heritage Studies 26, no. 1 (2020): 1–7. 32 See, for example, A. Negri, A Time for Revolution (London: Continuum, 2004). 33 P. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–1998). 34 Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 2, pp. 104–126. 35 H. Mantel, ‘Can These Bones Live? Treading the Line Between History and Alternative Facts’, The Spectator, 24 June 2017. 36 It is important to give some background to Ricoeur’s argument here as he was largely working from a position already staked out by Heidegger (Being and Time, Oxford: Blackwell, 1962). Heidegger’s initial position was very much influenced by the Bergson– Einstein debate where he was much closer to Bergson. Thus, he also argued that physical time, or clock time, was derivative of a more basic temporality grounded in human experience and that such time was spatialized, though later Heidegger seemed to have

118 Another time

distanced himself from Bergson. Where Bergson focused on issues of temporal divisibility and continuity which can be traced back to Aristotle’s linking of time to movement, Heidegger sought to re-situate time within issues of exteriority. For Heidegger, human existence (Dasein) is characterised by time in the sense that any being is never present to itself, but rather always ‘outside- itself’, a property he refers to as ek-static. In a sense, Heidegger is then trying to grapple with the problem of how time can be both inside and outside us. For example, take a simple act like cooking a meal; in performing this, I am always projecting myself into a time other than the present. The future, which is the anticipated, ready meal towards which this whole process is leading, and the past which is the memory and stock of experience I draw on in preparing this meal, from remembering where I keep a certain spice to previous occasions of having cooked similar meals. But it is not just the past and future that have this ‘outside-of’ quality, so does the present. For example, when making decisions about when to do something: choosing the right moment to add some ingredient or adjust the heat requires projecting another present alongside oneself. As I cook, I will always have one eye on the time (whether this is embodied in a clock or not), once again enacting another form of projection or externalization. Time as a form of projection or externalization is thus the horizon within which Being is finally analysed; it is time as a process, as temporalizing.

References Agamben, G. ‘What is the Contemporary?’. In G. Agamben, What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009, pp. 39–54. Bakhtin, M. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Bal, M. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, 4th edn. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. Bradley, R. The Prehistory of Britain and Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. DeSilvey, C. and R. Harrison. ‘Anticipating Loss: Rethinking Endangerment in Heritage Futures’. International Journal of Heritage Studies 26, no. 1 (2020): 1–7. Fabian, J. Time and the Other. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Fisher, M. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? New York: Zero Books, 2009. Fukuyama, F. ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest 16 (1989): 3–18. Fukuyama, F. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: The Free Press, 1992. Genette, G. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980. Gumbrecht, H. Our Broad Present: Time and Contemporary Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Halbwachs, M. ‘Historical Memory and Collective Memory’. In M. Halbwachs, The Collective Memory. New York: Harper & Row, 1980, pp. 50–87. Hartog, F. Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and the Experience of Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Hastrup, K. ‘The Ethnographic Present: A Reinvention’. Cultural Anthropology 5, no. 1 (1990): 45–61. Heidegger, M. Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962. Hodder, I. ‘The Narrative and Rhetoric of Material Culture Sequences’, World Archaeology 25 (1993): 268–282. Joyce, R. The Languages of Archaeology: Dialogue, Narrative and Writing. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002. Keunen, B. Time and Imagination: Chronotopes in Western Narrative Culture. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011. Koselleck, R. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.

Another time 119

Legendre, J-P. and L. Olivier. ‘“Let’s Get Rid of that Old Stuff!” Family Heritage Objects in France at the Age of Presentism’. In M. Tamm and L. Olivier (eds), Rethinking Historical Time: New Approaches to Presentism. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019, pp. 163–177. Lucas, G. Understanding the Archaeological Record. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Lucas, G. Writing the Past. London: Routledge, 2019. McKnight, D. ‘The Australian Aborigines in Anthropology’. In R. Fardon (ed.), Localizing Strategies: Regional Traditions of Ethnographic Writing. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990. Mantel, H. ‘Can These Bones Live? Treading the Line Between History and Alternative Facts’,The Spectator, 24 June 2017. Mehta, V. The Fly and the Fly Bottle. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965. Negri, A. Time for Revolution. London: Continuum, 2004. Nora, P. ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’. Representations 26 (1989): 7–24. Olivier, L. ‘The Future of Archaeology in the Age of Presentism’. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 6, no. 1 (2019): 16–31. Ricoeur, P. Time and Narrative, 3 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984–1998. Sanjek, R. ‘The Ethnographic Present’. Man (N.S.) 26, no. 4 (1991): 609–628. Sollas, W.J. Ancient Hunters and their Modern Representatives. London: Macmillan, 1911. Tamm, M. and L. Olivier (eds), Rethinking Historical Time: New Approaches to Presentism. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019, pp. 163–177. Toffler, A. Future Shock. New York: Random House, 1970. Toulmin, S.E. and J. Goodfield. The Discovery of Time. New York: Harper & Row, 1966. Tylor, E. Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization. London: John Murray, 1865.

7 THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL TIME MACHINE

Archaeology and cinematic time When we think about how our conception of time has changed as part of a long narrative of European modernity, we think clocks and calendars; indeed, this is the mode I adopted in Chapter 2 in portraying the singularization of time. Yet there are other technologies that have also affected our time consciousness, devices which have perhaps been marginalized in accounts of time because of their ostensibly indirect connection to time in comparison to the overt time-keeping performed by clocks and calendars. I am talking about new transport and media technologies such as trains, which affected people’s perception of speed and cinema, which seemed to capture the world in real time. Yet an underlying common thread between clocks and these other time-based technologies has always been there; both Poincaré and Einstein saw time as procedural, that time is essentially what a clock does. And let us also recall from Chapter 1, Bergson’s line drawn on the paper, the ‘unfolded’: a material record of movement; unwittingly, perhaps Bergson has offered us a way to re-think time. Clocks, moving hands, lines on paper, images on film, wheels on a track, pixels on a screen, grooves on vinyl … maybe it is in exploring the connections between these materialities and what they do, that we fully come to understand the complexity of time. It is perhaps no coincidence that when Europe was trying to co-ordinate local times into a singular, global time, this was, in part, a response to the demands of these highspeed transport and communication networks. At the same time, new media technologies were emerging which also impacted on people’s time consciousness. The invention of the railways, aeroplanes, cars, the gramophone, cinema and radio all had tremendous impact on how people perceived time and much has been written on this.1 Among the more obvious influences was the stimulus toward science fiction and time travel stories; H.G. Wells’ book The Time Machine, published in 1895, being one

The archaeological time machine 121

of the earliest in this genre.2 Indeed in Wells’ book it is interesting to read how time travel is depicted, especially the experience of it. Wells’ character describes it as like being on a switchback, that is, a roller-coaster ride. Essentially, articulating the act of time travel as derivative of the new experiences around speed gained from trains and amusement parks. Here though, I want to focus mainly on one technology, perhaps because it has become such a dominant – yet largely implicit – metaphor for thinking about time: cinema. Although there has been some attention directed at the relation between archaeology and cinema, generally this focuses on how archaeology is represented in film or how archaeology has used film.3 My interest is more about how cinema constructs time and the implications this has for archaeology. As a moving image, cinema is linked to much older technologies that can be traced to the late 18th century, all of which created the moving image from a static one, such as the phenakisticope, which is basically a spinning cardboard disc attached to a handle, with multiple images arrayed around its circumference.4 At its heart then, is the idea of the illusion of movement created when you juxtapose a sequence of images in rapid succession. This is a fascinating notion because if taken as an indication of how time and motion actually operate in the real world, it implies that change is really nothing more than a series of static objects. It seemed to offer concrete justification for Zeno’s paradoxes of time, such as how an arrow appears to move but at the same time, must always be at rest.5 More significantly, you can slow down or even stop time with these technologies and when you do, some very obvious connections can be made between stroboscopic time and stratigraphy, whether in geology or archaeology. There is certainly great potential in exploring the intersections between these early precinematic devices and the emerging discipline of archaeology, but as yet, no-one seems to have looked into this topic, as far as I am aware. On the other hand, the similarities between a moving image and the archaeological record break down on closer inspection. An archaeological site or a single deposit or feature is never a snapshot of a moment in the past, it is always mixed, composite, fragmented and so on, as the debates in formation theory since the 1950s have taught us (see Chapters 3 and 5). Yet while this sense of cinematic time does not really apply to the archaeological record, it does not mean our general sense of time is still not influenced by cinema, as if events as they happened in the past (or the present) unfold in cinematic time. There is more to this than the simple idea of time represented as a linear sequence of events, indeed in many ways cinema completely disrupts such a notion of time. But what an analysis of cinema does reveal is the way time is entangled with movement to the extent that is can be difficult to think of time outside of movement. This is where the work of Deleuze on cinema is relevant.6 Written in the 1980s, his two-volume work links cinema directly to the question of time, just as Ricoeur’s work on narrative, which I discussed in the last chapter, had done.7 Deleuze’s analysis is long and complex and there is no need to go into it in detail here; the key point is that cinema articulates the central relation between movement and time. For Deleuze, the problem is that western thought

122 The archaeological time machine

has generally subordinated time to movement, seen time through movement; it is because of this that time is typically portrayed as linear, directional and sequential. Think of Zeno’s paradoxes again. Deleuze argues that early cinema tended to reproduce this subordination through various means, but generally by adopting a conventional, linear narrative in the way it produced a film, while later cinema broke with this and inverted the relation, making movement now subordinate to time. Now of course at a technical level, cinema does create time through movement: the motion of the film on a reel. Indeed, this is why Bergson criticized cinema because of the way it reduced time and movement to series of instants, and how in focusing on such comparisons between cinematic and real time, we are forgetting the projector which is what actually makes the film move.8 In other words, using cinema to think time gets you nowhere. Deleuze however, suggested that Bergson was missing something and in fact argued that cinema actually embodies Bergson’s philosophy of time in a way Bergson did not realize himself. Deleuze focuses on the moving image itself and how the viewer perceives it rather than the technology of cinema. As such, it is the relation between time and movement in cinematic composition that becomes significant: how shots are framed and constructed, how films are edited and stitched together as montages of shots. Where early cinematic composition was defined by movement and its phases, later cinema broke free of this and began expressing time more directly by exploiting temporal fractures and juxtapositions, foregrounding what Deleuze called temporal aberrations, exemplified in the use of flashbacks and dream sequences among other things. Essentially what Deleuze argues is that cinema, contra Bergson, in fact articulates a Bergsonian view of time. This is a necessarily abbreviated and selective account of Deleuze’s book but the important point here is that just because cinema is based on a moving image (the movement-image in Deleuze’s terminology), does not mean cinema needs to be understood through movement. And by implication, therefore, we do not need to think time through movement either. Yet Deleuze’s focus on cinematic composition as opposed to its technology and apparatus, is perhaps also somewhat limiting; reading his text, even though it is replete with examples from cinema, one comes away with a sense that many of the broader points, especially about time, are applicable to other art forms and media, especially writing. At one level, this critique is unfair and perhaps misses the intentions of Deleuze; after all, he was explicit in drawing a distinction between cinema and narrative. Yet the temporal operations he describes for cinematic composition are very similar to those described by Genette for narrative as discussed towards the end of the last chapter. At another level though, as an explication of time, especially in relation to movement, I wonder if we might gain more if we had followed up Bergson’s original allusion to the projector as a movement-machine. To that end, I now want to shift my focus to another discourse on the moving image, one which does in fact focus on the materiality and technology of the apparatus of cinema and related media: German material media studies.

The archaeological time machine 123

Time-axis manipulation For this section, I will turn primarily to the work of Friedrich Kittler and Wolfgang Ernst especially focusing on both the separation and intersection of two key aspects of time-based visual media: recordings and live transmission.9 Recordings were in many ways what had the most impact in the first wave of new media in the late 19th and early 20th century; whether with gramophone or cinema, the recording and playback of sounds and moving images both worked on media where time was fundamental. It is why these new media are often called time-based media. But more than that, it created the possibility of time manipulation. Such media enabled endless operations such as stopping or pausing time, putting it on repeat, speeding it up or slowing it down, cutting and splicing to mix up times, jumping forward or backward and yes, even reversing time. Such malleability, or what Kittler called time-axis manipulation, can be seen as the liberating flipside of the rigour and constraint needed to co-ordinate simultaneity in the construction of a singular, universal clock time. Indeed, fundamentally it shared the same ontology about time as segmented, sequential and linear, only now those segments could be re-ordered and shuffled at will. And they were, as many of the early pioneers of the gramophone and cinema experimented with time-axis manipulations, such as Edison, Méliès and Vertov. And yet as they did so, something strange and unusual was discovered. When you speed up a recording, it is not at all the same sound as simply shifting tempo, from lento to presto. The sound was different. When you play a sound in reverse, this sounds differently if you play an actual recording in reverse. What in the recording industry later became known as backmasking (and used famously by the Beatles among other musicians), such reversed sounds are quite different from phonetic reversal. ‘God’ spoken backwards may have been ‘dog’ when writing was the dominant media, but not any longer. Nowadays, such time-axis manipulation is as easy as downloading an app on your phone; indeed, most phones come loaded with software that can perform some of the simpler operations. Of course, long before these new media technologies emerged, time manipulation was possible in old media such as painting and writing; a story could go back and forth in time, jump and even juxtapose time as I discussed in Chapter 6 in relation to the important studies of Genette.10 But crucially the time effects are different to dynamic recording media like the phonograph and cinema. Going back in time in writing is not the same as running a film sequence in reverse. The second aspect to consider relates to live transmission and real-time media, by which I mean among other things, radio, television and computers. One facet of these technologies is of course that they relay moving images in real time without the intervening need for a recording. While all of these can of course accommodate recordings (through magnetic tapes, CDs/DVDs and hard drives) and even play back older media like the gramophone and cinema, they function on the premise of transmitting live action images and/or sounds directly. Because of this, whether the image or sound is recorded or actually live, it is produced through a different form of time manipulation. The best way to explain this is by comparing cinema to television or computer displays.

124 The archaeological time machine

The moving image in cinema works, as we all know, by the rapid procession of still images; it is a serial or sequential process, one image at a time but displayed at a rate that exceeds the human ability to discriminate them as separate frames: typically 24 per second. What moves is the ‘whole image’. With live television and digital monitors, there is also a sequential process, but instead of whole images, what changes are fragments or parts of an image. The image is split into hundreds of lines (720 or 1080 in most modern flat screens) which progressively scan left to right, top to bottom as if reading lines on a page. A full scan or ‘page’ is performed 25 or 30 times a second depending on the system. However, since the 1940s, most systems split their lines into two sets or fields, even and odd, which change at a staggered interval (known as interlacing). The odd lines change first, then the even lines, so the whole image changes or has a refresh rate of 50 or 60 times a second. Since the conversion from analogue (e.g., PAL) to digital transmission (e.g., DVB), there have been moves to drop interlacing and speed up the progressive scan instead so it matches the refresh rate produced by interlacing (i.e., 50 times a second) and indeed, most modern computer screens and flat screens do this, using simple progressive scanning so any interlaced transmissions or recordings have to be de-interlaced. Moreover, such screens have the capacity to change one pixel at a time (and not necessarily in a progressive, sequential order as in raster scanning), but in practice they still use progressive scanning to change the image. Although for the viewer, the visual difference between cinema and television may not be really evident, the way these media technologies create time, is. One works off a complete image, the whole world changing one frame at a time, the other off staggered segments interlaced together. When you freeze cinema, you get a single frame, the moment captured being no different to a photograph; when you freeze a television or computer monitor, you get a montage, a composite of two multi-sliced or striated half-images captured micro-seconds apart.11 And although the visual perception of these two modes may not look different, arguably they are also connected to wider differences in regimes of watching and the breakdown between receiver and transmitter in terms of temporal control. The old regime of consuming these media was fixed to schedules and time slots: if you wanted to watch a movie or television programme, you had to adjust your lifestyle to the technology. Programmes and screenings followed pre-defined slots and although you could switch channels, you could not alter the sequential nature of the schedule. With home video recording, this started to be manipulable but it is only with the emergence of on-demand streaming and providers like Netflix, that the old viewing regime has finally changed. Even live television can be watched on a delay, depending on when you are ready. Like the screen image itself, watching can be interlaced. What was once the preserve of the producer, is now in the hands of the consumer. This is not meant as a celebration of a technologically-driven democracy, but simply to point out the impact real-time media has had on the temporality of media consumption. These shifts however also relate to the blurring and breakdown of the distinction between recording and live transmission at a technological level as well. Wolfgang Ernst’s work on digital memory and archives is relevant here as he argues that with

The archaeological time machine 125

contemporary digital media, the separation of record and transmission no longer applies.12 The record or archive simply becomes a property or aspect of data transmission or transfer. Wendy Chun has articulated this more clearly in a study on digital memory.13 Whereas with traditional, analogue media, memory is preserved by not being accessed or played, modern digital memory has this as a condition of preservation. For example, consider a vinyl disc or an old tape cassette; the more it was played, the more it suffered and wore out and thus the less value it had as an archive or memory. With digital media however, copying, rewriting and transferring objects becomes the only way to secure their preservation; our photos, text documents and other files migrate from computer to computer, or between devices, otherwise they would eventually become unreadable. Chun characterizes digital memory as the ‘enduring ephemeral’ to capture this somewhat paradoxical condition. In other words, with digital media we see how memory and the archive are not something to be frozen in time, but flourish precisely to the extent that they are in motion. Indeed, this characterizes much of digital media in general; it is never finished but always in flux. A traditional novel or film is not supposed to change; whether we watch it on the big screen, a TV or a smart phone, the film as a work is ideally preserved as it was published. But many modern media forms have change in-built, such as websites, social media, blogs, wikis and so on. How do you archive something whose very nature is to be constantly changing? Of course one can do this, but then only by time-sampling, that is, by making copies of webpages at regular intervals which is what web-crawling programs are designed to do for internet archiving sites such as the Wayback machine (web.archive.org). So what are we to make of the implications of these time-making operations for archaeology? Some rather obvious analogies come to mind, especially the notion of digital memory as the enduring ephemeral and ideas of the archaeological record as something continually re-worked rather than a frozen record of a particular moment – recall the Pompeii Premise discussed in Chapters 3 and 5. Or how the earlier difference between how motion is created in cinema and television becomes reminiscent of the distinction between strata and palimpsest. A stratigraphic section gives us a picture of time progressing, one deposit at a time, a mode of temporalizing we carry over into the way we phase a site and even construct periodizations as discussed earlier in this book. In contrast, a palimpsest is a montage, a mix of fragmented times, nothing is quite whole and yet together the resultant assemblage still appears meaningful. Layers, sites and landscapes are all palimpsests to various degrees. However, interesting as such analogies are, they do not really offer us anything new to work with. In many ways, what we need to attend to are not direct parallels with archaeology and media technologies, but to use this insight on media as a form of time manipulation, time-making, to think about the kind of temporal operations or procedures that archaeology can and might enact. To understand time as something defined by its procedural operation, that is, what time is, depends on how it is made – to understand time in relation to the materialities through which it is articulated. It is to this issue that I want to turn next.

126 The archaeological time machine

Archaeological time machines When it comes to thinking of archaeological remains as clocks, we have been pretty successful. Using methods such as stratigraphic excavation, seriation and typology, dendrochronology and radiocarbon dating, we have created an archaeological time which integrates beautifully with a singularized, universal time scale. Even our narratives and other written accounts as well as images largely incorporate and reproduce this temporality. Yet as I discussed in the last chapter, narrative also develops its own specific ways of making time and in fact viewed as a medium for representing time, it opened up the theme being addressed in this chapter. Narrative does not just represent time, it creates it. But what other possibilities does the archaeological record and the archaeological operation hold? If we consider the soil, building foundations, artefacts, drawings and texts as all essentially media for the construction and manipulation of time, where might this lead?14 At this point, I just want to offer some exploratory suggestions which try to engage with archaeological time in a different way than usual. To that end, I will examine a selection of five archaeological cases as examples of time-constituting media, making no necessary distinction between the objects we study and the records we use to represent these objects. Indeed, the point is, archaeological time is constructed through all of them, in different ways and together, they constitute what we might dub as the archaeological time machine: technologies for creating time.

Interventions I have always considered that the greatest legacy of phenomenology in archaeology was the way it taught us to value the embodied nature of fieldwork. That physically occupying the same ground that the people we are studying did, could itself be the basis for a whole new methodology, a way of understanding. It matters not that socially and culturally we are very different beings to those people, nor that the ground has changed over the intervening centuries or millennia; one can factor all this in of course. But the point is, simply by being there and being attentive to the materialities of that ground – whether in excavation or field survey – one is almost driven to repeat the past. To follow the course of a prehistoric route or Roman road, to excavate a burial, to hold a flint axe in your hand; all of these actions are repetitions of what others did before us, right here – but not right now. Someone else before us once dug that grave, held that axe, walked that road. These acts of repetition take us into past worlds in very immediate ways. In talking of transcribing manuscripts, Arlette Farge makes exactly the same observations; reading manuscripts and taking notes is one thing, but the act of transcribing, of copying a text verbatim like a medieval monk adds a whole new dimension to working with archives, a sense of temporal proximity that goes beyond simply holding the manuscript in your hands.15 Of course not everything we do in the field has this quality and many of the acts we perform can hardly be described as a repetition of the past. Yet almost all the acts we perform are made possible by the persistence of the past into the present as

The archaeological time machine 127

we discussed in Chapter 5. Sometimes we engage with this persistence through iteration (re-digging the same grave pit), sometimes we effect a reversal (taking apart what was carefully laid down, such as a stone wall), and sometimes we do both simultaneously (removing the grave fill/re-cutting the grave). But sometimes we do something completely new (measure or draw the grave) and in fact from another perspective, all of these operations are also doing something new. Digging with iron trowels instead of antler picks, digging to find rather than to bury. The paradox is, that to interact with the very persistence of the past, we need to transform it. Even repetitions and reversals are not re-enactments, not pure repetitions but forms of repetition through transformation. They evoke exactly the same form of archiving discussed above with new media technologies. Indeed, what is interesting about fieldwork as an archival practice is precisely the way it performs a perpetuation of memory into the future through transformation. It reminds me of that traditional distinction in heritage management of preservation by record versus preservation in situ. The first is not a poor substitute for the second, but rather a very different mode of temporalizing the archive. Preservation through transformation of media.16 The field archive re-works and re-configures the materialities of the ground as something different: bags of soil samples, finds, photographs, notebooks etc. It enacts a temporality which is quite different to that envisaged in conventional heritage management.

Interfaces Interfaces are funny things. Sometimes we don’t even recognize them when we see them. Unless the interface between two deposits has an unusual, gravity-defying shape (as with post holes, pits or graves), it might be disregarded. Thus a horizontal interface between two deposits is often viewed simply as a means to identify the deposit and distinguish it from adjacent layers; it is not in itself given any attention unless it is interpreted as a truncation or erosion horizon. The point of this preamble is to draw our attention to one of the salient properties of interfaces: they are forms without content, lines without depth. Ben Edwards has remarked on this, more particularly on the idea of interfaces as boundaries which lack duration; as discontinuities, they mark durationless breaks in time rather than extended durations.17 Arguably this is not quite true; a cut such as a post hole or grave pit obviously took time to dig, just as it takes time for the archaeologist to re-expose it by removing the fill. Cuts always imply a duration and in that sense, they are no different to deposits. Obviously most cuts represent very short durations, shorter than any of our current dating techniques can deal with, but then the same is true of many deposits as well. In terms of our ability to date them, they may be effectively durationless but this is surely incidental to their materiality. Perhaps the important point here is that a cut or an interface marks a break or discontinuity and thus signals change. However, they are not essential for recognizing change; we might look to more gradual variation across a deposit in terms of colour and tone, the frequency or nature of inclusions, all of which illustrate the

128 The archaeological time machine

possibility of difference without division. But an interface is nevertheless indicative of a special kind of change, a break in continuity. But just as interfaces take two forms – surfaces and cuts – so we need to understand discontinuity in two different ways. Doug Bailey has recently given us a fascinating tour of the materiality of the cut in archaeology, considering other practices and disciplinary approaches such as performance art, linguistics and psychology, and there are some ideas we can draw on here.18 One idea is the notion of how cuts break or intrude into existing surfaces, violating their integrity. In a sense, we need to remind ourselves that cuts are not so much forms without content, as voids or holes within matter. In other words, what cuts do is cut away matter; they remove parts of the past, they subtract time. Surfaces on the other hand perform something different; the surface of a deposit indicates a cessation of accumulation or sedimentation, or better, a pause in time between the end of formation of one deposit and the start of another. These two temporalities of the interface – cut and surface, subtraction and pause – inevitably evoke a third time, that of deposition which we might then characterize as an addition of time. All three have duration; subtractions can remove centuries of accumulation, while surfaces may remain stable for years, even if they suffer some wear and tear or incorporate sporadic additions. As time operations, duration is not really the issue; rather we are dealing with a materiality which adds, subtracts or pauses time. This sounds odd; how can you add or subtract time? Surely time just flows, we cannot change it? This gets to the heart of the point however: time is what materials do. Things don’t exist in time, they make it. We have no problem talking about adding, subtracting or pausing time in other contexts: smoking takes years off a life, the addition of an extra half-anhour to the working day, pausing a recording, and so on. We do similar operations all the time and the point is, these are not metaphorical but material as they have real-life consequences. Similarly, an archaeological site is the product of these three temporal operators: adding, removing and pausing time. Deposits, cuts and surfaces. This then becomes another way to think about a stratigraphic sequence such as typically rendered through a Harris matrix. The usual way to describe the temporality of a matrix is as linear and sequential, but given the stress Harris placed on the interface as the key unit of stratigraphy in his original work, perhaps the matrix is better considered as a diagrammatic equation showing time-axis manipulations based on very simple temporal operators: subtraction, addition and suspension. It shows us not how time is ordered, but how it is apportioned or distributed – a little more here, a little less there. And if you have ever tried to work through a matrix using single context plans, whether on the computer screen or overlaying permatrace, you will know that working backwards (top to bottom, latest to earliest) is not the same as working forwards (bottom up, earliest to latest) – even if the final result ought to be the same. Any operation involving subtraction is non-commutative, that is, it is never the same when reversed (e.g., compare the sums of 3 + 4 – 1 and 1– 4 + 3).19

The archaeological time machine 129

Deposits But of course, archaeological sites incorporate more than these three temporalities. In particular, a focus on deposits can lead us to explore a different temporal dimension to that which was uncovered in the examination of the interface. Where interfaces draw our attention to time as an operator, a function defining units as part of a stratigraphic matrix, deposits deal with units as substances, as solid or fluid bodies.20 The temporality of deposits is all about the temporality of solidity. Many years ago, I was excavating in a deep trench on an urban site in England; the trench extended several metres below the surface and I had to stand on a ladder to record the trench wall or section; we also had to put up shuttering and acrow props to prevent the sides of the trench from caving in and burying me alive. Despite following all health and safety regulations, it was still a little unnerving as I knew the safeguards might not be enough to protect me. Yet it helped that the deposits we were excavating were of thick, stiff, alluvial clays – and that it was raining. Sandier deposits would have been much less stable and prone to collapse, while had the weather been hot, the clays would have dried out and started to crumble or sheer off. Archaeological deposits are not as solid as they may sometimes seem. Indeed, in some cases and under the right circumstances, they will actually ‘flow’. Often what holds deposits together is not their own solidity but the mutual support they provide for each other, such that more ‘solid’ layers will retain more ‘fluid’ ones. Thus one way to understand a deposit is by its stability of form, the extent to which it holds its shape, or holds together as a single, discrete entity. Seen from another perspective though, this also expresses how much the deposit will ‘move’ – not just when you create a void next to it, as when digging a trench, but also in relation to adjacent deposits. Indeed, movement also characterizes another aspect of a deposit: its permeability. Permeability relates to the ability of other deposits, fluids or objects to penetrate a host deposit. Materials like water can flow across deposit boundaries, leaching minerals along the way. Worms and roots also move across boundaries and when they do so, they can disturb the soil and mix the finds. The list of postdepositional agents and processes which can cause archaeologists to scratch their heads all underline the permeability of archaeological strata. Two salient qualities emerge from these reflections. One concerns the stability or fixity of a deposit; let us call this its durability, which carries connotations of both hardness and endurance. Indeed, archaeologists might use the term ‘indurated’ to refer to an extremely compacted or cemented deposit. A durable deposit is not only hard; it also retains its shape or form relative to other deposits over time. Here, the etymological connection between durability and duration should be highlighted. Both words take their root from the Latin verb ‘to harden’, which sounds fine with the concept of durability, but less so with that of duration. We think of duration as an extended period of continuous time, by which we usually mean a period not marked by any significant break. It is the time which some event or process takes to unfold. It implies a kind of unity or coherence and resonates strongly with Bergson’s concept of durée as flux. And yet the notion of duration as flux or a fluid time seems

130 The archaeological time machine

at odds with the etymology of the word which rather suggests stopping the flow – a congealed time. Just like a deposit in fact. What should we make of this inversion? Consider the classic example of a single musical note or tone, sustained over a period of time. As it hangs in the air, time itself seems congealed and suspended, yet still it flows. Nothing else impedes this moment. This is thickened time – the world held fast and steady. Rather than see the archaeological record and deposits as typically static – as if time has been arrested or stopped, maybe we should see them as congealed, hardened time. The other feature concerns the permeability or porosity of a deposit: its readiness to allow other materials – whether deposits or other objects – to flow through it. I think we can connect this idea to that of percolating time as articulated by Serres and deployed by Witmore, something we discussed in Chapter 5. Percolation is the filtering or sieving of one substance through another, typically a fluid through a solid, like water through coffee grounds. But let us imagine it more symmetrically, as how things can mutually act to block or allow the ingress of other things into them. This co-mingling, when viewed temporally, expresses exactly the polychronic nature of the world, an ensemble of things from different times. Bergson’s contemporaneous flows which are both individuated and yet constitute a whole.

Maps Making plans on site has changed dramatically over my lifetime. When I started my career, they were all hand-drawn, pencil on permatrace, tapes and grid pegs. Now, although one occasionally uses these older methods, most site plans are made using a total station or GPS. In some ways, the two technologies are not that different; both work by plotting points in a geo-referenced space and then joining the dots up to create feature outlines. In both cases, it is the archaeologist who determines what the points are in the ground, these points then being transferred to a piece of paper by tapes or to a digital memory via a prism or GPS receiver on a stick, communicating with a station or satellite.21 Obviously there are differences; with hand drawing, the archaeologist connects the dots with their pencil while with digital surveying tools, software performs the same job. There have also been more general observations on how digital surveying removes the archaeologist from engagement with the site, though of course both technologies are essentially media and so create their own forms of distance – and proximity.22 The differences extend beyond these issues as well, but for the purpose of my focus on time, it is this quality of dots and lines that I want to stick with. Here, let us recall Bergson’s example of a hand drawing a line on paper – how the movement of the hand is an unfolding, a becoming, while the drawn line is an unfolded, a static object which can then be subdivided or partitioned as desired. For Bergson, the relation between these two – the movement and the drawn line – embodied the way real time is transformed into clock time. Both Tim Ingold and Helen Wickstead have also remarked on this connection between the gesture and the trace, the kinaesthetic movement and the drawn line.23 But look

The archaeological time machine 131

at the archaeologist as she draws a plan: whether by hand or digitally, she is inverting Bergson’s example. We start with the divisions, the points, and connect them with lines, which then creates the sense of continuity. Of course such plans are not meant to represent time but space. Bergson’s example was precisely meant to illustrate how we come to spatialize time, but can we say an archaeological plan is meant to temporalize space? No, but maybe the issue here is that to represent space, it needs to be constituted in time by a double process of sequential, individuated dots connected by a continuous line. That in making space, we still perform Bergson’s operation and even if it is in reverse, it still preserves the symmetry of his explanation.24 Dots and lines not only constitute the operations for the movement through which plans and maps are produced, they also comprise the main ways in which we represent movement in archaeological images. Indeed, the impression of time and movement in a still drawing can be easily conveyed by the artful use of dots or lines, a point made long ago by Kandinsky and illustrated archaeologically by McFadyen in her discussion of site plans and sections.25 For example, Kandinsky shows how the dots and lines of musical notation involve movement, which is preserved if not accentuated when abstracted just to a dance of dots.26 Similarly, McFadyen reveals how subtle use of dashed lines on a section drawing can indicated the flow and weathering of materials. Elsewhere, I have explored the use of dots and lines as techniques for representing movement in the past,27 contrasting Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza’s 1971 map of the spread of farming through Europe during the Neolithic with Anderson and Gillam’s more recent rendition of the spread of early humans through the Americas.28 One depicts the movement of people as a wave like ripples on a pond, the other as a series of discrete steps, like moves on a board game or the route finders on Google Maps. One cannot resist the obvious analogy here to the wave-particle duality of quantum physics, but this also takes us right back to Zeno’s paradoxes of motion and time and the tension between continuity and discontinuity.

Photographs Although archaeologists increasingly make use of video in the field, whether to create 3D photomontages or as video diaries among other things, on the whole photographs remain the dominant form of visual recording along with plans. Nevertheless, the way the temporality of the photograph is defined is almost always in relation to the moving image, whether implicitly or explicitly.29 Whereas a photograph is often considered to yield a snapshot, a moment frozen in time, the moving image shows real time, time as it unfolds in real life. Where photographs freeze or stop time, the moving image reproduces it. And yet there is something not quite right with this formulation; if movement can be evoked in a static drawing as discussed above, surely photographs too can do this? Such considerations should make us question some of the former comparisons often made between photographs as frozen time and the archaeological record.30 Indeed, a number of archaeologists

132 The archaeological time machine

have recently tried to articulate this dissatisfaction with the idea of a photograph representing frozen time, arguing that photographs still embody duration and movement albeit in different ways to the moving image.31 As Jennifer Baird has put it: ‘Thus, far from simply objectively recording archaeological remains the methodological conventions of archaeological photographs are themselves productive of time.’32 One of the key ways in which this is done, is by removing or framing out all traces of the contemporary from photographs, whether people, tools or buildings to give an impression of a site that does not exist in the present. Yet it is always a doubled temporality, if not a multiple one; the very juxtaposition of the here-and-now physicality of a photograph with the there-and-then image it depicts, evokes not so much arrested time as folded time, the concatenation of the past and present.33 But there is also another quality to consider here which relates more directly to movement and duration. In their paper on archaeological photography, Mark Knight and Lesley McFadyen discuss how duration is captured through long exposures which create blurred or ghostly figures; or through composition and framing of a subject, such as a half-excavated eel trap in a palaeochannel or a prehistoric pile dwelling which presents us with a riot of implied movement and activity, from hoof prints in the mud to a scatter of wood chippings.34 Yes, in all these cases movement is implied, just as in the maps discussed in the last section; but the significant thing here is to recognize how the movement is produced from the very stillness of the image. And this brings me to perhaps a fundamental difference between a photograph and frame in a film; the very idea of photographs as snapshots is in a way influenced by seeing them as if they were stills from a moving image. Yet as Deleuze remarked in his work on cinema discussed earlier in this chapter, there is an important difference between the photograph and the film frame; the latter captures what he calls an ‘any-moment-whatever’; there is nothing special about it, and in fact it only takes on meaning as part of a set or series.35 It is through the sequential conjunction of such frames that movement is created. But with a photograph, as with a painting, there is a privileging of this moment, there is a sense of the subject posing for the camera, a stillness which is thick with time – unlike the thin temporality of the individual film frame. Photographs of course vary in the extent to which they achieve this and arguably many photographs can take on the characteristics of the ‘any-moment-whatever’. But they nonetheless have this potential of a richer temporality, especially in archaeological site photography which organizes itself largely along the lines of the pose. It is a contrived, constructed composition which doesn’t capture or freeze time but orchestrates a stillness, like a suspended note ringing in the air. Rather than photographs embodying frozen time, we should think of them in terms of still time; stillness has duration, it can even imply movement although it is not necessary.36 Moreover, the duration that is embedded in a photograph is perhaps ultimately to be located not solely in the image itself but in the image-asviewed. Looking at a photograph takes time. The assemblage of photograph and viewer is what finally matters here, just as with the moving image, it is the

The archaeological time machine 133

assemblage of multiple frames on film and projector that provide movement. Remove images from these contexts or assemblages – whether a photograph or frame on a film roll – and you remove part of what makes them temporal.

The multiplicities of time These five cases I have discussed – interventions, interfaces, deposits, maps and photographs – are inevitably just selections. I have not talked about the temporality of artefacts, texts, databases or landscapes and in fact, the list could be endless insofar as we work on subdivisions or species of all these things. But my goal has not to be exhaustive or encompassing; rather I just wanted to highlight the way time is made through different objects and how different temporalities come to the fore. That if, instead of assuming time is some larger, overarching ‘thing’ which is manifest in reality, in which objects and events exist or occur, that we rather think of how objects make or constitute time through their materiality. Thinking through interventions, time is an operation of repetition or reversal, persistence and transformation; with the interface, time becomes an operator of addition, subtraction and suspension; with deposits, time is a solid or fluid, it hardens and congeals and yes, maybe freezes but in a different sense to the frozen time often ascribed to photographs or the archaeological record. It is literally frozen, which also means it can thaw, and in becoming fluid, percolate through harder temporalities. Maps create yet another type of time; working off points and lines, they perhaps bring us closest to the way time and space are mutually constituted, where time is simultaneously both an instant and a duration, where space is created through time and time rendered as space. Finally the photograph, which embodies this tension of the instant and duration in another way captured in the idea of stillness of the imageand-viewer assemblage. Perhaps these descriptions sound too metaphorical; how can time be like a sieve or congealed? How can you subtract or add time? But ask yourself whether any of the terms you ordinarily use to convey time are any different. How can time pass? Do you see it, like you see a bus pass you on the road? Then perhaps we can only express time metaphorically; indeed, this certainly resonates with a branch of study called conceptual metaphor theory which argues that most if not all of our abstract concepts like time, ultimately rest on a metaphorical basis grounded in embodied cognition. Cristián Simonetti’s work here is directly relevant and even though he separates himself somewhat from this particular school, his work on how time in archaeology is constructed through the body is instructive. Using phrases like ‘going back in time’ or ‘down in time’ draw on deeply embodied actions.37 Moreover, different cultures will express these basic bodily constructs in different ways; Zoe Crossland has pointed out how a Madagascan sense of time, especially the future, is something that comes at us from behind, while we of course, typically see it as something lying ahead of us.38 And yet this is not simply about culturally relative perceptions of time. As I mentioned in my prologue, this is one of the principal ways in which this book

134 The archaeological time machine

departs from my earlier treatment of time in archaeology from 2005. The point is, calling these time descriptions metaphorical is misleading; it suggests they are all different ways of trying to represent something which exists independent from the description. My argument here is that there is no time independent of these descriptions. Indeed, these descriptions simply capture the way time is concretely made and manifest in these different objects. And yet in stating this, I realize it also entails a contradiction: if time is simply what interfaces, maps and endless other things create, in what sense can we still use the word time to convey a commonality within this series? How can we say interfaces and maps both create time, but in their own way, if there is no underlying unity? Perhaps we can’t; we can of course pull out that common trick and invoke Wittgenstein’s family of resemblances and maybe this is alright. Perhaps this is where the real metaphor lies – not with all the individual variations and adjectives we use to describe time, but in the totality or unity which these variations are supposed to derive from. Or perhaps time is simply this tension between unity and multiplicity. After all, this is a tension that runs through all the chapters of this book. The tension between multiple local times and the need for a singularized, universal time as related in Chapter 2. The tension between the multiplicity of time scales and the need to integrate them as covered in Chapter 3. The tension between the individual rhythms of objects, buildings and sites and the need to create a unified periodization discussed in Chapter 4. The tension between the polychronic nature of the archaeological record and the coherent persistence of things across time as explored in Chapter 5. And finally, the tension between the singular thread of story time and the multiple distortions of narrative time as investigated in Chapter 6.

Notes 1 See, for example, S. Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1983); W. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014); M. Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency and the Archive (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). 2 H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1895] 2017). 3 For example, C. Morgan, ‘Archaeology and the Moving Image’, Public Archaeology 13, no. 4 (2014): 323–344. 4 L. Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2020. 5 See G. Lucas, The Archaeology of Time (London: Routledge, 2005), for a discussion of this. 6 G. Deleuze, Cinema I: The Movement-Image (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013) and G. Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time-Image (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). 7 Indeed, despite very different styles of writing, the work of Ricoeur and Deleuze from the 1980s offer many parallels. Both frame their respective topics – cinema and narrative – within the broader horizon of time, and both articulate time through a fundamental split or separation: between world time and lived time for Ricoeur (after

The archaeological time machine 135

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28

29

Heidegger), between the passing present and the persistence of the past for Deleuze (after Bergson). More parallels could be drawn, but the differences are also great so I will not pursue this further. See H. Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell (London: Macmillan, 1960): 323–324. W. Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); F. Kittler, ‘Real Time Analysis, Time Axis Manipulation’, Cultural Politics 13, no. 1 (2017): 1–18. G. Genette, A Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980). In fact when you pause a streaming image, it looks just like a paused film; a more accurate comparison would involve slowing down a streamed image versus a conventional film. It is only here that you would really perceive the difference. Ernst, Digital Memory. W. Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011). See here the work of Jussi Parikka who argues for extending the idea of media to deep time and geology; J. Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). A. Farge, The Allure of the Archives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 17. See G. Lucas, ‘Destruction and the Rhetoric of Excavation’, Norwegian Archaeological Review 34, no. 1 (2001): 35–46, for a wider discussion of this issue. B. Edwards, In an Instant: Thoughts on an Archaeological Philosophy of Time, paper presented at the British Theoretical Archaeology Conference (TAG), Cardiff, 2017. I am grateful to Ben for sharing a re-worked draft of this paper. D. Bailey, Breaking the Surface: An Art/Archaeology of Prehistoric Architecture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). The importance of subtraction in stratigraphy is perhaps most obvious in reconstruction work where much attention is given to the missing or subtracted pieces; see, for example, E. Demetrescu, ‘Archaeological Stratigraphy as a Formal Language for Virtual Reconstruction: Theory and Practice’, Journal of Archaeological Science 57 (2015): 42–55. See G. Lucas, ‘Solido intra solidum: Archaeological Stratigraphy and the Bifurcation of Time’, Theory, Culture and Society (forthcoming). Even when using tracking function on these devices, the software takes points at regular intervals and then converts them back into a line. See, for example, C. Morgan and H. Wright, ‘Pencils and Pixels: Drawing and Digital Media in Archaeological Field Recording’, Journal of Field Archaeology 43, no. 2 (2018): 136–151; H. Wickstead, ‘Between the Lines: Drawing Archaeology’, in P. GravesBrown, R. Harrison and A. Piccini (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World (Oxford: Oxford University Press). T. Ingold, ‘Drawing the Line’, in T. Ingold, Making (London: Routledge, 2013); H. Wickstead, ‘Drawing Archaeology’, in L. Duff and P. Sawdon (eds), Drawing: The Purpose (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2008), pp. 13–27. See L. McFadyen, ‘Practice Drawing Writing Object’, in T. Ingold (ed.), Redrawing Anthropology: Materials, Movements, Lines (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 33–44, for a related discussion on the temporality of drawing in the field. W. Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane (Michigan: Cranbrook Press, [1926] 1947); McFadyen, ‘Practice Drawing Writing Object’. Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, pp. 43–45. Lucas, ‘Solido intra solidum’. A. Ammerman and S. Cavalli-Sforza, ‘Measuring the Rate of Spread of Early Farming in Europe’, Man, New Series, 6, no. 4 (1971): 674–688; D. Anderson and J. Gillam, ‘Paleoindian Colonization of the Americas: Implications from an Examination of Physiography, Demography, and Artifact Distribution’, American Antiquity 65, no. 1 (2000): 43–66. For example, C. Metz, ‘Photography and Fetish’, October 34 (1985): 81–90; A. Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, Film Quarterly 13, no. 4 (1960): 4–9.

136 The archaeological time machine

30 D. Hicks, ‘The Transformation of Visual Archaeology (Part One)’, in L. McFadyen and D. Hicks (eds), Archaeology and Photography: Time, Objectivity and Archive (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), pp. 21–54; Y. Hamilakis, A. Anagnostopoulos and F. Infantis, ‘Postcards from the Edge of Time: Archaeology, Photography, Archaeological Ethnography (A Photo Essay)’, Public Archaeology 8, nos. 2–3 (2009): 283–309; M. Shanks, ‘Photography and Archaeology’, in B. Molyneux (ed.), The Cultural Life of Images: Visual Representation in Archaeology (London: Routledge, 1997); M. Shanks and C. Svabo, ‘Archaeology and Photography: A Pragmatology’, in A. González-Ruibal (ed.), Reclaiming Archaeology: Beyond the Tropes of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2013). 31 McFadyen and Hicks, Archaeology and Photography. 32 J. Baird, ‘Exposing Archaeology: Time in Archaeological Photographs’, in McFadyen and Hicks, Archaeology and Photography. 33 A. Thomas, ‘Duration and Representation in Archaeology and Photography’, in McFadyen and Hicks, Archaeology and Photography; Baird, ‘Exposing Archaeology’, in McFadyen and Hicks, p. 79; E. Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums (Oxford: Berg, 2001); R. Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981). 34 M. Knight and L. McFadyen, ‘“At any given moment”: Duration in Archaeology and Photography’, in McFadyen and Hicks, Archaeology and Photography. 35 Deleuze, Cinema I. 36 See D. Green and J. Lowry (eds), Stillness and Time: Photography and the Moving Image (Brighton: Photoworks/Photoforum, 2006). 37 C. Simonetti, Sentient Conceptualizations: Feeling for Time in the Sciences of the Past (London: Routledge, 2017). 38 Z. Crossland, Ancestral Encounters in Highland Madagascar: Material Signs and Traces of the Dead (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014); also see G. Radden, ‘Spatial Time in the West and East’, in M. Brdar, M. Omazic´ and V. Pavicˇ icˇ Takacˇ (eds), Space and Time in Language (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011), for a general discussion of how time and space are articulated in different languages.

References Ammerman, A. and L. Cavalli-Sforza. ‘Measuring the Rate of Spread of Early Farming in Europe’. Man (N.S.) 6, no. 4 (1971): 674–688. Anderson, D. and J. Gillam. ‘Paleoindian Colonization of the Americas: Implications from an Examination of Physiography, Demography, and Artifact Distribution’. American Antiquity 65, no. 1 (2000): 43–66. Bailey, D. Breaking the Surface: An Art/Archaeology of Prehistoric Architecture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Baird, J. ‘Exposing Archaeology: Time in Archaeological Photographs’. In L. McFadyen and D. Hicks (eds), Archaeology and Photography: Time, Objectivity and Archive. London: Bloomsbury, 2020, pp. 73–95. Barthes, R. Camera Lucida. New York: Hill & Wang, 1981. Bazin, A. ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’. Film Quarterly 13, no. 4(1960): 4–9. Bergson, H. Creative Evolution. Translated by A. Mitchell. London: Macmillan, 1960. Chun, W. Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2011. Crossland, Z. Ancestral Encounters in Highland Madagascar: Material Signs and Traces of the Dead. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Deleuze, G. Cinema I: The Time-Image. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Deleuze, G. Cinema II: The Movement-Image. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Demetrescu, E. ‘Archaeological Stratigraphy as a Formal Language for Virtual Reconstruction: Theory and Practice’. Journal of Archaeological Science 57 (2015): 42–55.

The archaeological time machine 137

Doane, M. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency and the Archive. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Edwards, B. In an Instant: Thoughts on an Archaeological Philosophy of Time. Paper presented at the British Theoretical Archaeology Conference (TAG), Cardiff, 2017. Edwards, E. Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums. Oxford: Berg, 2001. Ernst, W. Digital Memory and the Archive. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Farge, A. The Allure of the Archives. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Genette, G. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980. Green, D. and J. Lowry (eds). Stillness and Time: Photography and the Moving Image. Brighton: Photoworks/Photoforum, 2006. Hamilakis, Y., A. Anagnostopoulos and F. Ifantidis. ‘Postcards from the Edge of Time: Archaeology, Photography, Archaeological Ethnography (a Photo Essay)’. Public Archaeology 8, nos. 2–3 (2009): 283–309. Hicks, D. ‘The Transformation of Visual Archaeology (Part One)’. In L. McFadyen and D. Hicks (eds), Archaeology and Photography: Time, Objectivity and Archive. London: Bloomsbury, 2020, pp. 21–54. Ingold, T. ‘Drawing the Line’. In T. Ingold, Making. London: Routledge, 2013, pp. 125–141. Kandinsky, W. Point and Line to Plane. Michigan: Cranbrook Press, [1926] 1947. Kern, S. The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983. Kittler, F. ‘Real Time Analysis, Time Axis Manipulation’. Cultural Politics 13, no. 1 (2017): 1–18. Knight, M. and L. McFadyen. ‘“At any given moment”. Duration in Archaeology and Photography’. In L. McFadyen and D. Hicks (eds), Archaeology and Photography: Time, Objectivity and Archive. London: Bloomsbury, 2020, pp. 55–72. Lucas, G. ‘Destruction and the Rhetoric of Excavation’. Norwegian Archaeological Review 34, no. 1 (2001): 35–46. Lucas, G. The Archaeology of Time. London: Routledge, 2005. Lucas, G. ‘Solido intra solidum. Archaeological Stratigraphy and the Bifurcation of Time’. Theory, Culture and Society (forthcoming). Mannoni, L. The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2020. McFadyen, L. ‘Practice Drawing Writing Object’. In T. Ingold (ed.), Redrawing Anthropology: Materials, Movements, Lines. London: Routledge, 2016, pp. 33–44. McFadyen, L. and D. Hicks (eds), Archaeology and Photography: Time, Objectivity and Archive. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Metz, C. ‘Photography and Fetish’. October 34 (1985): 81–90. Morgan, C. ‘Archaeology and the Moving Image’. Public Archaeology 13, no. 4 (2014): 323–344. Morgan, C. and H. Wright. ‘Pencils and Pixels: Drawing and Digital Media in Archaeological Field Recording’. Journal of Field Archaeology 43, no. 2 (2018): 136–151. Parikka, J. A Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Radden, G. ‘Spatial Time in the West and East’. In M. Brdar, M. Omazic´, V. Pavicˇ icˇ Takacˇ , (eds), Space and Time in Language. Bern: Peter Lang, 2011. Schivelbusch, W. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. Shanks, M. ‘Photography and Archaeology’. In B. Molyneaux (ed.), The Cultural Life of Images: Visual Representation in Archaeology. London: Routledge, 1997, pp. 73–107. Shanks, M. and C. Svabo. ‘Archaeology and Photography: A Pragmatology’. In A. GonzálezRuibal (ed.), Reclaiming Archaeology: Beyond the Tropes of Modernity. London: Routledge, 2013, pp. 89–102.

138 The archaeological time machine

Simonetti, C. Sentient Conceptualizations: Feeling for Time in the Sciences of the Past. London: Routledge, 2017. Thomas, A. ‘Duration and Representation in Archaeology and Photography’. In L. McFadyen and D. Hicks (eds), Archaeology and Photography: Time, Objectivity and Archive. London: Bloomsbury, 2020, pp. 117–137. Wells, H.G. The Time Machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press [1895] 2017. Wickstead, H. ‘Drawing Archaeology’. In L. Duff and P. Sawdon (eds), Drawing: The Purpose. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2008, pp. 13–27. Wickstead, H. ‘Between the Lines: Drawing Archaeology’. In P. Graves-Brown, R. Harrison and A. Piccini (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 549–564.

EPILOGUE Making history

In the beginning … As so often happens, I find myself ending a book where one should just be starting. The last chapter was an attempt to explore the way time is materialized, the way the different archaeological media articulate and constitute their own special forms of time. It was a celebration of the multiplicity of time, as indeed the whole book has been, but also especially, a recognition that such multiplicity is based on the heterogeneous materialities that make up the world. Such an acknowledgement means we avoid the binaries that I discussed in the first chapter, especially between objective and subjective time, physical and felt time. Time is, what time does – that is to say, what things do. In Chapter 2, I explored the idea of an absolute chronology in archaeology as an achievement, a construction, something that involves a great deal of work to synchronize different temporalities expressed in different things: radioactive decay, tree ring growth, the movement of celestial bodies. From this work, we have created a marvellous tool, a measuring stick for time. But it is a construction, a composite of multiple times stitched together to create a co-ordinated whole we call chronology. Mistaking this composition for something that pre-exists it, some kind of ‘natural time’ results in all kinds of problems, especially manifest in the discussion about time scales in archaeology explored Chapter 3. In arguing for a multi-scalar approach to the past, we somehow seem to assume that time itself is composed of multiple scales, nested within each other like Russian dolls. But this is to conflate metrology with change, the measurement of change for that which changes. I argued, in my re-reading of Braudel, that what really matters here is not a multi-scalar archaeology, but an archaeology attuned to the qualities of change which includes aspects such as tempo, but also duration, which are in turn dependent on different kinds of change such as severance, recurrence or persistence. And ultimately that change itself, needs to be always situated with continuity, not against it. Thus in Chapter 4, I examined the

140 Epilogue

problems which arise when we separate change and continuity in relation to periodization, and that to keep them together means recognizing the importance of re-thinking synchronization and contemporaneity. What defines a period as a coherent unit of time, or the transition between periods as significant change, is a synchronization of key elements regarded as broadly contemporaneous. But what constitutes contemporaneity? So in Chapter 5, I investigated the ways in which contemporaneity has and might be re-thought, specifically as the persistence of the past into the present (and future) and what implications this has for how we do archaeology. Yet not wanting to abandon the conventional goals of archaeology as some form of re-presencing the past, in Chapter 6 I argued for the idea of an archaeological present, one that through the reconfiguration of the archaeological record in a different medium – narrative – constitutes another time, a ‘past present’, different from the persistence of the past in the present we see around us. The narrative construction of time led, in the final chapter, to a more wide-ranging consideration of the ways in which archaeology creates time through its different materialities, from the Harris matrix to maps. The journey of this book has thus traversed a series of problems and offered a series of arguments which both began and ended with the same point. Time is what time does, or more appropriately, what things do. It is a verb, it is material, it is multiple. And yet only at the end does this message become most concrete but also tantalizingly vague. What does this really mean for archaeology? For our understanding of the past, of history?

Making history Another way of phrasing this, is to ask ourselves how things make history. Throughout this book I have talked about the persistence of pasts, the multiple rhythms of objects and so on, but how does this all add up? Is history a mere jostling of events which we retrospectively place some order or coherence upon, or does it have an independent reality? I realize these sound like somewhat outdated, almost quaint thoughts, ones that we might have rehearsed in the 1970s and 1980s around the postmodern construction of pasts, but I feel there is a deeper point here we cannot ignore. If I think of a shoal of fish, like cod, can we say it has a history – as a species? Genetic research suggests modern Atlantic cod emerged as a species c. 3.8 million years ago;1 if you were to examine the behaviour and ecology of a shoal say a million years ago or even a thousand years ago, how different would it be to a contemporary shoal? I am sure ecologies, behaviours and even morphologies have subtly changed, but in what way do these changes represent a history as opposed to an almost random fluctuation? After all, zooarchaeology largely operates on the presumption of continuity of such traits. But take a human population and run the same question and you will immediately see the difference. And the difference clearly does not lie in changes to biology – we are essentially the same species (though again, some subtle changes have occurred) – but to behaviour and ecology linked largely to the changing nature of humanly created material worlds.

Epilogue 141

The point of this comparison is not to underline a difference between biology and culture, or even to defend human exceptionalism; taking cod as an example was too easy because while generally fish may not make or use tools, plenty of other species do. But even those that do materially transform their environment, still do not seem to create a history in the same way humans do. Consider the fascinating, but perhaps little-known study of trace fossils, or palaeoichnology. This is the study of past species through their traces rather than directly through their (fossilized) bones; footprints for example, but also animal structures such as beehives or termite nests, whose presence in the palaeontological record often precedes direct evidence of a species by a long time – in these two cases, by 25 million years and 60 million years respectively.2 These only reinforce my point; we can recognize a beehive or termite nest millions of years old because modern ones look more or less the same. Can we say the same about human buildings? Again, it may be that subtle changes have taken place and the point is not so much to make a rigid distinction between human and other species ‘artefacts’, but to suggest that maybe there is something about the historicality of any artefacts that change or alter a species existence in time. Humans only differ in the sheer quantity and diversity of these artefacts. But even this is not a fixed or constant of our species. In 2001, the artist Michael Landy famously destroyed all his possessions over the course of two weeks; in total, he owned 7,227 items, from a Saab to a sheepskin coat and all of them went through a crusher or shredder before ending up in landfill.3 Such acts of anti-consumerism are not new and the discourse around the amount of stuff we, especially in Western countries, buy and discard, is a familiar theme in contemporary society. In other cultures, the quantities of personal possessions are much smaller – for example, some households in contemporary Burkina Faso have an average of 100 items per person, while research on Hungarian villagers from the 1950s revealed around 1,000 per person, both of which are much less than the many thousands of objects belonging to someone living say in modern Iceland or England.4 As Peter Hahn has pointed out, the amount of stuff we own does not show any proportional relation to the amount of care or attention we give it. Having a hundred objects, does not make us more attentive to those things than having 1,000. Nevertheless, the disparities in sheer numbers of things does somehow seem to be related to material inequalities in these societies. But how exactly do we understand this relation and is it as simple as more stuff equals more wealth? Furthermore, what impact has the fluctuation in the amount of stuff over human history had on history itself? One imagines palaeolithic hunter-gatherers with very small amounts of possessions and while the Neolithic no doubt saw an explosion of objects, has this been a steady, upward trajectory or a curve with dips and peaks? Obviously this will vary in different parts of the world at different times, but whatever the shape of the curve, to what extent does the sheer weight of things, act to warp time? Michel Serres has suggested that what things do is slow down and moderate change;5 Latour has given us a mythical account of the human–thing relationship

142 Epilogue

over the long term,6 while Hodder has argued that our dealing with things has entrapped us into their care, creating a vicious cycle of working out a release from this entrapment which only exacerbates our dependence even further.7 With Hodder, I have argued that such entrapment also creates greater inequality.8 All of these arguments, and many more, suggest that human history is a product of our things, or of the human–thing relation. And many accounts like Hodder’s further suggest that this history takes on a shape or form that gives it a wider unity or coherence. This is no random drift, no chaotic fluctuation as one might see for other species: there is a trajectory, a direction, a structure. I am still not sure how I feel about this. It may be there is no connection; that history has no shape, no form except in our imaginative reconstructions. In reality, human history is just a series of random fluctuations with occasional sparks. We are no different to cod. And yet I cannot help feeling that Serres has a point. Things slow down time; they create inertia, they act like gravity, to warp and bend time, attracting other things to them, congealing time which allows the accumulation of the past to weigh on the present in a way few other species experience. In Chapter 1, I talked about the dilemma facing historical or archaeological time, somehow caught in the gap between physical and felt time, needing to be part of both but never quite sure of its place. Now this gap and the very dichotomy has dissolved in the recognition that things make time, that time is as multiple as the things in this world, perhaps we can appreciate finally what archaeological or historical time is. It is the time that artefacts make. Many of the things I have been discussing in this book point in this direction. Perhaps this is all we need to acknowledge; that the shape of history or our histories will only emerge by working out from the things themselves, by understanding the intersection of the temporalities they create. Whatever the answer though, this is surely the subject of another or many other books.

Notes 1 E. Árnarson and K. Haldórsdóttir, ‘Codweb: Whole genome sequencing uncovers extensive reticulations fueling adaptation among Atlantic, Arctic, and Pacific gadids’, Science Advances 5, no. 3 (2019): eaat8788. 2 J. Genise et al., ‘Advanced Early Jurassic Termite (Insecta: Isoptera) Nests: Evidence from the Clarens Formation in the Tuli Basin, Southern Africa’, Palaios 20, no. 3 (2005): 303–308. 3 The project was called Break Down; see https://www.artangel.org.uk/project/break-down/ 4 H. Hahn, ‘How Close Are Things to Us? On the Relation Between the Incidental and the Valuable’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 30, no. 1 (2020): 168–172. 5 M. Serres, Genesis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 6 B. Latour, ‘Pragmatogonies. A Mythical Account of How Humans and Non-humans Swap Properties’, American Behavioural Scientist 37, no 6 (1994): 791–808. 7 I. Hodder, Where Are We Heading? The Evolution of Humans and Things (New Haven: Yale University Press 2018). 8 I. Hodder and G. Lucas, ‘The Symmetries and Asymmetries of Human-Thing Relations: A Dialogue’, Archaeological Dialogues 24, no. 2 (2017): 119–137.

Epilogue 143

References Árnarson, E. and K. Haldórsdóttir. ‘Codweb: Whole-genome sequencing uncovers extensive reticulations fueling adaptation among Atlantic, Arctic, and Pacific gadids’. Science Advances 5no. 3 (2019): eaat8788. Genise, J., E. Bellosi, R. Melchor and M. Cosarinksy. ‘Advanced Early Jurassic Termite (Insecta: Isoptera) Nests: Evidence from the Clarens Formation in the Tuli Basin, Southern Africa’, Palaios 20, no. 3 (2005): 303–308. Hahn, H. ‘How Close Are Things To Us? On the Relation Between the Incidental and the Valuable’. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 30, no. 1 (2005): 168–172. Hodder, I. Where Are We Heading? The Evolution of Humans and Things. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. Hodder, I. and G. Lucas. ‘The Symmetries and Asymmetries of Human-Thing Relations: A Dialogue’. Archaeological Dialogues 24, no. 2 (2017): 119–137. Latour, B. ‘Pragmatogonies. A Mythical Account of How Humans and Non-humans Swap Properties’, American Behavioural Scientist 37, no. 6 (1994): 791–808. Serres, M. Genesis. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

INDEX

Anno domini: and concepts of time 35–37; on objects 34; system 33–34, 39–40 Anthropocene 19, 76, 99 Archaeogeography 95–96 archaeological present 108, 111, 140 archaeological time machines 126 Assemblage theory 6–7 Bachelard, G. 22 Bayesian 4, 30, 41–42, 45, 49, 65, 85, 92 Bayliss, A. 4, 42, 52 Bergson, H. 2, 7, 14–17, 20, 22–23, 41, 48, 59, 84, 93, 120, 122, 129–131 big history 4, 67 Boxgrove problem 47–49, 54, 89–90 Braudel, F. 4, 45–46, 52–58, 65, 79, 139 calendars 13, 15, 20, 29–34, 37, 39–40, 48, 120; regnal 33–34, 37, 39; see also anno domini change: in the archaeological record 58, 60; and continuity 59, 61n29, 64, 67–72, 79–80; and movement 59; and relative chronology 65–66; types of 50–51, 53–58, 64–65; see also periodization chronology: absolute 28–30, 32, 39, 40–41, 47, 53, 65–67, 69–70, 73, 84–85, 139; relative 29, 65–67, 71, 77–78 chronometric hygiene 31–32 chronos see Time chronotope 112, 114–115 cinematic time see Time

clocks 15–16, 21, 24–25, 33–34, 37–40, 48, 68–69, 84, 120; synchronization of 15, 32 complexity theory 1, 6–7, 57 contemporaneity 4–5, 93–94, 96; and anachronism 111; as periodization 77, 79; versus simultaneity 16–17, 84–86, 89; types of 86–87 contemporary past 4–5, 93 coordinated universal time 15, 32, 38–40 co-presence 19 Crellin, R. 6, 46, 48, 51, 58, 64, 76 dating 25, 28–32; and radiocarbon 4, 31, 41–42; see also Bayesian; calendars; chronology Dawdy, S. 5 deep future 105–106 deep history 4, 30, 45, 56, 67, 106 deep time 17–19, 29–30, 105–106 duration: etymology of 129; versus instants 20, 22–23, 127, 133; and movement/ stillness 132; as real and illusory 14–16; and scale 48–54, 58, 60; and sequence 29, 31, 41–42, 67–68, 77; and tempo 139 Einstein. A. 14–16, 20–21, 120 entropy 21, 24, 92 ethnographic present 109–112 Fabian, J. 19, 109–112 Focillon, H. 69–70, 74, 80 future-assembling practice 5, 97

Index 145

Gamble, C. 4, 45–46 Genette, G. 112–116, 122–123 Halbwachs, M. 7, 93, 104, 106 Hartog, F. 5, 106–108 Heidegger, M. 2, 41, 48, 117–118n36 historical distance 51, 78 Hodder, I. 1, 4, 46, 54, 56, 58, 112, 142 Ingold, T. 6, 130 kairos 24–25, 36, 57, 114–115 Koselleck, R. 105–106, 108 Kubler, G. 68–71, 73, 87 longue durée 45–46, 52; see also Braudel memory: dead and living 104, 106; digital 124–125; versus history 4, 93; and materiality 2, 7, 19; and perception 59–60; in psychology 22–23; versus recollection 103–105, 108; social/ collective 7, 33, 93 movement see Time narrative time: see time Olivier, L. 1–2, 4–5, 7, 69–70, 87–90, 93–95, 103, 109 palimpsest 7, 90–93, 103, 109, 125 Pauketat, T. 4, 46 periodization: as arbitrary 72, 76; as continuity 76–79; as marking change 76, 79; multiple 72–73; politics of 74–76; and relative chronology 66; and synchronism 74, 79; two views of 79; universal 67–70; also see contemporaneity persistence of the past 103–105, 108, 110, 126–127, 140 Poincaré, H. 15, 120 polychronic 87, 96, 130, 134 Pompeii premise 47–48, 90, 94, 109, 125 presentism 5, 106, 108–109 radiocarbon see dating relativity theory 14–16, 20–23, 41, 84; see also Einstein

resolution 41–42, 45, 47–49, 58, 67, 73, 85, 89, 93; optical and digital 49–51, 89–92; see also dating; palimpsest Ricoeur, P. 2, 13, 115–116, 121 Robb, J. 4, 46 scale: and Braudel 45–46, 52–56, 58; as extent and speed 51–52; large 4, 18–20; as measure and duration 49–50, 85; multiple/multi-scalar 45–46, 48, 139; problems with 46–52; see also Boxgrove problem; deep history; deep time; resolution Serres, M. 57, 93–94, 130, 141–142 Simonetti, C. 5–6, 49, 89, 133 simultaneity 14–17, 21, 32, 84–86, 123; see also contemporaneity survivals 94, 110–111 synchronism see clocks; periodization time perspectivism 1–2, 4, 7, 49, 91–93 time: abstract and substantial 34; averaging 49, 92; and biography 7; as chronos and kairos 24–25, 36, 115; and cinema 120–125; Einsteinian 20–22; as a field 14, 20, 24; as flux 16, 20, 109, 129; linear and cyclical 34, 57; and metrology 15, 18, 20, 48–50, 58; and modernity 37, 75–76, 94, 97, 106, 111, 120; and movement 5–6, 16, 59–60, 118, 120–122, 130–133; and narrative 13, 112–115, 134; Newtonian 20–21, 35, 84, 115; and physics 20–21; physical and felt 13–14, 17–20, 23–25, 115, 139, 142; psychology of 22–23; singularization of 15, 20–21, 32–33, 37, 39–41, 48, 53, 66–67, 72–73, 84, 120, 126, 134; spatialized 16, 48, 117n36 time-axis manipulation 123–125, 28 timeliness: see kairos untimeliness 110–111 UTC see Coordinated Universal Time White, H. 19, 34, 112 Whittle, A. 4, 42, 45–46, 52, 55 Witmore, C. 5, 94–95, 99, 114, 130 zombie archaeology 96–99