Engaging with the Past and Present: The Relationship between Past and Present across the Disciplines [1 ed.] 0367460327, 9780367460327

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ENGAGING WITH THE PAST AND PRESENT

This collection brings together fifteen essays from practitioners of a variety of disciplines that concern themselves with the past, not only historians but also scholars from other branches of the humanities and social sciences (including theology, art history, public history, and archival science) and natural sciences (including geology, paleontology, astronomy, and paleoanthropology). What is the relationship between the past and the present? This essential and seemingly straightforward question, of central importance to many fields of study, in fact yields a variety of answers, with significant repercussions for methodology, epistemology, and pedagogy. This volume’s contributors describe how they relate phenomena in the past and their observations of the present, revealing intellectual resonances and opportunities for dialogue across subjects that are too often walled off from one another. By engaging scholars in a conversation about a first principle of their work, this book offers a genuinely interdisciplinary consideration of a timeless question, with implications for knowledge about both past and present. Engaging with the Past and Present is full of insights and ideas for anyone seeking to understand the past or employ it as evidence for understanding present realities. Paul M. Dover is Professor of History at Kennesaw State University. He has published widely in early modern political and cultural history and in the history of information. His most recent book is The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe (2021).

ENGAGING WITH . . .

‘Engaging with .  .  .’ is a series of big, multi-contributed volumes with between 25 and 40 contributors and up to 350,000 words in length. These volumes are typically broken into three parts, Concepts, Key Terms/Methodologies and Case Studies, and they are designed to provide a reference work for researchers and students for exciting new topics. Books in this series cover the key concepts of the field or approach being studied, and contain analysis of the significant terms being used, as well as providing case studies of research currently being done. They are the perfect opportunity to bring together the work of established academics, early career academics and postgraduate students. In this series: ENGAGING TRANSCULTURALITY Concepts, Key Terms, Case Studies Edited by Laila Abu-Er-Rub, Christiane Brosius, Sebastian Meurer, Diamantis Panagiotopoulos, and Susan Richter ENGAGING WITH THE PAST AND PRESENT The Relationship between Past and Present across the Disciplines Edited by Paul M. Dover

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Engaging-with/bookseries/EW

ENGAGING WITH THE PAST AND PRESENT The Relationship between Past and Present across the Disciplines

Edited by Paul M. Dover

Designed cover image: Clio, Muse of History, 1800. Charles Meynier (French, 1768–1832) © Artokoloro/Alamy Stock Photo First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Paul M. Dover; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Paul M. Dover to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted 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 ISBN: 978-0-367-46032-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-44629-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-02657-0 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003026570 Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

About the Contributors

vii

1 Engaging With the Past and Present: An Introduction Paul M. Dover PART ONE

1

Past, Present, and History

17

2 Reflections on Marc Bloch’s Maxim Felipe Brandi

19

3 When Does the Present Become the Past? Jeremi Suri

32

4 Does the Past Still Matter? Zoltán Boldizsár Simon

43

5 The Big History of Past, Present, and Future Craig Benjamin

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PART TWO

Cultures Past and Present

67

6 Historical Faith and Faithful History Nicolas Steeves, SJ

69

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Contents

7 Confucian Culture and the Imminence of the Past Yves Vendé

84

8 Past, Present, and Heritage William F. Stoutamire

102

9 The Continuum Between Past and Present: An Art Historian’s View Gregory T. Clark

117

10 Digging Into the Human Past: Archaeology, Time, and the Object Martin Porr

143

11 Archives: Preserving the Documentary Past Randolph C. Head

158

PART THREE

The Past, Present, and Natural History

171

12 Imagining Earth Time Hilairy Hartnett

173

13 The Past and Present in Environmental Science Ellen Wohl

180

14 The Past and Present of the Cosmos David Garofalo

194

15 Disengaging With the Past: Extinction and Resets of the Biosphere Roy E. Plotnick

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16 The Human Deep Past (Paleoanthropology) Deborah I. Olszewski

217

Index229

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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Craig Benjamin is Professor of History Emeritus at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. His books include Big History: Between Nothing and Everything (2014); Volume 4 of the Cambridge History of the World (2015); Empires of Ancient Eurasia: The First Silk Roads Era 100 BCE – 250 CE (2018); The Routledge Companion to Big History (2019); and Traditions and Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past (2020). Craig has recorded programs and courses for the History Channel and Great Courses. He is a frequent lecturer on cruise ships all over the world, including for Scientific American and New York Times Journeys; and also on land and air tours for the Smithsonian Institute. Felipe Brandi holds a doctorate in history and civilization at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), in Paris, and was an associate researcher at the Centre des Recherches Historiques at the EHESS between 2017 and 2020. He is currently a researcher at the Instituto de Historia Contemporânea of the Nova FCSH in Lisbon. His work focuses on the intellectual history of contemporary France and, more specifically, on the history and social sciences of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Brandi is also the scientific editor of the edition of Georges Duby’s Œuvres, published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 2019. Gregory T. Clark is a professor emeritus of Art History at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. His scholarly specialty is French and southern Netherlandish manuscript illumination of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. His most recent book is Art in a Time of War: The Master of Morgan 453 and Manuscript Illumination in Paris during the English Occupation (1419–1435) (2016). Paul M. Dover is Professor of History at Kennesaw State University, outside Atlanta, Georgia. He has published numerous essays and articles on the political and cultural history of late medieval and early modern Europe, and on the history of information. He is the author of The Changing Face of the Past (2014) and The Information Revolution in Early Modern Europe (2021), and the editor of Secretaries and Statecraft in the Early Modern World (2016). He is currently writing Information: A Human History with Johns Hopkins University Press. David Garofalo, originally from Italy, studied at the University of Bologna before obtaining his doctorate in physics at the University of Maryland at College Park. He is currently vii

About the Contributors

Associate Professor of Physics at Kennesaw State University, where his research focuses on the astrophysics of black holes. Hilairy Hartnett is a professor of biogeochemistry and astrobiology at Arizona State University and her research spans from the role of oxygen in Earth history to the habitability of exoplanets. She also explores the creative synergies between art and science. Randolph C. Head is Professor of the Graduate Division at the University of California, Riverside, where he joined the faculty in 1992 after studying anthropology at Harvard University and European history at the University of Virginia. His research has concentrated on political and confessional culture in Switzerland in the early modern period, and on the history of archives and information across early modern Europe. In addition to his monographs Early Modern Democracy in the Grisons (1995) and Making Archives in Early Modern Europe (2019), he has authored several other books and edited collections; his recent articles on the history of archives discuss the documentary practices of King Manuel of Portugal, the way the archiving of letters has shaped the historiography of the Zurich Reformation, and the emergence of a distributed virtual archive of the Swiss Confederation between 1550 and 1850. Deborah I. Olszewski is an adjunct professor in the Department of Anthropology and a consulting scholar in the Penn Museum at the University of Pennsylvania. She specializes in paleoanthropological research, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, where she has directed several field projects. Her current field project and research focuses on the use of fire by Neandertals in France. Roy E. Plotnick is a paleontologist and professor emeritus in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is a fellow of the Geological Society of America and of the Paleontological Society and the author of Explorers of Deep Time: Paleontologists and the History of Life (2022). Martin Porr is currently an associate professor of archaeology and a member of the Centre for Rock Art Research + Management at the University of Western Australia. He has published widely on Paleolithic art and archaeology as well as general theoretical aspects of archaeological and rock art research. He has conducted fieldwork in Germany, Thailand, Australia, India, and the Philippines. He is currently engaged in active field research in the Kimberley, Western Australia. His research has so far focused on aspects related to decolonizing approaches in archaeological research, Paleolithic archaeology, the Paleolithic art of Europe, and Australian rock art, and he has co-edited several volumes on these themes, including Interrogating Human Origins: Decolonisation and the Deep Human Past (2020) and Ontologies of Rock Art: Images, Relational Approaches, and Indigenous Knowledges (2021). Zoltán Boldizsár Simon is Historian/Theorist of History at Bielefeld University. He has been an assistant professor at Leiden University and visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. He has written extensively on the theory and philosophy of history and on the challenges posed by technology and the Anthropocene to modern historical thinking. His latest books are History in Times of Unprecedented Change: A Theory for the 21st Century (2019), The Epochal Event: Transformations in the Entangled Human, Technological, and Natural Worlds (2020), and Historical Understanding: Past, Present, and Future (2022), co-edited with Lars Deile. Most recently Zoltán has co-authored a Cambridge Elements volume, The Fabric of Historical Time (2023), and he co-conducts the Historical Futures project with Marek Tamm in collaboration with the journal History and Theory. viii

About the Contributors

Nicolas Steeves, SJ is a Roman Catholic priest who grew up in the United States and France. He is Professor of Fundamental Theology and Moderator of the First Cycle of Theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, Italy. The core of his theological research is the relation between faith and imagination, both systematically and in specialized studies, from the study of Christological metaphors in patristic, medieval, and contemporary theology to contemporary preaching in practice and theory. William F. Stoutamire is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Nebraska at Kearney (UNK), where he serves as Coordinator of the public history minor and Director of the online MA in Public History. He holds a PhD in History (Public History) from Arizona State University. Stoutamire’s current research focuses on the Antiquities Act in the early American Southwest and the development of a regional Southwestern identity through archeology, museums, and heritage tourism. He previously worked on contract for the National Park Service and served as Director of the G.W. Frank Museum of History and Culture at UNK. Jeremi Suri holds the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a professor in the Department of History and the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. He is the author and editor of eleven books on contemporary history and policy, most recently Civil War by Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy. Professor Suri also writes frequently for major media sites and he cohosts a weekly podcast, This Is Democracy. Yves Vendé received his first training in philosophy in France (Centre Sèvres) and Spain (Comillas). After learning Mandarin Chinese in Beijing, he taught for two years (2012– 2014) at Sun Yat-sen University (中山大學，廣州) before joining the doctoral program (2014–2018) under the direction of Chen Shaoming (陳少明). His dissertation explores Zhu Xi’s method of reading the Confucian Classics through the lens of Western philosophical hermeneutics. After a postdoc at Loyola Marymount University, he is now teaching at the Université Catholique de Lille and the Centre Sèvres in Paris. Ellen Wohl is a geologist who focuses on physical process and form in rivers. She received her bachelor’s degree in geology from Arizona State University and her doctorate in geosciences from University of Arizona. She is a professor at Colorado State University. Much of her research involves the intersection of river morphology and biotic and human communities.

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1 ENGAGING WITH THE PAST AND PRESENT An Introduction Paul M. Dover What is the relationship between the past and present? The former precedes the latter, one might reasonably comfortably declare, but beyond this simple distinction the association between the two defeats easy characterization and demarcation. Part of the difficulty resides in the truism that the past takes many forms and is deployed for multifarious purposes. Is the past prologue, as Antonio suggests in The Tempest? Is it prophecy, testifying to present glories, as in Virgil’s Aeneid? Is it a source of heritage and tradition, confirming the pieties of the present? Is it a receptacle of evidence and parallels for understanding current events and predicaments? Is it a vessel of moral, cultural, and political exemplars for mobilization in the present? Is it a collection of experiences that construct a personal self or selves? Or is it a foreign country, as per the novelist L.P. Hartley? We hear of individuals and communities being imprisoned or poisoned by their past, but also that the past can be a source of comfort, inspiration, and renewal. Or perhaps the past is not even past, as William Faulkner, Woody Allen, and some corners of quantum physics have suggested. The present, at first blush, seems easier to define, but its identity too is an unstable one. Is the present an instant of infinitesimal duration? Or is it an extended temporal state in which we currently reside? Is there a single present, or multiple ones? We deem the present to have paramount and singular importance, but according to the prevailing laws of physics, the present is as arbitrary a moment in time as “here” is a location in space; there is nothing there that marks the present as particularly special. Unfortunately, we are not like the Tralfamadorians of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five: we cannot effortlessly see across time and take in the past, present, and future all in a single glance. Past and present defy easy definition and correspondence in part because the nature of time has long been unstable. In Book XI of Confessions (ca. 400 CE), Augustine of Hippo offered this meditation on the nature of time: What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not. Yet I say with confidence, that I know that if nothing passed away, there would not be past time; and if nothing were coming, there would not be future time; and if nothing were, there would not be present time. Those two times, therefore, past and future, how are they, when even the past now is not; and the future is not as yet? But should the present be always present, and should it not pass into time past, time DOI: 10.4324/9781003026570-1

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Paul M. Dover

Figure 1.1  Marc Bloch. Source: Matteo Omied/Alamy Stock Photo.

truly it could not be, but eternity. If, then, time present – if it be time – only comes into existence because it passes into time past, how do we say that even this is, whose cause of being is that it shall not be – namely, so that we cannot truly say that time is, unless because it tends not to be? Like Augustine’s time, the past and present, then, while we might be confident we know what they are, prove difficult to define with any great specificity. Two ideas that on the surface appear so familiar in fact defy easy definition on closer inspection. Numerous cultural moments and milieus have understood the past and present to be intermingled or perhaps even inseparable. Indeed the separability and oppositional nature of past and present are distinctive features of the modern West rather than a universal of humanity. In Norse mythology, the cosmos is supported by Ygdrassil, a tree that is continually tended by the Norns, representing Fate (or “Past”), Becoming, and Future. Past and present are thus inseparably linked – the Norse idea is wyrd, the power of the past to define the present. The Ghanaian notion of sankofa, symbolized as a backward-looking bird, reminds one to keep the past in mind when moving forward.1 In Aymara, a language spoken in the Andes of Chile and Bolivia, the word for the past (nayra) also means “eyes of sight” (thus forward-looking), while the word for the future (qhipa) also means “back” or “behind”: all of which is suggestive of a fundamentally different perspective on how Aymara speakers conceive of time.2 There have also been cultures, including premodern Western ones, that perceive the unfolding of time in cyclical terms, rather than irreversibly directional. The idea that the world has a starting point and pursues a linear route to an end is an idea that really only emerged in monotheistic contexts, whereby God’s intervention in human affairs, the religious commemoration of specific moments and personages in time, and the promise and expectation of future events combine to impose directionality on the passage of time. The advent of modern science in the past two centuries or so has done little to clarify these matters. The laws of Newton recognize absolute time as a first principle of reality, but they do 2

Engaging With the Past and Present

not assign a directionality of time. Einstein, of course, demonstrated that the passage of time was not in fact absolute but instead relative, and that simultaneity was dependent on identical frames of reference. In Einstein’s general relativity, time is one of the dimensions that defines the very fabric of the universe, while in quantum mechanics it is a factor in the emergence of a quantum system. And yet some of the equations that scientists have offered to unify the two theories offer no place for time in their calculations. Scientific views of time can be broken into two basic models: eternalism, which posits that the past and future are distinct and equally as real as the present, existing within a four-dimensional block universe; and presentism, whereby only the present is real, and all moments in the past and future are only in fact their own individual presents. The cosmologist and philosopher George Ellis is among those who advocate for a hybrid compromise between these two: a four-dimensional block in which the present is a wave front that gradually transforms an indeterminate future into an unchangeable past.3 The historian John Lewis Gaddis offers a formulation in which the present is a funnel posed between future and past, turning one into the other. Scientific understandings of the universe really offer no consensus about whether the past, present, and future are equally real and whether the passage of time is a genuine physical phenomenon, rather than an illusion our minds have created to perceive and process what our senses provide us. Thus, one of the most universal features of the human experience – that the present is finely poised between a past that is forever gone and a future that is yet to be – is nonsensical. There is as yet no scientific explanation for our subjective perception of the passage of time. Whether there need be, or ever will be, is (fortunately for me, at least) beyond the scope of this book. And luckily, the chapters in this volume accept the past and present as real, and in pursuing understanding of both temporalities, they embrace and employ the mental time travel that, as far as we know, is distinctive of our species. The question “What is the relationship between past and present?” became for me the basis of a successful application to the American National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Enduring Questions Program in 2016. This grant was primarily intended for the development of interdisciplinary undergraduate courses revolving around its central question, but it also allowed me to engage in sustained reflection on some of the chief methodological concerns of my discipline, concerns that had already been foremost in my mind, as I had recently completed an introductory text on Western historiography. The work related to the NEH grant compelled me to examine how my question was addressed in the broader culture, in literature, and in a range of disciplines other than history. It quickly became evident to me that this enduring question offered fertile opportunities for interdisciplinary conversations about methodological and epistemological considerations related to the interface between past and present. This book is designed to be a forum for those conversations, bringing together a range of voices from disciplines that look to the past in their search for understanding. It poses my central question to representatives of a range of disciplines and is predicated upon the belief that discussions about a first principle such as this one can be of great benefit to all involved. It also reflects the editor’s conviction that, given these synergies, we would do well to reduce the conceptual (and often physical) distance between historians of human culture and historians of the natural world. For all the talk of the desirability of interdisciplinary exploration and conversation, in practice interfaces that span the disciplinary divides, especially those between the humanities and the physical sciences, remain exceedingly rare. Ones that revolve around seminal epistemological questions are rarer still; perhaps by beginning with addressing questions that concern our basic principles, we can identify meaningful resonances that will bridge the disciplinary chasms. *** 3

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One thing is abundantly clear: the past ain’t what it used to be. Among other things, there is a lot more of it than there used to be. Roughly coinciding with the advent of the critical modern historical approaches to understanding the past that have emerged in the last 250 years or so is a gradual parallel realization among naturalists of the enormous dimensions of the past itself. In order to explain the phenomena they were observing, they had to discard the familiar temporal models that had been shaped largely by biblical referents. Perhaps the most famous (or notorious) of these was Archbishop James Ussher’s (1581–1656) uncannily precise dating of Creation to six in the evening on Saturday, October  23, 4004 BCE, the fruit of his rigorous analysis of biblical chronologies. For most at the time of Ussher’s calculation, the near 6,000 years of Earth’s existence was an unfathomably long period of time. And, indeed, today six millennia remain an expanse of time that is difficult to encompass in familiar human time frames. But the discovery of deep time, the awareness that the universe and the earth are both incredibly old, has forced a wholesale temporal recalibration. It has been, in the words of the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, a “cosmological revolution of Galilean proportions.”4 Along with heliocentrism, it was one of what Freud called the “two great outrages upon [humankind’s] naïve self-love.” The current formulation of a whole range of disciplines is predicated on the realization that life, the earth, and the heavens have vast histories behind them and there is a yawning expanse of time stretching back beyond the comparatively brief extent of the human past: astronomy, geology, evolutionary biology, paleontology, paleoanthropology, and others among them. Like history, these disciplines seek to explain change that has occurred in the past – change that might be imperceptibly slow to human eyes that over long expanses of time can transform landscapes, produce new species, and reorient the cosmos. They have, in their own ways and examining their own particular subjects, grappled with the implications of the insight of Georges Louis LeClerc, the Comte de Buffon (1707–1788), one of the earliest proponents of a very old earth, that “the great workman of nature is time.”5 The reality of deep time can be intellectually dislocating. No human mind can truly comprehend time frames in the millions, let alone in the billions – our lived experience simply does not provide us with applicable frames of reference. Keith Meldahl applies the unfamiliar mathematics involved to the familiar landscape of the Grand Canyon: if the Colorado River erodes its bed at the rate of 1/100 of an inch (approximately the thickness of a fingernail) each year, then in six million years there has been sufficient erosion to create the current awe-inspiring gorge.6 And six million years is a scarcely a drop in the geological time bucket. Once one begins to talk about the rearranging of the continents, and the assembling and disassembling of supercontinents that has happened multiple times in earth’s history, the expanses of the past become almost impossible for a human mind to grasp. As John Playfair (1748–1819), the mathematics professor who accompanied the naturalist James Hutton (1726–1797) to Siccar Point, off the east coast of Scotland, where Hutton recognized that unconformities he observed in the rock testified to the great age of the earth, remarked about his own cognitive dislocation: “the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.”7 Playfair’s giddiness was induced by his recognition that Hutton’s insights of an unimaginably old earth had to be true. But neither man, nor scarcely any serious thinker for the next century and a half, imagined the true expanse of deep time. As the geologist Marcia Bjornerud has suggested in her fascinating primer on geological thinking, Timefulness, effective understanding of the geologic past requires nothing short of time travel. Bjornerud hails the benefits that accrue from deep time thinking – among them temporal humility, multigenerational thinking, a sense of kinship with other life-forms – all of which are unassailably salutary.8 But as a historian working in far shallower mines of time, I find myself stricken with a distinct temporal vertigo. As the author who coined the phrase “deep time,” John McPhee, put it: “Numbers do not seem to work well with regard to deep time. Any number above a couple of thousand 4

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years – fifty thousand, fifty million – will with nearly equal effect awe the imagination to the point of paralysis.” I share his speculation that “the human mind may not have evolved enough to be able to comprehend deep time. It may only be able to measure it. . . . On the geologic time scale, a human lifetime is reduced to a brevity that is too inhibiting to think about. The mind blocks the imagination.”9 Many disciplines in the physical sciences now plunge into these depths. In many ways, the availability of deep time is greatly freeing, as the new expanse of time opens a huge new range of potential explanatory mechanisms. The Oxford professor of geology William Sollas remarked that “the geologist who before had been bankrupt in time now found himself suddenly transformed into a capitalist, with more millions in the bank that he knew how to dispose of.” As the physicist Lord Kelvin (who greatly underestimated the age of the earth) once noted, without the ability to estimate the great antiquity of the planet, “geology [would be] in the same position as that in which English history would be if it were impossible to ascertain whether the battle of Hastings took place 800 years ago, or 800 thousand years ago, or 800 million years ago.”10 Darwinian evolution and geology shared the same temporal bases – Darwin’s insights into the history of life are unthinkable without his awareness of the earth’s great age. The existence of a deep past was a necessary prerequisite for the operation of natural selection – Darwin fully recognized this without the benefit of DNA’s insight into heredity. In the first edition of his On the Origin of Species, Darwin wrote, He who can read Sir Charles Lyell’s grand work on the Principles of Geology, which the future historian will recognize as having produced a revolution in natural science, yet does not admit how incomprehensively vast may have been past periods of time, may at once close this volume. Thus historicity was transferred from culture to nature; nature itself became a historical entity, and like human history, natural history could not be reduced to straightforward scientific laws. As Martin Rudwick has written in his history of the discovery of deep time, [M]ountains and volcanoes, rocks and fossils, were recognized as being the products of nature’s history; they could not be understood solely in terms of causes governed by the timeless “laws of nature.” And as in human history, the past events that could be inferred from features preserved in the present were marked throughout by contingency: they could not be predicted, even in retrospect (in technical jargon, retrodicted).11 Like history, these disciplines tell stories about their subjects, stories about the past told from the perspective of the present. And like historians, in making sense of what they find in those great expanses of time, the practitioners of these disciplines reckon ceaselessly with the interface of the past and present. The geologists with whom John McPhee conversed described their temporal thinking as existing in two registers – human time frames that measure at most in generations, and geologic time, in which a million years is merely the blink of an eye. Such temporal virtuosity is suggestive of the ways in which the relationship between past and present is perceived differently across historical disciplines, and indicative that there are disciplines beyond the bailiwick of history that inhabit this space between the past and the present. For most geologists, at least, observation of the present is fundamental to composing a reliable picture of the earth of the past. In the approach to the geologic past known as uniformitarianism, “the present is the key to the past.” It was an outlook embraced first by Hutton and subsequently by Lyell (1797–1875), who coined the 5

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phrase and subtitled his Principles of Geology with “An attempt to explain the former changes of the Earth’s surface by reference to causes now in operation.” Even in his day, there was debate over whether this was the best approach to understanding change in earth history. Georges Cuvier (1769–1832), generally credited with establishing the reality of the extinction of species, was a proponent of catastrophism, which posits that geological change was due chiefly to sudden, dramatic episodes such as massive floods and volcanic eruptions. There remains a lively and enduring debate among geologists over the correct balance between these two approaches; it turns out there are reasons to believe that the earth has behaved quite differently in the past, and especially in the first few billion years of earth history. It is evident, for example, that the composition of the earth’s atmosphere has differed considerably over time, that the earth’s days and years used to be substantially shorter, and that the tectonic movement of plates that is so important to current-day earth geology did not occur in the first billion years or so of the earth’s existence. In addition, geologists have found widespread evidence of events that have transformed landscapes in astonishingly short time frames. The Spokane Flood in the northwestern United States, occurring between 20,000 and 18,000 years ago as the glaciers of the last Ice Age retreated, is one such example. When the ice dam that was holding back Lake Missoula (the size of one of the Great Lakes) broke, it unleashed a scarcely imaginable flow of water: as much as ten times the current flow of all the rivers in the world at once. Over the course of several weeks, water surged at speeds of perhaps 80 kilometers an hour at depths of more than 24 meters. In a geological blink of an eye, it transformed the surrounding landscape, including, for a time, creating a waterfall ten times bigger than Niagara Falls, the remnants of which can be seen today at Dry Falls in Washington State (See Figure 1.2).12 There have also clearly been

Figure 1.2  Dry Rivers Falls, Washington. Source: Rod Jones/Alamy Stock Photo.

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episodes in the earth’s history for which there are simply no parallels in the small window of time during which humankind has been observing the earth – the likely multiple episodes of a snowball earth (in which glaciation consumed much of the planet’s surface), the eruption of shield volcanoes on a continental scale, and the Hadean era of the earth’s earliest history. Given the narrow sample size of human observation of geological phenomena, it may prove impossible to declare what is unassailably “normal” in the earth’s geological history. Close observation of the present in the service of understanding the past is also central to the field of paleontology. The discovery in 1954 by petrogeologists in Shark Bay, Australia, of modern stromatolites provided vital insight into fossils of microbial mats of organisms that were among the first living things on earth. These are an example of “living fossils.” Keith Thomson has described the work of paleontologists as “teasing out the mysteries of a single life and a whole world from a few inanimate remains.”13 Often they are required to fill in the gaps by finding appropriate analogs from among living organisms – their depiction of the past is heavily dependent on their observation of the present. Much of the current, prevailing wisdom around the lifeways of dinosaurs has been gleaned from the observation of the form and function of living animals. Speculation about the walking articulation of the giant sauropods has been informed by the observation of modern elephants and (more recently) hippos.14 The walking of the apatosaurus in the BBC production Walking with Dinosaurs, for example, began with footage of an elephant walking and running. Paleontologists’ best guesses at the social behavior of dinosaurs whose fossils have been found in packs, such as hadrosaurs, are in part based on observations of herding megafauna such as wildebeest. The questions that geologists and paleontologists ask are inescapably shaped by the present. For example, the Alvarez meteorite thesis was put forward in the 1980s to explain the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous that killed off the dinosaurs. It was clearly influenced by the concerns of the Cold War, in particular the prospect of a nuclear winter in the wake of an atomic exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. By 1990, when the discovery of a crater beneath the Yucatán Peninsula of the appropriate size and age seemed to confirm such a meteorite strike, the Cold War had largely petered out, and the search for explanations for the periodic mass extinctions has since shifted toward more long-term natural causes, such as climatic and environmental change, again in keeping with the prevailing anxieties of the day, recasting the current episode of anthropogenic climate change in a new, and perhaps even more alarming, light. Similarly, paleoarchaeologists, in seeking to reconstruct the hunter-gatherer lifestyles that characterized most of human history, have interpolated what they have learned from observing the behavior of the few remaining modern hunter-gatherer communities. There are, unsurprisingly, limitations to drawing on such parallels, as no current community remains untouched by interactions with settled peoples. In the case of astronomers, given the great distances that light has had to travel before arriving on earth, their present observations and calculations are necessarily drawn from the past. In some cases, such as in the measurement of cosmic background radiation from the universe’s early days, the evidence upon which they are relying is far older than the earth itself. Astrogeology, which emerged as a field of investigation with the advent of NASA’s program of planetary exploration, necessarily relies on knowledge of the earth’s geological systems and processes to discern those of extraterrestrial bodies, but also examines the present state of the likes of the moon and Mars for insight into the earth’s past and potential future. Evolutionary biology, too, has engaged in a debate over the mechanisms of natural selection that has hinged upon how one regards the relationship between species past and present, and whether Darwin’s maxim that the present is key to understanding the past is always applicable. In addition, in recent years, the assumption that change is gradual and 7

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requires immense expanses of time to unfold has been brought into question, especially by the theory of “punctuated equilibrium,” which appears to show that significant transformations in morphology and the emergence of new species can occur in short bursts. And in a curious reversal, it is telling that DNA sequencing, so important to evolutionary biologists working today, is evidence from the present that provides a insight into the way that the past unfolded, rather than remnants from the past, such as fossils. These debates, across multiple scientific disciplines, are strikingly similar to those engaged in by historians, who frequently have to reckon whether the past is in fact a foreign country, and, in grappling with the bugbear of anachronism, must assess whether past human behavior and development (and perhaps even human nature) can be judged according to present-day patterns and exemplars. The questions that historians ask, and the methodological approaches that we embrace, are invariably shaped by our present contexts and concerns. The increasing prominence of gender history and the concern with issues of race and ethnicity in the human past have everything to do with changing attitudes and related social justice movements over the past several decades, along with the increasing representation in the profession of women and members of historically underrepresented groups. Similarly, the interest among historians in the role of climate in world history, and on the role of information in the human past, are closely connected with current awareness of the effects wrought by anthropogenic climate change and the disruptions of the digital revolution, respectively. Practitioners in other areas of the humanities regularly grapple with similar concerns regarding the interplay between past and present. Literary criticism, for example, in addressing works composed in the past, navigates a varying terrain of familiarity and alterity. While we cannot help but read works in our own present, should we understand them in light of present concerns and sensitivities, or seek, as much as we can, to read them as products of a particular time and place? This is the central question preoccupying historicism, perhaps the most important critical school in literary studies of the past few decades, in which scholars seek to place texts and their authors in the context of their creation. How the interpreter regards the relationship between the past and present has implications for a number of questions central to the meaning of pieces of literature. Does literature “exist” in its present, or in a series of presents in which it is read, subject to the perspective of the reader? Does its meaning change according to the particular present in which an encounter takes place? Can there be such thing as a “timeless” piece of literature? Such concerns are also at play among theologians and scholars of religion. Many of humankind’s great cultural and religious traditions seek to draw essential links between seminal individuals and episodes in the past and present realities and concerns. They locate ideals and inspiration in past figures and events, and regard them as essential for living a correct and meaningful life in the present. The Bible, for example, assigns great weight to specific moments in time, usually junctures where God intervenes in human history. Theologians thus engage in exegesis, interpreting the past as recorded in text and tradition for meaning and application in the present. They must also engage tricky questions concerning God’s place in time. The various schools of interpretation, especially in the Abrahamic faiths, offer different approaches to the past, permitting varying degrees of accommodation with present realities and proclivities, with fundamentalisms admitting no meaningful difference between past and present realities. As a matter of course, the nature of the relationship between the past and present becomes an important, indeed inescapable, theological concern. The past is also mobilized politically and culturally, as a resource to be exploited for cultural construction and political identity in the present. The past is the chief ingredient in “heritage” campaigns that seek to connect the citizenry in the present with selected elements of the 8

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past. These efforts often endeavor to domesticate the past, to “presentize” it, locating in it the foundations for tradition, identity, and meaning. The great modern-day obsession with heritage is an example of how the past is mined for exempla and resonances with current concerns, in so doing “quickening the sense of connection between then and now,” in the words of David Lowenthal.15 Humankind does this in manifold ways: we draw from the reservoir of the past to create and confirm personal, familial, and communal frames of reference. We invite the past into the everyday, with results that can be creative, educative, and enriching, but also tendentious, misleading, and malign. Tailored interpretations of the past can be used to create common identities rooted in the past but also can marginalize, oppress, and exclude. The past is routinely, in pursuit of political ends, selectively edited, whitewashed, or fabricated. The past is contested, as collective and institutional memories, in their concern for present exigencies, clash over its content and significance. Such contests raise interesting questions about the proper role of public history: should its aim be chiefly didactic, to educate about the past; or should it be commemorative, to honor those who lived through the events and whose own recollections should be paramount? Is there a set knowledge about the past that a citizen must understand? Does the past exist for our purposes in the present and, if so, which parts of it? *** I am a historian, and the genesis of this book lies in my consideration of two works by two different historians, written some 60 years apart. The first of these is one of the very best considerations of the discipline of history ever composed: The Historian’s Craft (French: Apologie pour l’histoire) by Marc Bloch (1886–1944). It is a book that I revisit often when thinking about my discipline and one that I share with students who wish to understand the work of the historian. Bloch began the work in the dark days after the German defeat in 1940 of the French army, to which Bloch had been called back at age 53. Bloch had a well-established reputation as a member of the circle of historians around the influential historical journal Annales, but his Jewish heritage made it impossible for him to return to his position at the Sorbonne after the French surrender. Bloch continued to assemble his reflections as an academic exile at universities in the south of France, until the German invasion of the remainder of France in November 1942 drove him from academic life altogether. Bloch joined the Resistance, leading a cell centered on Lyons, before being arrested by the Gestapo in early 1944. In June of that year, he was shot to death in an open field with more than two dozen other members of the Resistance. History thus lay heavy on the France in which Bloch composed his treatise, which remained unfinished at the time of his death (it was posthumously prepared for publication by his friend and fellow Annaliste Lucien Febvre). It is perhaps unsurprising, given the circumstances of its composition, that Bloch included in his work an extended consideration of the relationship between the past and present in the writing of history. He begins with an acknowledgment that the past does not entirely account for and explain the present, but nonetheless insists on its importance, citing the words of the nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet: “he [who] would confine his thought to present time will not understand present reality.” The temptation to separate the past from the present is that much more tempting in a world already characterized in Bloch’s day by relentless technological progress, which can seem so detached from the past that historians are seeking to describe and understand. Bloch suggests that even the recent past must be subject to historical scrutiny, countering those who “wish only to spare Clio’s chastity from the profanation of present controversy.” Unlike “on one hand, a small group of antiquarians taking a ghoulish delight in unwrapping the winding-sheets of the dead gods; on the other, sociologists, economists, and publicists, the only explorers of the living,” historians must be concerned with both past and present. History depends on both of them; indeed they 9

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are linked in an intimate existential embrace. Bloch depicts the discipline of history as inhabiting an intermediate state between past and present, and the relationship between the two was vital to his work. Bloch characterizes this relationship as mutually reinforcing, in dynamics that are akin to arrows of understanding pointing in opposite directions: we understand the present by the past and, equally, understand the past by the present. Concerning the former, Bloch rejects the idea of the present’s self-intelligibility. Such a conceit overstates the degree to which human nature and institutions can change over anything less than long time frames. There is a force of inertia present in a great many human social creations. He describes a society molded entirely by the immediately preceding period as having a “structure so malleable as to be virtually invertebrate” and one in which one could learn only from one’s parents. Bloch points to a knowledge of the history of the Protestant and Catholic reformations as vital to understanding the current religious landscape as an example of understanding the present by the past. Not to acknowledge the rootedness of the present in the unfolding of the past is akin to regarding the course of human evolution as a series of short, violent jerks, no one of which exceeds the space of a few lifetimes . . . what would we think of a geophysicist who, satisfied with having computed their remoteness to a fraction of an inch, would then conclude that the influence of the moon upon the earth is far greater than that of the sun?16 In truth, few would argue with Bloch’s insistence that the present is best understood with reference to the past that shaped it. But he is also equally insistent we understand the past by the present: The solidarity of the ages is so effective that the lines of connections work in both ways. . . . Misunderstanding of the present is an unavoidable consequence of ignorance of the past. But a man may wear himself out just as fruitlessly in seeking to understand the past, if he is totally ignorant of the present. History may be a science of the past, but it is a science whose concerns and perspectives are inevitably shaped by the present. Bloch famously recounts a walk he took in Stockholm with the famous Belgian historian Henri Pirenne (1862–1935). Pirenne declared to him, “[I]f I were an antiquarian, I would have eyes only for old stuff, but I am a historian. Therefore, I love life.”17 For Bloch, Pirenne’s proclamation was a reminder that one had to keep in constant touch with the current day in order to understand the past. Bloch, like Pirenne, had no interest in being a “useful antiquarian” and insisted that a scholar who had “no inclination to observe the men, the things or the events around him” would need to renounce all claims to the title of historian. Sometimes the natural progression of research is from the best known to the less well known, so it can be useful to read history backwards. Bloch warns firmly against anachronism, but also recognizes that the daily experience of the present shapes our questions, concerns, and perspectives, and can provide “new tints” which help us to restore the past. This space between the past and the present, therefore, is where history materializes, as a “science of men in time,” one that “requires us to join the study of the dead and of the living.”18 Further reflections on Bloch’s treatment of the interface between past and present in the work of the historian, and its place amid the development of French historiography, will be offered in the chapter by Felix Brandi which follows this one. 10

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Bloch’s portrayal of the historian’s dance between past and present resonated with my own efforts to achieve historical understanding. Historians since Herodotus have, to greater or lesser degrees, understood that their inquisition of the past is shaped by the present, even if they do not go as far as Benedetto Croce’s declaration that “the past does not live otherwise than in the present, resolved and transformed in the present.” It is clear that the relationship between the past and present is central to the work of the historian, even though historians might disagree as to its precise definition and dimensions. Most historians recognize that it is essential to steer clear of anachronism and its sister sin of presentism, whereby the evident differences between past and present are filed down and past episodes, outlooks, and worldviews assessed (and often judged) according to the standards and assumptions of the present. Historians do maintain honest and often wide differences of opinion on the degree to which present concerns should be allowed to seep into our interpretation of the past. Few historians, however, wish to be labeled as one of Pirenne’s antiquarians, for whom the past becomes a museum curio. They might differ on exactly how and why, but in considering the past that they study, most historians argue for the “relevance” of their studies, for the applicability (in some guise) of their history to the present day. The other inspiration for this volume is the work of a scholar who, like me, is a great admirer of Bloch. Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis used insights from Bloch’s Historian’s Craft as touchstones in his own pithy yet profound ruminations on the methodology of the historian, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past.19 Gaddis’ book is notable for its rigorous defense of the way in which historians seek to ascertain the truth about the past but also for the many parallels that it identifies between historians’ methodology and those of disciplines that we generally categorize as “hard sciences.” History, Gaddis reminds us, is far from the only discipline that is historical, and far from the only one whose search for understanding necessarily inhabits the space between past and present. Numerous fields of scientific study occupy themselves with discovering truths about the past, often with a view to applying their findings to explain present-day phenomena; this is true of astronomy, geology, paleontology, and evolutionary biology, among others. Their pasts extend much farther back than the relatively short span of human history. Astronomers peer into a past that extends back to the beginnings of the universe – for them every piece of evidence that they gather has arrived from the past; in the case of geologists, into chasms of the deep time of the earth’s history; for paleontologists, into a fossil record of life that extends as far back as four billion years, revealing a complex, divergent, and contingent story; for evolutionary biologists, into an extended past that provides the necessary sinks of time in which the mechanisms of natural selection have done their work. In a series of essays, Gaddis outlines the many conceptual and methodological similarities between the work of historians and these disciplines: like these scientists, historians perceive “a web-like view of reality” (a term of the philosopher of history Michael Oakeshott), in which numerous interdependent variables interact; they embrace an ecological outlook, and generalize from particulars, rather than the other way round; and, in the end, they paint the best picture of the past that they can, drawing upon a combination of the best evidence available, parallels from both past and present that fit the available evidence, and their imagination. Of course, history is a big-tent discipline with a great many approaches, some of which might not engage in these praxes, but Gaddis’ observations about history broadly, and the parallels he draws with fields rarely considered as sister disciplines, made me realize that we implicitly tackle many of the same questions, and that the pursuit of truth undertaken by we historians bears much more in common with the so-called hard sciences than with the social sciences with which we are more customarily linked. We who share a common emphasis on historicity acknowledge the essential interface between past and present in our disciplines. One of Gaddis’ central points is 11

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that disciplines in the natural sciences are required to engage in subjective decisions about how phenomena in the past and those in the present resemble or differ from one another. The shared recognition of the inherent complexity of the past and epistemic humility in the face of it binds the natural sciences to history, as well as other disciplines in the humanities. These kindred concerns are at the root of this volume. In some fashion, therefore, this is a volume about the sort of time travel suggested by Bjornerud. Certain Catholic saints in the Church’s history have achieved canonization in part because of their reported ability to bilocate, that is, to inhabit two physical locales at the same time. Scholars from the disciplines represented in this book engage in their own brand of bilocation, but a temporal one. In fact, in their pursuit of understanding not only episodes in time but the nature of their causation, these practitioners inhabit not only their present and a place in the past but numerous points on the intervening spectrum. The paleontologist Roy E. Plotnick (a contributor to this volume) calls such forays into the past “cerebral trips in time.”20 Historians, for their part, regularly tailor the passage of time to fit their own narrative and explanatory needs and purposes. Gaddis describes this temporal alchemy on the part of historians as follows: Historians have the capacity for selectivity, simultaneity, and the shifting of scale: they can select from the cacophony of events what they think is important; they can be in several times and places at once; and they can zoom in and out between macroscopic and microscopic levels of analysis.21 Different models of time machine are employed by different historians, depending on their methodology, the degree to which the present penetrates their work, and the target of their temporal meandering. The sister disciplines seeking understanding of the past that are represented in this volume employ their own versions of time machine and their own brand of time travel. As Daniel Lord Smail remarks in On Deep History and the Brain: “The archeologists, anthropologists, molecular biologists, and neuroscientists who study the deep past are also historians, regardless of the archives that they consult.”22 The emergence of a past that stretched unfathomably into previous ages granted the natural world a history of its own akin to that of humanity, full of change (both gradual and sudden), dramatic events, and contingency. Geology, evolutionary biology, paleontology, archeology, and cosmology are all, in no uncertain terms, history. An attentive reader of this volume will no doubt draw multiple connections between the various disciplines represented in these pages and the way that the authors engage past and present in their work. We all begin by asking questions, questions that are invariably shaped by where we are and what we are experiencing, as individuals, as societies, and as a species. To answer these questions, we all rely on an array of evidence, most of it from the past but often burnished from observation of current phenomena, and then deploy that evidence in describing and explaining past realities. And it is striking how, in pursuing our questions and making sense of the past, approaches across our disciplines echo each other. For example, the study of the past is necessarily in part about explaining change. Ever since Polybius, who in the second century BCE sought to explain the rise of Rome from Italian city-state to Mediterranean empire, historians have sought to calibrate the relative influence of individual events (the particular) and longer-term, slower-moving trends (the general) in effecting change. This dynamic is also in play in other historical disciplines, which recognize motive forces for change that operate at various temporal and spatial registers – in the transformations of the earth’s surface, in the unfolding story of life’s rich tapestry, in the emergence of our own species, and in the development and diversification of human culture, religion, and society. 12

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Understanding the past is always about painting a picture, about offering a portrait of the past (or a map, according to Gaddis) based on an educated (and hopefully informed) guess. To make our pictures legible and meaningful, we are invariably forced to fill in blanks. This requires what one geologist has called “grey data skill sets.”23 As time travelers, we are both interpreters and raconteurs, hopefully ones with a measure of epistemic humility. Hartley’s description of the past as a “foreign country” is an apt one, for, while there, we regularly believe that we are “recognizing” things in the past because they appear to resemble what we see in the present, and at the same time struggle to make sense of much else that we encounter there. The deployment of the present within the past need not necessarily conjure the bugbear of anachronism, but it does compel our vigilance against inviting its presence. For me, the recognition that there exists a great diversity of histories and efforts to depict the past, both human and natural, is methodologically liberating, as it releases us from the misapprehension that there should be a single historical or scientific method. What is more, it is an encouragement for we historians, and hopefully to others engaged in disciplines that are fundamentally historical, to look outside our own immediate cohort for ideas and inspiration, and to share our practices and insights with those in the sister disciplines. When we realize our philosophical and methodological kinship, the sense of mutual alterity may very well melt away. My wish is that this volume represents steps in that direction, initiating conversations between scholars whose work has much more in common than is commonly recognized. *** After this introductory chapter, this book is divided into three parts. The first consists of essays by historians that consider how they situate themselves between past and present. The second brings together essays by representatives of disciplines that seek to understand human culture and draw upon evidence from the past to do so. The final section is composed of contributions by those in the physical sciences, for most of whom the past with which they are concerned extends well beyond the human history that is the focus of Parts One and Two. While the contributors were given considerable latitude as to the themes of their chapters, they were asked to consider three questions above all. First, what, in their own work and in their discipline more broadly, is their understanding of the relationship between the past and present? Second, how does the nature of this relationship impact truth claims within their discipline – that is, what are the epistemological repercussions of this relationship? And finally, how does this relationship impact their pedagogy, how they share their knowledge with their students and with the broader public? The contributors were invited to address these questions with reference to examples from their own work or from other representative work from those in their field. Not all contributors answered all three questions directly, but taken together, these essays offer numerous resonances across the many disciplines represented, suggesting numerous avenues for further dialogue as practitioners compose their own brands of history. Part One begins with a chapter in which Felipe Brandi places Marc Bloch and his reflections concerning past and present within their context of the longue durée of French historiography. Brandi demonstrates that Bloch’s maxims were in fact part of an ongoing consideration of such matters among French historians. Bloch’s thinking on the role of the present in historians’ search for historical understanding helped prompt a recalibration in French historiography, including a rejection of positivist notions of history as an exact science, suspicion of claims of absolute objectivity, and the embrace of contemporary concerns in asking questions about the past. The diplomatic and U.S. presidential historian Jeremi Suri, in his chapter on the recent past, engages the question of when the past becomes the present, providing the answer that it is when the past is subject to critical historical inquiry. He delineates the salutary effects of such historical 13

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thinking for policy makers, as well as the dangers of avoiding it. Zoltán Boldizsár Simon asks, amid a time of bewilderingly fast technological change and the potential for a dystopian future, whether the past still matters, and answers by speciating the past into a variety of forms. The past does still matter, but not as a unitary form; instead Simon argues for a plurihistoricity, in which multiple modes of making the past matter coexist. The final chapter in Part One, by Craig Benjamin, explores a branch of historiography that draws especially from historical disciplines in the physical sciences: “big” history. Big historians regularly dive deep into the past, including the pre-human past; engage in broad topical and temporal sweeps of the human experience; and frequently extend their gaze into the future. Benjamin explains how the big historians make their truth claims at such large scales, and how, when combined with the more granular work of traditional historians, a fuller picture of the human past comes into view. Part Two of the book, “Cultures Past and Present,” focuses on the work of those from a range of disciplines who seek meaning in the present regarding cultural events and creations from the past. Father Nicolas Steeves examines how Catholic tradition and biblical criticism seek to interpret events seminal to the faith which simultaneously reside in the past and are imminent in the present – a historical faith and a faithful history. Imminence of the past is especially germane to Confucian culture and philosophy. Yves Vendé explores how Confucian thought seeks to transmit tradition through the Confucian classics. Vendé shows how the past is regarded as an essential resource for the present, not only as inspiration, but also for application. The public historian William F. Stoutamire explores the heritage industry in the United States, and especially the way that it has changed over the last several decades to present a more nuanced and representative picture of the American past. Stoutamire shows that, when the past is regarded as a component of heritage, the distance between past and present quicky collapses and their interface becomes yet another component of current political contention and culture wars. Gregory T. Clark confronts the relationship between the past and the present in the field of art history. An accomplished scholar of medieval art, Clark nonetheless approaches the question as a seasoned teacher of art history, emphasizing the importance of understanding the material past embodied in artistic creations and the contexts which produced them. Such knowledge provides insight into not only the material present but also into human aspirations more broadly. Martin Porr traces how emerging means of measurement and understanding of time have shaped archeological practice and interpretation over the past three centuries. Porr shows how archaeology is complicated both by the multiple pasts that are represented in the archaeological evidence of even a single site, and by the “multi-temporality” of the present in which that evidence must be collected and interpreted. The final chapter in this section is by the historian Randolph C. Head, an expert on the history of European archives. Surveying manifold examples of archives, Head describes archives as “double-ended bridges between the past and present,” which reflect the priorities of individuals in the past – including what they felt worth preserving – as well as the projection of present concerns into the past. Archives are never neutral repositories of past realities. The third, and final, section of the book focuses on the relationship between the past and present in the realm of the physical sciences. The disciplines that are represented in this section are fundamentally historical, meaning that their search for understanding about the natural world is dependent on evidence from the past, often from a deep past that makes a nonsense of human time scales. The first chapter in this section, by Hilairy Hartnett, looks at the deepest recesses of the earth’s past. Given that very little rock actually dating from that period remains, Hartnett explains how deep-time geologists must employ a combination of imagination, speculation, and observation of current geological processes to assemble a picture of the early earth. The ensuing chapter also concerns geology, but earth history of a far more recent vintage. Geology 14

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is generally considered a science of slow change occurring over extremely long time frames, but Ellen Wohl’s chapter chiefly concerns the geology of the Anthropocene, revealing how human intervention has accelerated the pace of geological change. Focusing on North American geology, Wohl’s description of transformed landscapes and the anthropogenic forces that shaped them brings into question some of the assumptions of the discipline. The very deepest wells of the past are necessarily the concerns of astrophysicists such as David Garofolo – after all, all the evidence upon which they rely has arrived to them from the past. Garofolo reveals how astronomy depends on traditional understandings of directional time rooted in cause-and-effect relationships, but that cosmology’s approach to time complicates these familiar considerations. He shows how the instability of time problematizes not only the nature of the relationship between past and present but even whether a relationship between the two exists. Roy E. Plotnick examines the phenomenon of mass extinctions across the history of life in order to explore how paleontologists employ the fossil record to envision the biota of the past. In particular, Plotnick suggests ways that fossil evidence from these episodes illuminates the biological world of the present, and how the current “Sixth Extinction” is likely to manifest in the fossil record to hypothetical paleontologists in the distant future. The last chapter of Part Three, and of the volume, by Deborah I. Olszewski, casts its gaze on the human deep past and the discipline of paleoanthropology. Paleoanthropology brings together the methodologies and concerns of several of the disciplines already considered in the preceding chapters. It is fundamentally human history, but relies on many of the tools employed by geologists, paleontologists, and evolutionary biologists. Olszewski explores the difficult balance that paleoanthropologists must strike between observation of current human communities and the extant evidence from the past: fossils, ruins, and artifacts, among them. While they share a lineage with the current day, hominins prior to about 300,000 years ago were decidedly not human, limiting the applicability of present-day models to their life pathways. The application of the present to the past needs to be careful, measured, and selective. This array of chapters by no means exhausts the conceivable range of historical disciplines nor the ways of thinking about the past and present. Additional chapters that I had hoped to incorporate did not end up being included, for a variety of reasons. But I trust that the selection before you here is suggestive of the rich veins of thought that open up when asking the superficially straightforward question: “what is the relationship between the past and the present?” And that those who regularly reflect upon this question extend well beyond the familiar cadre of historians. *** As described previously, this book has its origins in a grant from the United States National Endowment for the Humanities’ Enduring Questions Program. I would like to thank the NEH for extending me this grant in the academic year 2016–7. I would also like extend thanks to the undergraduate students in my “Past and Present” honors seminar from 2017, an offering that was in part made possible by the NEH grant. These students came from a variety of majors and their questions and insights helped shape the direction of this project. I also wish to thank the Dean’s Office of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Kennesaw State University for a summer research grant that gave me the time to explore how other disciplines have approached the relationship between past and present. Perhaps the greatest joy of this project has been the opportunity to pick the brains of many practitioners in the social and physical sciences with whom I would not normally converse. I have learned so much from these (mostly new) acquaintances, who are too numerous to list here, and have been comforted by the realization that our mutual searches for truth, about past and present, are not so different after all. 15

Paul M. Dover

I especially wish to thank the contributors to this volume: for many of them, participating in this unconventional project meant expending time and effort on something that might very well not accrue the same “credit” that traditional, equivalent work in their field might. I am very grateful for them having taken that chance. Finally, I  want to express my deepest appreciation to Isabel Voice, Laura Pilsworth, and Allison Sambucini at Routledge for their guidance, advice, and patience in the assembly of this volume. Edited collections like this one, with chapters from numerous contributors (from numerous countries), have many moving parts – something about herding cats comes to mind. Isabel, Laura, and Allison have been ceaselessly full of ideas and encouragement, even with the many complications caused by a global pandemic.

Notes 1 These examples are from Marcia Bjornerud, Timefulness. How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 162. 2 Dean Buonomano, Your Brain Is a Time Machine. The Neuroscience and Physics of Time (New York: Norton, 2017), 194. 3 George Ellis, “The evolving block universe and the meshing together of times.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences1326 (2014), 1313–1317. 4 From Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). 5 This is from Chapter 3, “Of wild animals”, Volume 6 of his Natural History, published in 1756.This translation is from Barr’s Buffon, published in 1807, at www.gutenberg.org/files/45731/45731-h/45731h.htm. 6 Keith Heyer Meldahl, Rough-hewn Land. A  Geological Journey from California to the Rocky Mountains (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), 217. 7 Quoted in Jack Repcheck, The Man Who Found Time. James Hutton and the Discovery of the Earth’s Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2003), 13. 8 Bjornerud, Timefulness, esp. 159–179. 9 John McPhee, Annals of the Former World (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1998), 29, 90–91. 10 Quoted in Pascal Richet, A Natural History of Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 208. 11 From Martin Rudwick, Earth’s Deep History. How It Was Discovered and Why It Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 299. Historians, too, speak of what they do as retrodiction, as distinct from the prediction that social scientists like to engage in. 12 Paul Lyle, The Abyss of Time: A Study in Geological Time and Earth History (Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press), 80–81. 13 Keith Thomson, Fossils: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 71. 14 Jens Lallensack and Peter Falkingham, “A  new method to calculate limb phase from trackways reveals gaits of sauropod dinosaurs.” Current Biology 32.7 (April  22, 2022), 1635–1640, https://doi. org/10.1016/j.cub.2022.02.012. 15 David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 16 Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft. Trans. Peter Putnam (New York: Vintage, 1953), 41–42. 17 Ibid., 44. 18 Ibid., 47. 19 John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 20 Roy Plotnick, Explorers of Deep Time: Paleontologists and the History of Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022), 8. 21 Gaddis, The Landscape of History, 22. 22 Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008), 11. 23 Helen Gordon, Notes from Deep Time (London: Profile, 2021), 9.

16

PART ONE

Past, Present, and History

2 REFLECTIONS ON MARC BLOCH’S MAXIM Felipe Brandi

Et comme tout change dans l’homme et autour de lui, comme le point de vue d’où il considère les faits, et les dispositions qu’il apporte dans cet examen varient sans cesse, on dirait que le passé change avec le présent. [And as all changes in and around humankind, as well as the point of view from which he considers things, and the dispositions that he assumes in his examination constantly change, one can say that the past changes with the present.] – François Guizot, Histoire des origines du gouvernement représentatif en Europe. Volume I (Brussels: De Wouters, 1851), 8.

In 1942, the French historian Marc Bloch had gone underground. As a Jew, forced to stay hidden, having joined the French Resistance, he devoted part of his time to reworking an essay on history and the historian’s craft that he had begun drafting in late 1940. Fifty-five years old and with an outstanding career already behind him, Bloch set down on paper his reflections gained from his experience in a trade he passionately loved and in which he was, at the time, one of the leading figures. Interrupted by his arrest and execution at the hands of the Gestapo, Bloch’s essay Apologie pour l’histoire ou métier d’historien (generally translated into English as The Historian’s Craft) was printed posthumously in 1949 as the memorandum of a craftsman, the methodological testament of a great historian. This is a book brimming with original ideas and a series of strong and unsettling reflections that provided subsequent generations of historians with a fresh and vigorous view of their trade and their professional practice. Among its original ideas is the statement that “the past is not a subject of science” and that history is not, regardless of what is commonly said, the science of the past. According to Bloch, the very idea of making the past a matter of rational knowledge was pointless, for three main reasons. First, because it would be absurd to attempt to transform into an object of science the elusive reality of what once was but is no more. Second, because it is simply impossible to reintroduce and to bring back into the present the totality of a time span. Finally, because, in any case, le passé ressouvenu (the recollected past) and le passé révolu (the past gone by) are not the same. In contrast to the widespread idea that history is a science of the past, Bloch is asserting, loud and clear, that it is in the light of the present that historical knowledge is built. History: science of the present, or rather of the present placed in time. What DOI: 10.4324/9781003026570-3

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The Historian’s Craft exhorts young historians to do is never to study history at the expense of the present but to remain ever aware of the solidarity of the ages and of the complex lines of connection between them. As Bloch says, “Misunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of the ignorance of the past. But a man may wear himself out just as fruitlessly in seeking to understand the past, if he is totally ignorant of the present.”1 In the midst of the war, in the height of his involvement in the French Resistance, Bloch was more aware than ever of the importance of the present, but also of the fact that good historians who observe the past must grapple with life and not turn their back on whatever is happening around them. For it is there, facing the turmoil and upheavals of the present, that historians forge the questions behind any historical investigation. It is historians’ questions that give life and shape to their research object, never the other way around. Marc Bloch’s views left a lasting impact on historical studies in France, and they provide us with a common thread that serves as an excellent guide for tracking their unfolding in the second half of the twentieth century. To do so, we will first try to see how this past-present dialectic, as it appears in the pages of The Historian’s Craft, is in fact the synthesis of a vision of the historian’s practice that is already present in Bloch’s work ten and even fifteen years before the writing of his methodological testament. This quest for the origins of Bloch’s maxim will lead us, naturally, to his earlier work of the 1930s, but also well upstream, taking us further back in time. To what did Bloch’s views in fact respond? To answer this question and to understand Bloch’s position and the novelty it represented, we will look back quickly to the nineteenth century and to the constitution of the idea of history as a “science of the past” – that is, the very notion challenged by Bloch in his Apologie pour l’histoire. Next, we will also reference the critical thinking of other authors contemporary to Bloch, such as R.G. Collingwood, Benedetto Croce, Lucien Febvre, and Henri-Irénée Marrou, who at the same time also took a stand against this old, deeply ingrained postulate of history as a “science of the past.” Finally, we will try to see how Bloch’s maxim has stood up since the publication of The Historian’s Craft in 1949 and how it produced lasting effects within French historiography. In particular, we will highlight two major trends that have marked the French historical school: first, the rather slow acceptance by French historians of studies devoted to the present time; second, the rise and triumph of a “problem-driven history” (histoire-problème), fostered by the school of historians around the journal Annales, which prioritized the questions raised by the historian in the present. We will conclude by noting the way in which the past-present dialectic penetrated the thought and work of some of the leading representatives of French historical studies in the 1970s and 1980s and reshaped the way the French historical school approached the complex question of how the past and the present enlighten one another. By recalling the cases of historians of earlier periods, such as the classical scholars Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and the medievalists Jacques Le Goff and Georges Duby, we will try to show how their work is the very expression of what Bloch’s maxim has meant to French historical studies and what it can still mean today. These French historians, like historians elsewhere, and indeed like those in the other disciplines represented in this volume, found that it was essentially impossible to detach the present from the past in their search for search for knowledge in their respective fields. The entire first chapter of Bloch’s Historian’s Craft actually revolves around the central idea of history as a study of the dialectical solidarity between past and present. The views espoused here by Bloch are the outcome of long-ripening meditation, dating back to the beginning of the 1930s. Indeed, the statements on the past/present dialectic outlined in Historian’s Craft are an effort to give final form to Bloch’s reflection on the ways of understanding the past by means of the present. These reflections matured during the 1920s, when 20

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Bloch was pioneering agrarian history. By the early 1930s, Marc Bloch was fully aware that the past/present dialectic was extremely complex, and that he would have to fight relentlessly on two fronts simultaneously. While he pleaded the cause of history and tried to persuade his contemporaries that the present “does not contain its own explanation, [. . .] since it is only the outcome of the past,” he also invited his fellow historians not to restrict their observations about the past to the past alone, and not to ignore what goes on in current times.2 In the 1920s, his study of agrarian systems led Bloch to promote the regressive method, which establishes a comparative principle between at least two states of a given object, one from a recent period and the other belonging to an earlier age. This method allows researchers to use more recent evidence to shed light on previous ages and reconstitute older phenomena and, in Bloch’s case, former visions of the French landscape. The principle of this method lies in “reading history backwards” (“lire l’histoire à rebours”), moving gradually back in time by going from what is better known to what is less well known.3 Past and present become complementary in this approach: the French countryside provides the historian with topics that allow the historian to combine reading of past documents and direct observation of the present-day landscape, in such a way that he can proceed backwards from the present to more remote eras. Thus, if it is indeed true that the past determines the present, it is also in the historian’s interest to endeavor to “illuminate a very distant past in the light of times that are much closer to us.”4 Convinced that history is primarily the “knowledge of changes”5 and that it can be well written only when the historian succeeds in “joining with a sure stroke the present to the past” (joindre d’un trait sûr le présent au passé),6 Bloch is sympathetic to historical works that seek to enable their readers to feel the “solidarity of the present with the past.”7 In fact, aside from the regressive method, the attempt to bring out such solidarity and to link past and present is fundamental to Marc Bloch’s approach to history. At several moments in his book Feudal Society (1939–1940), he draws parallels between the contemporary world and the medieval period, in an attempt to render the described phenomenon less unfamiliar for his reader. He points out how, around the year 1000, an experienced foot-traveler could cover,  “as at present in Africa,” very long distances and overcome obstacles faster than a horseman.8 At another moment, he notes that “in the England of Thomas Becket, dynasties of priests do not appear to have been much more uncommon than descendants of the ‘popes’ are today in the Orthodox countries.”9 These parallels reveal a clever, immersive procedure that brings the practices and the “modes of feel and thought” of the narrated era closer to the mental universe of the contemporary reader. At one point, Bloch compares the justice of feudal lords to the authority held by business leaders and military commanders in his own day.10 At another, he asks his reader directly if the appeal of the epic in men’s imagination, due to the warmth of its utterance, is not similar to the power of radio, as a means of propaganda far more effective than the newspaper.11 In Bloch’s historical thinking, there is no such thing as a break between past and present, but rather a permanent interaction between them. That is why he deplores the vain efforts to understand the past when one ignores the present. “I had many times read, and I often narrated, accounts of war and battles. Did I truly know, in the full sense of that word, did I know from within, before I myself had suffered the terrible, sickening reality, what it meant for an army to be encircled, what it meant for a people to meet defeat?”12 History should not be an escape. Since the historian himself is a historical and social actor, he is inclined to action.13 As a useful science for the men of the present, history requires from the historian a focus on what is happening around him. Therefore, in this ongoing historical dialogue between past and present, the latter must always, as Bloch sees it, be the driving force. 21

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Bloch’s Maxim Against the Nineteenth-Century Idea of History as “Science of the Past” By making this dialectical solidarity between past and present a central feature of his historical work, Marc Bloch’s views were provocative, consistent with the modernity of the approach of the Annales, the circle of French historians who proudly claimed to be making “new history” in the interwar years. This attention given to the present, however, was not entirely unprecedented. We might even say that it is as old as history itself. If one cared to, it would be possible to trace it back to Thucydides, whose conviction that the present is central to historical research is well known. As Arnaldo Momigliano points out, for Thucydides historical research must start from the present and be focused on it, not just because the present is the only period for which reliable information can be obtained, but also because, since human nature is immutable, the experiences of the present provide the key to understanding the past.14 In the nineteenth century, the historian and statesman François Guizot (1787–1874) reclaimed the centrality of the present, when he declared that “the past changes with the present.”15 Because the human world is in perpetual change and because our perception of things is, consequently, continually evolving, the past, rather than a static reality, is itself always in motion. What lies behind Guizot’s statement is that each generation writes the story of the past anew. Such a profound truth, which Guizot acknowledged as early as 1820, remains just as apposite 200 years later, but it seems to have been rather overlooked by those who followed him in the nineteenth century. Indeed, the time was approaching when professional historians would seek to widen the chasm between past and present. One notable example is the case of Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges (1830–1889), author of The Ancient City (1864) and a leading representative of French historical studies in the nineteenth century. Throughout his works, Fustel de Coulanges championed a new ideal of scientific history whose value was founded on the historian’s ability to distance oneself from one’s own present. In the eyes of this leading proponent of pure, impartial, disinterested, and impersonal science, any influence of the lived present of the historian could only be harmful to the pursuit of historical knowledge.16 Believing that the historical truth would inevitably be twisted and compromised by any intrusion of current concerns, Fustel endeavored to be as free as possible from the passions and influences of the immediate present. All his energy would be devoted to the knowledge of the past alone. Throughout his life, Fustel never gave up his ideal of history as “pure science,” where the study of the past would not be determined by any presentist or practical goal. For him, current issues and trends must ultimately remain out of any historical account. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the prevailing historiography was grounded in the abiding belief that history would succeed in fulfilling its scientific mission only once it had distanced itself from the present. This period thus saw the rise of the idea of history as a “science of the past,” against which Bloch, in the 1940s, would take a stand. In 1876, the foreword to the first issue of the Revue Historique formally stated, right from the start, the journal’s intention to ask all its contributors to “avoid contemporary controversies.”17 For the Revue Historique, the great epistemological challenge for the new generation of historians lay in the ability to resist the powerful influence of present-day passions so as to stand above political or religious biases. According to the directors of the Revue Historique, Gabriel Monod and Gustave Fagniez, contemporary times were charged by a multitude of contradictory testimonies and too much stirred up by the turmoil of passions. In his lead article for the initial issue of the Revue Historique, “Du progrès des études historiques en France depuis le XVIe siècle,” Monod stressed, for his part, that the separation of the past and the present was a precondition for any impartial history. What defines the study of history and the behavior of the genuine historian, 22

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he states, is the detachment from present-day passions and the will to study the past for its own sake. What Monod defends is thus a sympathetic, respectful, but also independent and impartial study of the past.18 In other words, a study of history that is not polluted or compromised by today’s prejudices and passions, and one that is willing to judge historical events and characters for themselves alone. In France, the gap between the past and the present dominated the scientific historiography in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. But some of the leading representatives of this so-called methodical (or “positivist”) historiography refused to join Fustel in his relentless fight against all interference of the present in the study of history. This was the case with Bloch’s teacher Charles Seignobos, coauthor with Charles-Victor Langlois of Introduction aux études historiques and well known as one of the main proponents of the methodical school. Far from the traditional image of the empiricist historian, devoted loyally to their method, Seignobos did not hesitate to take a position quite contrary to that of his old master, Fustel de Coulanges, and state that any historical reconstruction is inevitably nourished by the historian’s subjective experience living in the present.19 In 1908, during a heated debate with Émile Durkheim, Paul Lacombe, and Marc Bloch, Seignobos reiterated this position and stressed even more clearly how influential the observation of the present really is in any historical reconstruction of the past. In his view, “it is in fact according to vague analogies with the present that one judges and criticizes most often past phenomena. . . . For the historian, to compare means above all to juxtapose what he finds with the present time in which he is living.”20 As we can see, Marc Bloch’s views of the present, in his Historian’s Craft, did not emerge ex nihilo. But since the scientific ideal underpinning the model of history as “science of the past” was so deeply ingrained, Bloch’s maxim on how to understand the past by means of the present was still considered fresh and provocative in the 1940s. Only slowly did thinking begin to shift. By the 1940s, doubt had spread over the epistemological claims of scientific historiography. The widely shared idea that history was a methodical and objective science of the past no longer seemed self-evident, and some began to acknowledge that the art of historical research relies on the personal values and present concerns of the historian. Such new perspectives appeared, not only in The Historian’s Craft and among Bloch’s colleagues Lucien Febvre and Henri-Irénée Marrou, but also outside France, in the work of R.G. Collingwood and Benedetto Croce. Both Collingwood in The Idea of History (1946) and Croce in La Storia come pensiero e come azione (1938) were challenging the naive confidence of scientific historiography in its credulous quest for impartiality and its obstinate pursuit of pinpoint accuracy. Against the scientific historians who pleaded for detachment from the present in order to contemplate the past on its own terms, Collingwood and Croce maintained that the past is “not an object of possible perception, since it does not now exist.” It is only through the historical imagination that the past becomes an object of our thought. So, according to Collingwood, the historian’s imaginative reconstruction of the past uses “the present as evidence for its own past,” in order to reconstruct it “as here and now perceived.”21 Collingwood’s theory of historical knowledge as reenactment of past experiences in the mind of the historian established a new way of addressing the past/ present dialectic, as “the gap between present and past being bridged not only by the power of present thought to think of the past, but also by the power of past thought to reawaken itself in the present.”22 Collingwood’s views match some of Croce’s, since, for both of them, the past in itself is not known, only the present. In fact, Croce, just like Collingwood, stressed that historical knowledge is fundamentally subjective, and that each historical reconstitution is necessarily drawn from the historian’s present viewpoint. That’s why, as Croce famously stated, all history is contemporary history, a well-known dictum meaning simultaneously that, first, historical reality does not exist prior to observation by the historian; second, any historical work has, in its own 23

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time, the value of testimony; but also third, history is inextricably bound to the present; and therefore, fourth, every true history reflects the changing standpoint of the historian’s present. Bloch, Collingwood, and Croce: while differing in many ways, all three maintained theoretical standpoints emblematic of a new attitude toward history that undermined the nineteenthcentury paradigm of history as a “science of the past” and, in addition, laid the foundations for a new understanding of historical research that led to what one might call a new age of historical consciousness that would mark French historical production throughout the second half of the twentieth century.

Fostering a History of Present Time One of the distinctive features of the Annales journal, founded by Bloch and Lucien Febvre in 1929, is the attention that the two directors and their collaborators devoted to current events, turning their backs once and for all on mistrust of the contemporary. A quick look at the early years of the Annales clearly shows the substantial amount of space devoted to contemporary events, including the 1929 crisis, the advent of the USSR, North American industrialization, the political and economic situation in Germany, and the New Deal.23 This interest in current issues found unquestionably its most powerful expression in L’Étrange défaite, Marc Bloch’s account of the war written in the heat of the moment, barely a few months after the events it describes, a landmark in contemporary history. The French historical school continued, for many years to come, to put up fierce resistance to the history of the present, judging it too close to political science and journalism. In fact, the challenges to the study of the immediate present are not trivial. French academic historians confronted the study of the very recent past with at least two main objections: first, the lack of sources, given that the requisite material was not yet in the private collections and public archives and remained inaccessible; second, the lack of distance between the historian and their subject, which presents a formidable difficulty that can jeopardize history’s epistemological ambitions, given the complete unawareness of outcomes.24 As Philippe Joutard stated in 1990, French historians clearly felt that they needed “at least twenty years of hindsight to begin to move from the chronicle to history. Without this first temporal distance, what one does [. . .] is journalism.”25 This dividing line, which reserved the past for historians and left the present to journalists and political scientists, prevailed for a very long time in the minds of French historians. Very few authors would have dared to combine historical and journalistic approaches. However, two remarkable cases stand out: one is Jean Lacouture; the other, François Furet, one of the most prominent specialists of the French Revolution, who turned himself into a historian-journalist when he became from 1958 to 1997 a regular commentator in the weekly France-Observateur and Le Nouvel Observateur.26 Fond of present-day politics, Furet applied his extensive historical knowledge to his penetrating analyses of the contemporary world. For Furet, there was never an option to isolate the historian’s scholarly battles from the engaged citizen’s daily ones. His hybrid identity as historian-journalist allowed him to set up a double approach since, “as a historian, the journalist explains events from their past logic, and as a journalist, the historian interprets events from their political dimension.”27 The case of Jean Lacouture offers a mirror image of Furet. A renowned journalist,28 Lacouture launched in 1963 a new series at the Seuil publishing house called Histoire immédiate – an expression that he would popularize in the 1980s.29 As a new field of research, this “immediate history” was characterized by contemporaneity between scholar and subject. Such an approach, making the historian contemporaneous with their subject, clearly departs from traditional paths of historical research, so much so that 24

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some will wonder if this approach to the contemporary still deserves the moniker of history. In fact, those who tried to promote contemporary history in the 1970s clearly sought to highlight the inherent paradox in any “history of the present.” Instead of trying to gloss over the various traps of studying recent times, they emphasized what made it exciting and risky, with the outcomes as yet unknown to the researcher.30 Indeed, the main challenge to any historical approach to the present is that the historian must do without that major (and constitutive) asset of the historical knowledge: awareness of what one might call the “future of the past,” the prior knowledge of what happened next. The histoire immédiate gave up that prerogative of historical studies, which is recul temporal, temporal hindsight, in favor of the study of ongoing change. In an attempt to compensate for a lack of hindsight, this approach sought to bring the past into the present and the present into the future. In doing so, it helped make the history of the present palatable to the profession. The year 1978 stands as an important milestone in the belated recognition of the study of the present among French historians. At the very moment when Jean Lacouture published his program for “immediate history,” the Institut de l’Histoire du Temps Présent (IHTP) was founded, within the framework of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), French’s major public scientific agency. In addition, a Chair devoted to the History of the Present was created by Pierre Nora at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). The IHTP, whose focus is the study of the entire post–World War II period, and Nora’s seminar at the EHESS both served as laboratories where new conceptual and methodological approaches could be tested. These new initiatives dared historians to reflect on their practice and on the very nature of the knowledge they aimed to produce. During a workshop at IHTP in November 1980, Mona Ozouf gave a telling description of the challenges raised by the study of the “present time,” when she noted how it appears, in the eyes of most French historians, as both “too much and too little”: too many events, too much news, but also “too many idols, too many monstrous actors who clutter the stage.”31 Pierre Nora also recognized, for his part, the same complexity inherent in the history of the present and characterized it as being at once “overabundant and poorly treated, plethoric and without a well-defined object or established status”. Its strength lies, however, in the fact that this is a new historical field that “is not defined by a chronology, nor by a method, but by a standpoint.”32 The beginning of the 1980s witnessed a new generation of historians in France fighting hard to prevent the history of the present from being dismissed as a branch of scholarly historiography.33 Its rapid accession to prominence in the next twenty years led to a reconfiguration among French historians; the history of the present went from being a subaltern field to a dominant one. At the turn of the 1990s, forty years after the publication of The Historian’s Craft and sixty years after the first battles within the Annales, the history of the present finally gained its rightful recognition as an accepted genre inside the French historical school.

Problem-Oriented History The attention that the Annales of the 1930s and 1940s paid to the present and the immediate past can be related to a particular way of looking at the historian’s practice, to a conception of the very nature of historical knowledge. The two editors of the Annales, and especially Lucien Febvre, urged their fellow historians to recognize that every scientific fact is a construct. In history, just as in the natural sciences, the facts are never “raw” data. They respond to a set of questions raised by the historian and are defined in accordance with the latter’s hypotheses and concerns. For the founders of the Annales, the time had come for historians to recognize that they construct their facts, that they choose the subjects in the past to study, and that this choice is largely dictated by 25

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the concerns of the current day. The present is thus understood as the starting point of historical inquiry. Lucien Febvre pleaded for a history that explicitly states, as do the physical sciences, the hypotheses and questions that guide its inquiries. He referred to this kind of history as histoireproblème, describing it as follows: “to pose a problem is precisely the beginning and the end of all history. No problem, no history. Just narrations, compilations.”34 This problem-oriented history rejects the rather naive, crude scientism typical of the historiography of the turn of the twentieth century in favor of a new conception of the historian’s craft that is actually much more in line with the modern paradigm of the physical sciences. While the scientistic history of the early twentieth century believed that the more the historian succeeded in fading away, the more objectively the past would be grasped in its purity, the histoire-problème fostered by the Annales openly endorsed the inescapably creative involvement of the historian, arguing that no facts exist prior to their elaboration by the historian. The Annales promoted a history that seeks to solve, or at least to raise, problems, a history that favors an analytical, problem-oriented approach rather than a chronological one. According to the histoire-problème approach, the strength of a historical work lies not only in rendering its hypotheses and analytical grid explicit, but also in highlighting how much it depends on the questions being raised in the lived present of the historian. But what exactly, from a theoretical point of view, was the impact of such a promotion of the present as advocated by histoire-problème? What are the repercussions of this research model, where the historical inquiry appears to be entirely aimed at providing answers to questions that are relevant to the present? Alongside the histoire-problème’s emphasis on the present,35 a new awareness of the underlying subjectivity of all history was emerging. This helps us to understand better how Marc Bloch’s maxim in The Historian’s Craft also concerns the unattainable ideal of neutrality and impartiality in history. The historian’s present was not an obstacle or threat for Bloch, but rather a necessary component for a field of research highly dependent on the subjective input of its practitioner. Lucien Febvre betrayed two divergent attitudes about the relationship between the present and the past, between the historian and the historical subject. On the one hand, Febvre spent his life fighting against what he called the “sin of anachronism” (péché d’anachronisme) – “the worst of all sins, the sin that cannot be forgiven.”36 His historical psychology intended to prevent twentieth-century ways of thinking from being projected back in time. Throughout his career, Febvre rejected misleading analogies between the past and present and spoke out against “the constant, irritating anachronism which writers are unconsciously guilty of when they project themselves as they are back into the past with their own feelings, their own ideas and their own intellectual and moral prejudices.”37 In all his major works, indeed, Febvre tried to highlight how truly enormous are the contrasts between our present-day image of the world and the mental habits of our far-removed ancestors, urging both his readers and his fellow historians to grasp the radical differences between us and men and women in the past. Febvre also assumed a second outlook, a more positive one, toward the interplay between past and present. This second approach is defined by histoire-problème, and organizes the study of times gone on the basis of the present, but refrains from “judging the past from the perspective of the present.ˮ38 When in 1933 he stated that man, instead of remembering the past, reconstructs it, and that the historian, consequently, “proceeds from the present – and it is through it, always, that he knows, that he interprets the past,”39 Febvre was trying to discard, just as Bloch would do later in his Historian’s Craft, the old model of history as a “science of the past.” In the new conception of history he was proposing, the value of a well-conducted historical inquiry stems from the historians’ ability to choose their subject and the sociological problem they wish to solve. This choice would always depend on their personality, their intellectual curiosity, 26

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their acculturation, but also on the mental framework of the society and epoch to which they belonged. Therein lies the presentism of Febvre’s histoire-problème: historical knowledge itself is inextricably linked to the historian’s creative subjectivity, which itself is bound up with the philosophical questions and existential concerns of the historian’s present time. Forged in the years 1930–1940, Febvre’s problem-oriented history led to a profound shift in historiography. By acknowledging that history is first and foremost a scholarly construct, it called attention to the part played by the conscious subject and ceased to regard history as a science of the past. Febvre and Bloch were not, it must be said, preaching in the desert. Their conception of a histoire-problème was closely aligned with the views of Henri-Irénée Marrou, in his essay on historical knowledge, “De la connaissance historique,” published just five years after The Historian’s Craft, in 1954. A practitioner of history as well as a philosopher, Marrou exerted decisive influence on the way the French historical school reflected on the past/present dialectic. In Marrou’s work, history emerges as the conjunction, achieved through the historian’s action, of two layers, represented in the formula h = P/p, where (P) is the past lived by our ancestors and (p) is the historian’s own present. There is no formal distinction between the object (the past) and the historian’s present.40 In history, what deserves to be called “reality” is, finally, “the awareness of the human past, obtained in thought by the historian’s effort; it is situated on neither of the two poles but in the ratio, in the synthesis between present and past that is established by the active intervention, the initiative of the conscious subject.”41 Against Jules Michelet’s formula of history as résurrection de la vie intégrale du passé [resurrection of the entirety of life in the past] and Ranke’s statement of the reconstruction of the past “as it actually happened” (wie es eigentlich gewesen), Marrou also opposed Collingwood’s view of history as a reenactment of past experiences. Arguing against those historians who regard the present as a distorting factor, a “parasitic given”42 that should be shunned, Marrou stated, instead, that the initiative and the logical priority of the historical operation belong to the “question posed” by the historian. It is this question, and not the documents of the past, that triggers the choice of the subject and delineates the field of observation. Historical truth is “twofold, being made at the same time of truth about the past and of testimony about the historian.”43

Bloch’s Maxim: A Historiographical Legacy By allying itself with Febvre’s histoire-problème and Marrou’s views on the historian’s indispensable creative input, Bloch’s maxim achieves its full scope. These views converged on two main points, crucial to the subsequent paths of the French historical school. First of all, methodical scientistic history’s efforts to hide, or to suppress, the intervention of the conscious subject were in vain; instead, one should embrace the personal involvement of the historian, and integrate this existential input into the study of the past; second, an acknowledgment that history is constructed out of the formulation of hypotheses – the “question posed,” in Marrou’s words – based on historians’ observation of the present, of whatever is preoccupying the society in which they live. History is, according to Marrou’s famous dictum, “a spiritual adventure wherein the historian’s personality is brought into play.”44 The more the historian is attuned to their time, the more successful they will be in understanding the past. Bloch’s maxim, when set against the changes affecting French historical studies in the midtwentieth century, was part of a decisive historiographical shift rooted in a conviction that there is no historical reality waiting to be discovered prior to the historiographical operation performed by the conscious subject. If there is a parallel to be made between history and scientific knowledge, it does not lie in an unrealistic impartiality attained thanks to a false obliteration of 27

Felipe Brandi

the subject, but rather in the acknowledgment of how the existential perspective of the historian represents the crucial element in forming the historical phenomena under study. In the history of historical studies in France over the last century, this awareness laid the foundation, not only for the rupture of French historians with scientific history à l’ancienne mode,45 but also for an awakening of a new sensibility, of a new attitude among historians towards their discipline and towards the knowledge on which they were building. This new attitude is reflected in the way in which historians of the remote past, scholars of the ancient and medieval periods, have declared how deeply their work is bound up with the questions and torments of the present, and that their visions of centuries long gone bear the imprint of the world in which they live. Jean-Pierre Vernant, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Jacques Le Goff and Georges Duby were, each in his own way, eloquent on this point. Founder of the Centre de recherches comparées des sociétés anciennes and a leader in the renewal of Greek studies in the 1960s and 1970s, Vernant led a long life of political activism and militancy, engaging in many of the great battles of the twentieth century. A  young anti-fascist activist in the Latin Quarter in the 1930s, then a member of the French Communist Party until 1969, Vernant was also a hero of the French Resistance during the Occupation, commanding the French Forces of the Interior (FFI). According to Vernant, his work revealed many zones of overlap between the present and the past, connecting his role as a historian engagé with his scholarly investigation of ancient Greek civilization: The investigation that I have been pursuing for many years in ancient Greece has not diverted me from contemporary events. By reflecting on Antiquity, it was on us that I questioned myself, it was our world that I was calling into question.46 Vidal-Naquet, another scholar of the ancient world, also built an impressive body of work in which the study of antiquity coexisted with his political activism. The latter included his anti-colonialist campaign against the Algerian War and the systematic use of torture by the French Army in the conflict, writings on Jewish identity, a prolonged fight against Holocaust deniers, and his involvement in the peace efforts in the Middle East, where he spoke out against Israel’s occupation policy. A disciple of Marrou, for whom history was a spiritual adventure that engaged the historian’s entire personality, Vidal-Naquet would never have accepted that his researches on Greek religion diverted him from contemporary conflicts. What truly defined his work and that of Vernant was a double perspective that they shared: a “view from afar” upon a very distant past; and an immediate gaze on the contemporary struggles of their lifetime. The examples of Jacques Le Goff and Georges Duby – both direct heirs of Marc Bloch and two of the leading French medievalists of the twentieth century – are also highly instructive. According to Le Goff, his professional choice and his passion for the study of the Middle Ages reflected childhood feelings about the present. “The Middle Ages attracted me, he explains, only because it had the almost magical power of taking me away from the turmoil and mediocrity of the present, and at the same time to make it more vivid and more clear to me.”47 As a historian-anthropologist, Le Goff sought to distance himself from his society and his time, as ethnographers do when they spend long periods living among societies that are very different from their own. Yet Le Goff’s writings, as well as his lectures and teaching, both at the EHESS and abroad, were always brimming with references to the present. Le Goff enjoyed surprising his readers and listeners by revealing unexpected links between the Middle Ages and the contemporary world. He wrote, “The historian of an era can understand it only in a back-and-forth with the present. I lived the Middle Ages and my present, simultaneously.”48 This “back-and-forth” between present and past went far beyond the field of his professional 28

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activity and represented an essential element of his personal connection to the world he lived in. This is why Le Goff claimed that being a medievalist allowed him to live his own time even more intensely. Throughout his career, especially from the 1980s onwards, he emphasized more and more the links between his world and medieval culture. Using controlled anachronisms, he drew parallels between the towers of San Gimignano and Manhattan’s skyscrapers, and devoted famous studies to the role in the Middle Ages of components familiar to our contemporary world, such as money, urban life, merchants, and intellectuals.49 The case of Georges Duby is also revealing. Master of French medieval studies, professor at the Collège de France, and member of the French Academy, Duby has reflected at length on the influence of the present in the historian’s work. His work betrays a tripartite influence: Bloch, to whom he can be seen as a successor; Febvre, who supported him in the 1950s; and Marrou, who was his teacher in Lyon in the 1940s. This triple heritage shines through in the way Duby, skeptical about the possibility of objectivity in historiography, pleads for the recognition of history as an art. Good history, well made, must always be passionate. “We have gradually discovered that the objectivity of historical knowledge is mythical, that all history is written by a man, and that when this man is a good historian he puts a lot of himself into it.”50 According to Duby, there is a direct link between the historian’s writing and what goes on deep inside the historian. Historians, he states, are inevitably subject to their passions, and to the ideologies of their time. With Duby, the past/present dialectic contributes both to the strength and the fragility of historical knowledge. Duby’s research into the ideological systems of the eleventh and twelfth centuries compels him to integrate into his analysis a reflection on the ideological hold of the present on the historian. The historian must wage a struggle against their own blind spots, which are produced by contemporary ideologies and mental habits that constrain the way the historian observes and interprets the past. He even states that the prestigious research that made the reputation of the historians of the Annales and the Nouvelle Histoire were, for their part, always “very dependent on the interrogations, the anxieties, the frustrations of the current society.”51 Always aware of the past/present dialectic, Duby’s work has pushed history towards self-doubt, and an acknowledgment of the things that blind the historian. This new attitude regarding the present in the historical research, which the works of Vernant, Vidal-Naquet, Le Goff, and Duby have masterfully embodied, would, over time, by fits and starts, push postwar French historians to put their own discipline into historical perspective, to acknowledge the limitations of their objectivity, the crudity of their analytical tools, and overconfidence in their scientific aspirations. This, then, is the powerful legacy of Marc Bloch’s maxim: the recognition by historians, in France and beyond, of the inescapable hold of the present over any attempt to understand the past.

Notes 1 Marc Bloch, The Historians’ Craft. Trans. Peter Putnam (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1954), 36. 2 Marc Bloch, “Régions naturelles et groupes sociaux.” Annales d’histoire économique et sociale 17 (1932), 489–510, here 490. See also M. Bloch, “Culture historique et action économique: à propos de l’exemple américain.” Annales d’histoire économique et sociale 9 (1931), 1–4, here 3. These views seem to be inspired by Jules Michelet’s maxim, cherished by Bloch, according to which “he who would confine his thought to present time will not understand present realities.” (Jules Michelet, Le Peuple. Ed. Paul Viallaneix (Paris: Flammarion, 1974), 63; cf. Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, 29). 3 Marc Bloch, Les Caractères originaux de l’histoire rurale française (Paris: Les Belles-Lettres, 1931), xii. 4 Ibid., x.

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Felipe Brandi 5 Bloch, “Culture historique,” 3. See also Bloch, Les Caractères, x. 6 Marc Bloch, “Henri Pirenne, l’Histoire de la Belgique.” Annales d’histoire économique et sociale 17 (1932), 478–481, here 479. 7 Bloch on Henri Cavaillès’ approach in “Régions naturelles,” 490. 8 Marc Bloch, Feudal Society I: The Growth of Ties of Dependence (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 62. 9 Marc Bloch, Feudal Society II: Social Classes and Political Organization (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 70. 10 Ibid., 82. 11 Bloch, Feudal Society I, 101. This kind of procedure is actually quite common among historians, who readily acknowledge its didactic efficiency. Lucien Febvre himself sets up parallels several times in his writings; but, in contrast with Bloch, he uses it not to draw analogies between the past and the present, but rather to show his reader how different the mental universe of the sixteenth century men can be from his own. Febvre’s The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais. Trans. Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982, c1942) is filled, from the beginning to the end, with this procedure aimed at showing how much the “mental equipment” of Rabelais’ contemporaries differs from ours. This same kind of procedure is also found all over his book Amour sacré, amour profane. Autour de l’Heptameron (Paris: Gallimard, 1944). See, just as an example, the passage where he reminds us that, for the contemporaries of Marguerite de Navarre, morality and religion had a relationship that is no longer the same for us today (284). 12 Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, 36–37. 13 Bloch himself stated this in no uncertain terms: “this ignorance of the past not only confuses contemporary science, but confounds contemporary action” (The Historian’s Craft, 33). 14 Arnaldo Momigliano, “The Herodotean and the Thucididean tradition.” In The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), 51–53. 15 François Guizot, “Première leçon – 7 décembre 1820.” In Histoire des origines du gouvernement représentatif en Europe. Volume I (Brussels: Wouters, 1951), 2. 16 Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, “L’histoire, science pure (1875).” In François Hartog, ed., Le XIXe siècle et l’histoire. Le cas Fustel de Coulanges (Paris: PUF, 1988), 340–345. 17 Gabriel Monod and Gustave Fagniez, “Avant-propos.” Revue Historique, 1.1 (1876), 1. 18 Gabriel Monod, “Du progrès des études historiques en France depuis le XVIe siècle.” Revue Historique 1.1 (1876), 37–38. 19 “La réalité passée, nous ne l’observons pas, nous ne l’a connaissons que par ressemblance avec la réalité actuelle. Pour se représenter dans quelles conditions se sont produits les faits passés, il faut donc chercher, par l’observation de l’humanité présente, dans quelles conditions se produisent les faits analogues du present” (Charles Seignobos, La méthode historique appliquée aux sciences sociales (Paris: F. Alcan, 1901), 84); cf. on this same subject, Seignobos, “Les conditions psychologiques de la connaissance en histoire.” Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 24 (1887), 168–179. 20 Charles Seignobos and Émile Durkheim, “Debate on explanation in history and sociology (1908).” In Steven Lukes, ed., The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts of Sociology and Its Method (London: Macmillan, 1982), 220. 21 R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), 247. 22 Ibid., 294. 23 According to André Burguière, until 1939, “a third, and in some years more than half, of the articles published by the Annales dealt with the present time” (“Histoire d’une histoire: la naissance des Annales.” Annales ESC 34.6 (1979), 1347–1359, here 1354). On the same topic, see also “Face au present. Politique des temporalités.” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 75.3–4 (2020), 493–516. 24 Cf. François Bedarida, “La dialectique passé/présent et la pratique historienne.” In F. Bedarida, ed., L’Histoire et le métier d’historien en France 1945–1995 (Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1995), 75–88, here 76. 25 Philippe Joutard, “La Tyrannie de l’actualité.” L’Histoire 137 (October 1990), 94. 26 Cf. François Furet, Un itinéraire intellectuel. L’historien-journaliste de France-Observateur au Nouvel Observateur, 1958–1997. Ed. Mona Ozouf (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1999); as well as Michael Scott Christofferson, “François Furet between history and journalism, 1958–1965.” French History 15.4 (December 2001), 421–447. 27 As well put by Temístocles Cezar, “François Furet.” In Mauricio Parada, ed., Os historiadores – clássicos da história. Volume III (Petrópolis–Rio de Janeiro: Vozes–PUC Rio, 2014), 155–177, here 162.

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Reflections on Marc Bloch’s Maxim 28 On Jean Lacouture’s approach to journalism, see Jean Lacouture, Enquête sur l’auteur (Paris: Arléa, 1989). 29 Jean Lacouture, “L’Histoire immédiate.” In Jacques Le Goff and Roger Chartiers, eds., La Nouvelle Histoire (Paris: Retz, 1978), 229–254. 30 Lacouture, “L’Histoire immédiate,” 238–239. 31 Mona Ozouf, “Longue durée et temps présent.” In Histoire et temps présent. Journées des correspondants départementaux, 28–29 novembre 1980 (Paris: CNRS, 1981), 50–60, here 52. 32 Pierre Nora, “Histoire du présent.” Annuaire de l’EHESS (1977–1978), 177–178. 33 Among the benchmarks that punctuated the increasing success of the history of the present in France in the 1980s, we might add, for instance, the creation of the Vingtième siècle journal in 1984, as well as the inclusion of the word “present” in the Dictionnaire des sciences historiques in 1986. 34 Lucien Febvre, “Vivre l’histoire.” Mélanges d’histoire sociale 3 (1943), 5–18, here 8. 35 “For history has no choice in the matter, it systematically gathers in, classifies and assembles past facts in accordance with the present needs. It consults death in accordance with the needs of life” (Lucien Febvre, A New Kind of History. From the Writings of Lucien Febvre (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 41). 36 Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief, 5. 37 Lucien Febvre, “History and Psychology (1938).” In A New Kind of History, 7. 38 Lucien Febvre, “Civilisation: évolution d’un mot et d’un groupe d’idées’.” In Civilisation, le mot et l’idée. Première semaine internationale de synthèse, 2 (Paris: La Rénaissance du Livre, 1930). 39 Lucien Febvre, “Examen de conscience d’une histoire et d’un historien.” In  Combats pour l’histoire (Paris: Colin, 1953), 15. 40 See Henri-Irénée Marrou, De la connaissance historique (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 35. 41 Marrou, De la conaissance, 37. 42 Ibid., 49. 43 Ibid., 221. 44 Ibid., 197. 45 According to Georges Duby, Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion, 1981), 54. 46 Jean-Pierre Vernant, Entre Mythe et Politique (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 50. 47 Jacques Le Goff, À la recherche du Moyen Âge (Paris: Seuil, 2003), 13. 48 Ibid., 164. 49 Just a few examples, in chronological order, spaning from 1956 to 2010: Jacques Le Goff, Marchands et banquiers du Moyen Age (Paris: PUC, 1956); Les Intellectuels au Moyen Age (Paris: Seuil, 1957); Pour l’amour des villes (Paris: Textuel, 1997); Le Moyen Age et l’argent: essai d’anthropologie historique (Paris: Perrin, 2010). 50 Georges Duby, “Aujourd’hui, l’historien.” Magazine Littéraire 164 (September 1980), 20. 51 Georges Duby, “Et ils crèrent la cité.” Magazine Littéraire 169 (February 1981), 69.

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3 WHEN DOES THE PRESENT BECOME THE PAST? Jeremi Suri

We rarely understand a moment until it has passed. That is especially true for traumatic events, like the beginnings of a conflict, when emotions and instantaneous reactions overwhelm situational analysis. The enthusiastic crowds across Europe that greeted the start of war in the summer of 1914 had little sense that they were marching into four years of stalemated trench fighting, mass death, and social and economic dislocation – a disaster that would usher in the end of a century of European global predominance. Stefan Zweig, a highly regarded Jewish writer and one of the era’s most astute observers, described the frenzy that for a moment gave wild and almost irresistible momentum to the worst crime of our time. . . . Every little post office worker who usually worked from morning to night, Monday to Saturday, sorting letters without a break, every clerk, every cobbler suddenly saw another possibility lying ahead – he could be a hero.1 Here was the intoxicating allure of war, experienced at the conflict’s start and replicated at many other times in many other societies. Historical perspective has exposed what Zweig characterized as the “childishly naïve and gullible” shortsightedness of citizens moved by instinct and by lies. The misjudgments of the moment are revealed not only by the passage of time, but by the willingness to interrogate initial prejudices and predictions. What historian James Joll called the “unspoken assumptions” of 1914 distorted how people on the cusp of disaster understood their predicament. Present decisions are built on distortions, intensified under stress, and then subject to interrogation by the historically minded analyst.2 A different dynamic occurs during less abrupt periods of social change, like a gradual shift in modes of economic production and consumption. In the decades after the Second World War, the United States made intensive investments in industrial infrastructure – including factories, highways, and fossil fuel extraction – at home and abroad. These investments contributed to immediate prosperity, particularly in the most industrialized regions, but they locked these areas into work patterns and technologies that became outdated in a few short decades. The postwar “economic miracle” was also the seed of the “rust belt.” The transition from industrial to digital production, largely unacknowledged in the postwar decades, brought unemployment and dysfunction to what had felt like the most industrially advanced and economically secure places, such as Detroit, the English West Midlands, and the 32

DOI: 10.4324/9781003026570-4

When Does the Present Become the Past?

German Ruhrgebiet. The changes were slow, unseen by most leaders in times of prosperity, and largely ignored until it was too late. Historical perspective elucidates the ignored patterns of change that evade the headlines, even as they reorder society.3 Amid sudden conflict and gradual change alike, contemporary actors neglect the deeper causes and miss the enduring effects of events around them. “Presentism” is the frequent tendency to overestimate the importance of the obvious, immediate, and sensational while simultaneously discounting the longer-term influences and effects. It is the narrow focus on the moment that neglects wider context. It is the legitimate but distorting instinct to manage a crisis without understanding why the crisis occurred and what might come next. This chapter will address the perils of presentism, especially for policy-makers, and describe how historical thinking offers a necessary antidote. Historical thinking for government leaders does not require a return to the archives or even a deep familiarity with historiography. It calls for a focus on historical questions, even in moments of intense crisis. Historically thinking policy-makers should raise a number of queries: what were the long-term causes of this moment? How should those causes affect our understanding of the moment and our possible responses? How will the developments of the past shape the effects of our responses to the current crisis? What are the likely unintended but historical implications of our current behavior? These questions push present-obsessed policymakers to look back before the current moment and examine the dynamics that linger below the surface. Historical thinkers see the flash in front of them, but they remain attentive to the ever-shifting ground on which we stand – moved both by slow continental drift and catastrophic earthquake. To command effectively in the contemporary terrain, we need present awareness of what is going on and historical perspective on why and how things are changing. Historian John Lewis Gaddis articulates this point eloquently when he writes about a “landscape of history.” This chapter describes a historical mapping of the policy landscape broader than the decision-maker’s normal, narrow confines.4 Journalistic writing about the present is more and less than the first draft of history. The most astute reporters capture the feelings of the moment, the confusion, the uncertainty. They take us into the experiences of those living through the start of a war or a shift in modes of production. Contemporary description elucidates how people acted in the moment, often in ways that are not well documented. Zweig’s account of the First World War is a classic example. His awestruck description of the “great wave” of militarism that “broke over humanity so suddenly” is essential to any retelling of a conflict that ultimately produced millions of maimed and despondent citizens.5 But Zweig’s vivid descriptions do not tell us much about why this phenomenon took shape. In his memoir he relies on a simple Freudian analysis of human aggression, which explains little and probably distorts analysis of the war. For this author and other shaken observers of murderous events, the causes are necessarily “mysterious.” Although Zweig’s memoir is not an academic analysis of the war’s origins, it is a frustrated effort to understand how his comfortable fin-de-siècle European milieu destroyed itself. The struggle to understand the unthinkable would ultimately drive Zweig to suicide.6 When contemporary observers, even those as astute as Zweig, try to explain the causes of events around them, their perspective frequently mistakes immediate triggers for deeper motivations and pressures. Although they reveal what people think they are doing in a given moment – and here Zweig is a master storyteller – real-time assessments rarely probe deeply into the hidden, unspoken, and often unrecognized reasons for behavior. Context is foreshortened in contemporary analysis, and causes are narrowed. Although we closely follow the trajectory of the bullet striking the exposed body, we do not gain a full understanding of why the gunman aimed in that direction, and why he pulled the trigger. 33

Jeremi Suri

Fyodor Dostoyevsky tells us we might never get a good explanation for the deepest motivations of the human mind, but the historian must try to uncover reasons for why things in the past transpired. When we analyze why something happens, and query our original, contemporary, explanations – that is when the present becomes the past. In the original moment, reaction takes precedence. What shall we do? That is not a historical question. Once we step back and ask why this happened, we have made a move that is fundamentally historical. Time and distance are generally sufficient to escape the dominant reactive impulses, but that is not always the case. The contested political and social disruption of some events lingers for so long that even decades later it is difficult to inquire seriously about their causes. More than twenty years after the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, most Americans have resisted asking why terrorists targeted the country and its citizens. Killing the “evil men” who carried out the atrocities because “they hate what we stand for” is more satisfying than examining how the United States might have provoked their violence. The links between American actions and those of the terrorists are essential to any causal analysis, even if the responsibility for the murder of innocent civilians on September 11, 2001, rests squarely on the shoulders of the airplane hijackers. They killed, but what caused them to kill remains under-analyzed.7 To historicize an event or episode requires the discipline to suspend reactive explication for critical, narrative inquiry. When did this moment really begin? How is our current experience part of a longer story that originates far back in the past and extends into the future? Time and distance are not the sole, nor the most important, touchstones for historical inquiry about the present; a determination to evaluate uncomfortable causes is what matters most. Few can summon that discipline in the moment, and still fewer can do it later when memories remain politicized. Although collected evidence in an archive can help to ground analysis, those materials are also assembled amid the reactions of the moment, and not as a function of a deeper consideration of causes. The archive does not reveal why events occurred; it offers clues that are subject to interpretation by the analyst. To historicize, then, is about what one does with evidence – the questions one asks of it – more than about which evidence and how much of it one acquires. More footnotes do not make for better history. A compelling narrative, focused on human motivations in a changing context, tells us so much more. Proximity to an event makes alternative pathways difficult to see. Once the weapons are fired and the war commences, it is hard to imagine a different experience unfolding. Once Zweig’s European cosmopolitans marched off to war, proposing peaceful possibilities among adversaries became almost impossible to envision, at least in the short term. How could Wilhelmine Germany and czarist Russia coexist any longer? Despite the obvious and immediate reasons for war, the two countries had, of course, lived side by side, more or less peacefully, for decades. The popular momentum towards armed conflict ahead of the First World War over time closed off different outcomes and disguised the many contingencies that might make war avoidable. Christopher Clark has shown that at many junctures German, French, Russian, and Austrian leaders could have pulled back to stop the outbreak of the conflict had they thought more deeply about the trajectory of events and the tragedy that awaited. They did not pursue these alternatives because they were obsessed with the immediate crisis after the assassination of the Austrian Archduke and felt compelled to react to escalating threats as national armies mobilized. They gave exclusive attention to present slights and dangers, and ignored deeper historical causes, consequences, and precedents. They were resigned to a conflict they wished they could avoid. In Clark’s account, European leaders were “sleepwalkers” following a path that became more and more obvious to them and, 34

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ultimately, inescapable. They lacked the awareness, flexibility, and creativity of thought necessary to see that war was not inevitable, as indeed nothing is in history.8 To those living through the 1914 crisis, what was previously unthinkable became increasingly inevitable. Even faced with the unimaginable horrors of world war, that sense of inevitability was hard to escape. Fatalism became a default in mainstream thought. By 1916 the daily killing of thousands of men stuck in trenches seemed normal. It was easier to keep fighting, and counting the dead, than to stop and change direction. To end the war meant accepting personal responsibility for the rash, rushed decisions that had caused so much suffering. Every decisionmaker had strong incentives to continue ignoring the historically obvious, sending more boys to their death in the name of combating the enemy. War had been inevitable, so patriots had to accept their duty and keep fighting. Suffering ennobled the present while it denied the past.9 Despite the perceived necessity of conflict, war did not have to come and it nearly did not. Acting with historical perspective, and not simply responding to the emotional pressures of the moment, would have opened up an array of alternative outcomes, many of which did not involve war. The traditions of European great power diplomacy, exemplified by Metternich and Bismarck, had encouraged negotiation and compromise, rather than war, in resolving tensions. Those traditions were ignored and then forgotten in July  1914. Present inclinations toward aggression occluded historical peacemaking successes. Seen in the context of the historical longue durée, the turn to war that seemed obvious and inevitable actually becomes a historical puzzle – a departure from what was most likely and made more sense. Presentist policy perspectives induced a war of necessity that historical perspectives rejected as absurd.10 The limits of presentism are also evident during moments of strategic surprise, like the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 or the terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001. Each of these “bolts from the blue” achieved surprise less from “mastermind” planning than from a conjunction of circumstantial factors – including domestic political pressures, which distracted the American leadership, and which the attackers did nothing to generate. Both Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and George W. Bush confronted strong anti-interventionist sentiments in Congress and among the public. Both leaders neglected signs of coming conflict – including the stated aims of their adversaries – that were lost in more immediate attention to other pressing political matters, including congressional debates about budgets. The tragic results at Pearl Harbor and on September 11, 2001, were not inevitable. Many contingencies had to fall into place, including weather, timing, and the performance of individuals in the circumstances. The role of chance in these attacks is lost in the enormity and apparent irreversibility of the outcome. The failure to predict a unique and unlikely event looks like an “intelligence failure” to those dealing with the immediate consequences. “How did well-informed people neglect the coming tragedy?” victims exclaim. “Someone must have known this would happen,” the reporter on the scene surmises. Often no one could have expected what in retrospect appears obvious. A recognition of both indeterminacy and multicausality in the complex mix of forces contributing to recent experience is what separates historical from presentist analysis. The present becomes the past when we move beyond a mere description of what happened to explore the many previous decisions and occurrences that led to the episode. Those decisions and occurrences were not inevitable and they were not designed to produce the outcomes that they precipitated. Analyzing the many pasts that contributed to the present – that is the essence of historicizing our contemporary world. In the lovely The Landscape of History, alluded to earlier, John Lewis Gaddis uses a visual metaphor to describe what it means to analyze the present as part of the past. Gaddis writes of “seeing like a historian,” which involves making legible the connections between what came 35

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before our current moment and how those connections continue to influence our experiences, even when we do not initially recognize them. He calls for a rejection of reductionist claims, often politically driven, and a search for balance between the frequently contradictory forces that create present conditions. Gaddis wants us to see the unexpected conjunction of human patterns of behavior that shape the world we live in, and that will continue to transform the world in unpredictable ways. We prepare for the future, he argues, by studying evolving patterns of behavior, from past to present, while humbly acknowledging that we cannot be sure where they will lead. Echoing Hegel, Gaddis calls for close scrutiny of the long-term “tension between opposites.”11 This formulation is especially useful in a politically polarized time such as our own. Confronted by provocative rhetoric and extreme behavior, we are all inclined to choose sides – to condemn, promote, or defend. When we feel threatened in our values and our bodies, we flee to familiar positions and respond forcefully. These conditions turn present interpretation into confirmation of bias, rather than thoughtful interpretation. Partisanship is the obvious manifestation of this phenomenon – everything we witness is filtered through the prism of what we already believe. Faith and prejudice, not a reasoned analysis of available evidence, drives how we think. This is true at some of our most elite educational institutions, and it is commonplace in policy-making circles. Gaddis gives us a way out of this cul-de-sac by articulating how “seeing like a historian” is different from acting like a partisan. He emphasizes the mystery of human behavior and how every decision is dependent on others, but he nonetheless insists that actors still have choices. He also places great store in the role of circumstance, the ways that conditions at a particular moment can have lasting consequences for later choices. Decisions are layered one on another, meaning that the old choices do not disappear but continue to influence later activities, even if unseen or unacknowledged by later actors. This is an ecological way of viewing the present, very different from a unitary focus on action and reaction. The phenomena we experience today, Gaddis explains, are conditioned by various movements of peoples and resources over time, deep below the surface of what we initially see. To survive we are habituated to focus on what is happening right now – to ascertain how the current of the river flows at this moment. To do more than just survive – to lead and to prosper – societies must understand the geological and climactic changes that are slowly remaking everything around us. That is literally and figuratively true. The boats we build must not only sail on today’s river current; they must also function on evolving waterways shaped by deposits laid down long ago, by seasonal changes in rainfall, and by water siphoned off for other uses far upstream. We are in motion, but so too is everything around us. We cannot understand where we are and where we are going unless we consider the movements of our surroundings. A presentist outlook is static: what just happened? A historical one is dynamic: what has been happening that affected our experience today? Presentism is about surviving, keeping the boat afloat on rough waters. Historical thinking is about sustainability, helping the boat to perform in every type of river and all variety of conditions. To think in the present is to find oneself bombarded with tactical pressures and opportunities. They are tactical because they are about immediate demands. Our overloaded daily email inboxes, which we struggle to manage, manifest this phenomenon. We spend much of our days reacting to questions, requests, complaints, and, of course, spam. Even successful professionals struggle to sift through this enormous volume of stimuli, to identify the small number of worthwhile messages, and to respond expeditiously. They endeavor to manage crises, please powerful people, and put out fires before they spread. 36

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My research shows that these pressures have made vital leadership positions (including the U.S. presidency) impossible, even for the most talented, hard-working figures. They are stuck in a “reaction doom loop” (my own phrase) that diminishes the executive’s time and energy to accomplish anything big and consequential. The pressures of partisanship make this worse. Each day is a struggle to keep up and please a wide coalition of people, rather than solve real problems. Leaders survive by minimizing risks and serving as many stakeholders as possible on their side. Reaching out to the other side and taking risks makes no sense when every pressure is short term and every goal is subjected to public reassessment. Modern presidents possess incredible power, which they use for narrow presentist purposes. They cannot get beyond their daily inboxes. Every moment of their time is cut into small increments and occupied with an immediate challenge. You can see this in their daily calendars, which I have studied closely. Most presidents barely have time to nourish themselves or exercise – there is just too much to do in every minute. This was even true for Donald Trump, who spent his presidency obsessing about his enemies, his reputation, and losing the popular vote twice. Presentist pressures leave leaders with little time for reflection, little space for deep thinking. They are always running to catch up, rather than charting a future course based on a thoughtful understanding of the past. Their repeated failures are symptomatic of our overworked, shortterm society. Most business, school, and community leaders face similar circumstances. Our leaders are often hurting themselves and our society by responding to problems as a series of crises.12 The problem is not only too little time for the insatiable demands placed on leaders, but also that they are deluged with too much information. At every level in modern societies, we are bombarded with more images, sounds, and words than any human brain can handle. Our current society places a premium on who can show command of more information than others. If you have hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers you are now an “influencer,” even if you have little to add, and influence little of importance. If you can dig up embarrassing information about someone, you are now perceived as a mortal threat, even if your information is derivative and unconfirmed. And if you can mobilize more information to defend a position – even dubious ones, such as bogus claims about stolen elections or the dangers of vaccines – you are now politically powerful, even if all your sources are intentionally distorting the truth. The aggregator of words and images has trumped the deep, creative thinker. This is the height of present obsessions – what can you tell me now? Whoever can tell me the most, regardless of quality, wins. Saying more in different ways is always better in this media moment. Derivative outrage is familiar and comfortable for many; real innovation, building on past wisdom, is undesirable and widely resisted. Our presentism breathlessly repackages the same experience; it obsesses over one immediate point of view. Just as important as what happened is the reaction to it, how it is spun. Immediacy is coupled with insularity. Presentist thinking emphasizes networks of connection between people, but these networks are regularly overwhelmed by current needs and shared points of view. They respond to current demands, not broader concerns that might transcend the moment. They echo opinions, rather than encouraging a diversity of perspectives. Current connections tend to create silos and homogeneity, rather than openness and heterogeneity. This is an old story, but one multiplied ad infinitum by the ease and reach of digital communications. The internet ghettoizes citizens and leaders alike. Historical thinking about the present ventures outside these ghettoes. It begins by asking not about content but about origins: where did the current information come from? Source analysis, or heuristics, matters to historians in ways that are alien to journalists and polemicists. 37

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Tracing the origins of information and its various modifications over time, before its current deployments, allows us to see biases, limitations, and distortions. Source analysis also asks how the same evidence could be interpreted differently and deployed in different contexts for different purposes. By asking where the information comes from, even before arguing over what it means, a historical perspective counteracts the tendency toward confirmation bias. It encourages skepticism about conventional opinions. It also calls for a comparison with information from other sources: what other information can shed light on the matter in question? This is a crucial question that policy-makers often fail to ask, and its absence prevents historical learning. Leaders repeat the mistakes of the past when they recycle old assumptions using new information. Policy-makers under pressure often react quickly, seeing confirmation of their preexisting assumptions in the information presented to them. This was true for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson in the first days of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War, respectively. Kennedy saw evidence that his Soviet counterpart was seeking to provoke war; Johnson was reassured that the North Vietnamese would surrender under overwhelming American military pressure. The information in both cases was colored by the biases of the advisers who circulated it. They assumed, incorrectly, that their adversaries thought as they did. Kennedy realized this, and during the second week of the Cuban Missile Crisis he tasked his brother, Robert, to find evidence that might provide an alternate explanation for Soviet General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev’s behavior. Different information, coming from the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, and Khrushchev himself, convinced the American president that his counterpart was, in fact, equally averse to war and open to a reasonable compromise. Since succeeding Joseph Stalin, Khrushchev had defined his goals for the Soviet Union around economic growth, not victory in battle. Kennedy used this information to pursue peace successfully. The secret removal of American missiles from Turkey and a public non-invasion pledge toward Cuba were the diplomatic carrot that the president proffered to get Soviet missiles out of the Western Hemisphere. Washington and Moscow then also committed to the first serious nuclear arms control negotiations. A historical perspective on the information coming in, rather than a singular focus on the alarming news of Moscow’s deployments to Cuba, allowed for this shift in Cold War policies from nuclear escalation to arms control. Lyndon Johnson never shifted his thinking on Vietnam. Until the end of his presidency, he remained beholden to the extensive reporting from various government agencies about North Vietnamese aggression and weakness. He also received repeated confirmation that the American people would rally to his support if he looked strong in fighting global communism. The information came to the president from the “best and brightest” men in America, who were his closest advisers, but he rarely questioned if they were good sources for a nuanced understanding of Vietnam. Johnson neglected better information, often available from area experts, pointing to different policy choices, particularly military de-escalation.13 Johnson was so obsessed with defeating communism in Vietnam that he doubled down on the biased information he had received. He intensified the acquisition of information that justified his polices, and he repressed information that argued otherwise. The president increased his commitment to a losing cause, distorting U.S. policy in other regions to generate support for his failing efforts. This meant increased American backing for brutal dictators in countries like Brazil and Indonesia, who promised to help Johnson in Vietnam, even as they ignored all of Washington’s demands for basic democratization in their societies. Assisting the president’s current war commitments was more important than historical American interests around the globe. Justifying U.S. intervention in Vietnam became more important than interrogating why 38

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current actions were not working and what could replace them. This was the height of willful historical ignorance.14 Lyndon Johnson left the White House in January 1969 still unable to see beyond his present predicament. Vietnam dominated his presidency, and he therefore missed numerous other opportunities abroad and at home. His presentism was ultimately self-defeating. Johnson’s tragic failures in Vietnam point to the crucial distinction between information and knowledge. The president received an overwhelming amount of data and reporting on the war, and he overextended himself trying to read it all. No president worked harder, but Johnson still knew precious little about the war or Vietnamese politics, history, and culture. That was because he pushed to make all the information fit his pre-existing understanding of American superiority and righteousness, rather than probing deeper to conceptualize Vietnam as a sophisticated country with a rich and complex culture and history. The president was responding to the immediate and overwhelming challenge of a distant Southeast Asian Cold War proxy for Soviet interests, not the historical reality of a culture and society with deep reservoirs of pride and independence. Johnson should have known the Vietnamese had long resisted Chinese and French domination before the American intervention. He also should have known that foreign sponsorship of nation-building rarely works. Johnson missed these insights because he was in perpetual crisis mode, desperately reacting to the war in real time, rather than seeking to understand the conflict in its fullest historical dimensions. Knowledge requires history. We know things, like the safety of vaccines, because there is an established history of their trials and their effective public use. We understand different cultures because we study their development over time. We empathize with different experiences – personal and collective – because we situate them in their past and present. Ernest May and Richard Neustadt famously showed that effective leadership requires this “placing” of stakeholders to succeed. It is what we do as citizens of a nation and members of a community – we locate ourselves in a longer arc of history that connects us with those around us and those who came before. How else can we explain our identities?15 Context is crucial, and it is almost always underappreciated in presentist analyses – as in the statistics informing President Johnson that the United States was winning in Vietnam because it was killing more of the enemy’s combatants. The recourse to such “kill rates” offers a pristine (and perverse) example of presentist thinking. American leaders received the same misleading data in Iraq and Afghanistan forty years later. Killing more people when fighting insurgents in their home territory often creates more insurgents, not fewer. It also alienates those who remain bystanders. Context is what matters, not the kill rate. To see that point, however, one must have a sense of how the occupied society has developed and how citizens think about insiders and outsiders. The kill data given to presidents measures discrete actions in the present only and denies them a culturally and historically constructed meaning, based on an understanding of the past. In many settings, the use of more violence makes the powerful actor weaker and more vulnerable. Leaders must insist that their military advisers slow down and look back to make sense of the alluring data adorning their pretty, but deceptive, PowerPoint presentations. Victory in the present can hide deeper defeat in the historical evolution of a society. If the point of American intervention in Vietnam (as well as in Iraq and Afghanistan) was to rebuild those societies with functioning governments, then actions which defeated adversaries militarily but undermined social and political order were, ultimately, defeating for the United States as well. To assess this longer dynamic as decisions about the use of force are being made is to 39

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historicize one’s present – to understand the current moment as part of a longer past that will affect the future, even when today’s gangs of insurgents are dead. After expending billions of dollars and killing thousands of people, the United States military left Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. These societies, however, continued to resemble what they were prior to American interventions. American power could not wrangle historical processes that proved much more enduring than the gadgets and tactics of the moment. This does not mean that the past is destiny – it surely is not, and these societies did end up changed – but it does mean that powerful actors must understand the limits of their present capabilities, no matter how plentiful and advanced. Historical perspective encourages humility among the most powerful. The present becomes the past when we recognize that our current problems, and our preoccupation with solving them, are only small parts of a larger, ongoing story. The hubris of an ambitious, self-confident government that tells itself it is the last great hope on earth makes the narcissism of presentism hard to resist. This is an ailment that has infected American foreign policy making, resulting in enormous damage at least three times in the past half century. Strategic thinking is the only antidote to the multiplying demands on a powerful nation’s resources. What Paul Kennedy famously described as the tendency toward overstretch and decline in the history of empires is a consequence of hyper-responsiveness – the urge to overreact in crises. Presentism causes competencies to be spread too widely, with short-term emergency spending replacing necessary long-term investment. The demands of the present starve the future when leaders respond quickly and instinctively to current pressures, allowing the immediate to drive their actions.16 Strategic thinking is the antidote to short-term, tactical thinking. Strategy is, among other things, the art of connecting one’s immediate conditions to a longer narrative, in which the past helps to explain present conditions and to anticipate what they may genuinely portend for the future. Strategy focuses on a study of what matters most across time, and which actions are most likely to serve desirable ends in an enduring manner. In this sense, past values and experiences should drive reactions to present challenges, rather than having policy defined solely by immediate outcomes and threats. The question should not be: how does this country threaten us today? We can always imagine terrifying dangers from the “other.” The appropriate strategic question is: what are the most meaningful values and interests of my society, and where and how are they most imperiled today? One can only answer this last, crucial question by historicizing the present. Values and interests evolve over time, they reflect past decisions, and they draw on remembered experiences that remain alive in the public consciousness. At the end of the Second World War, for example, President Harry Truman and many other Americans recognized that destroying fascist adversaries, their current priority, was essential but did not represent the sum of their interests. Postwar planning in Washington motivated influential figures, especially George Marshall and Dean Acheson (both future secretaries of state), to examine what role the defeated countries of Germany, Italy, and Japan had played in the evolution of American power in prior decades. That history helped to set priorities for the economic and political reforms Washington wanted to encourage in the former fascist countries as the war ended. To “win” the peace, leaders in Washington had to understand what peace had looked like before the war, and prioritize the conditions that could sustain it again. Despite the traumas of the recent fighting, the historical experiences of Americans in the Great Depression had taught them that they needed prosperous allies and reliable security partners in the very countries that caused the current conflict. The isolationism and beggar-thyneighbor economic policies of American leaders early in the Depression had contributed to the 40

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suffering of millions of Americans and foreign citizens. For better or worse, the U.S. economy depended on reliable open markets in Europe and Asia. American democracy also benefited from partners who worked together through institutions like the League of Nations and its successor, the United Nations, to sanction aggressive regimes. The history of the early twentieth century emphasized the importance of international cooperation for American prosperity and security. U.S. strategy at the end of the Second World War prioritized these insights. It focused on rebuilding and democratizing Germany and Japan as part of a global liberal capitalist system, with the United States at the center. This meant representative governments, private property protections, and open markets for trade. It also required large investments in the industrial facilities that had been destroyed during the war, as well as support for the labor unions and other institutions that helped sustain working families. American leaders shifted their priorities to pursue these foreign reconstruction goals because they conceived their own postwar moment as part of a longer historical trajectory. “Keeping these countries down,” as some suggested the United States should do, would respond to current emotional demands for revenge, but would undermine the sources of prosperity and security that mattered most to Americans. Seeing current challenges as part of a longer narrative allowed for more effective policy-making. The European Recovery Program in 1947 (the “Marshall Plan”) reflected the courageous and strategic American decision to put aside present animosities and invest millions of precious dollars in rebuilding traditional partners who would solidify a resurgent American-led “West.” Leaders in Washington could not have pursued this policy or sold it to a war-weary public without the historical perspective that they brought to the present crisis. Their earlier efforts in 1946 to focus only on the immediate issues of military occupation had, predictably, failed to create order or progress after the fascist surrender in Europe and Asia. President Truman and his advisers reconceptualized their difficult moment as an opportunity to invest in a Western European and Japanese future that built on a thoughtful reading of the past. The presence of an aggressive regime in Moscow, which sought to build an alternative communist system, helped to focus American attention on the historical opportunity of the early postwar years.17 Secretary of State Marshall’s speech announcing the program, delivered on June 5, 1947, offers a model for strategic thinking. “It is logical,” Marshall explained, “that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace. Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.”18 These words helped connect the present and the past for listeners anxious about the future. Marshall made similar points when testifying to Congress and speaking to audiences around the country. He not only advocated for a policy; he sought to change the public understanding of the postwar moment. There has never been another Marshall Plan, although the United States has repeatedly invested in nation-building efforts around the world since then. These projects have failed because of difficult local conditions, regional resistance, and, especially, American historical ignorance. Leaders in Washington have approached foreign “problems” as immediate crises, and they have conceptualized international development efforts as opportunities to build new societies on a rapid timetable. They have treated the present as prologue for an imagined, unrooted future that denies the powerful history that matters most to people on the ground.19 41

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The diversity of present human experiences holds up a mirror to the diversity of human history. The present becomes the past when we see our current moment as one part of a longer story that both precedes us and extends into the future. The changes of this moment in time are less monumental and transformative than we think. Our footprints will remain in the soil so we must be careful where we step. But our steps do not remake the terrain or determine its composition. We must recognize that we stand on the ground occupied by many predecessors, and they are with us still. The past indeed haunts us, and it is when we see the ghosts, and contemplate their memories, that we are at our best. Historical thinkers are the Hamlets of their world, conversing with the ghosts of their forerunners. They might make poor politicians, but they educate better policy-makers.

Notes 1 Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday. Trans. Anthea Bell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 246–247. 2 Ibid.; James Joll, 1914: The Unspoken Assumptions (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968). 3 See Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); Gert-Jan Hospers, “Restructuring Europe’s Rustbelt: The Case of the German Ruhrgebiet.” Intereconomics 39 (May–June  2004), 147–156, www.intereconomics.eu/contents/year/2004/number/3/ article/restructuring-europe-s-rustbelt-the-case-of-the-german-ruhrgebiet.html. 4 John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 5 Zweig, The World of Yesterday, 246. 6 Ibid. 7 On this point, see Peter Bergen, The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al-Qaeda (New York: Free Press, 2011). 8 Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (New York: Harper, 2013). 9 Philip Zelikow points to the possibilities for war termination in 1916, and the failures of European leaders: The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Battle to End the Great War, 1916–1917 (New York: Public Affairs, 2021). 10 For a recent similar analysis, see Jack S. Levy and William Mulligan, “Why 1914 but Not Before? A  Comparative Study of the July Crisis and Its Precursors.” Security Studies 30 (April–May  2021), 213–244. 11 Gaddis, The Landscape of History, 135. 12 Jeremi Suri, The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America’s Highest Office (New York: Basic Books, 2017). 13 This is the core argument in the enduring account of the Vietnam War written by David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972). 14 See Mark Atwood Lawrence, The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021). 15 Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers (New York: Free Press, 1986), esp. 157–231. 16 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987). 17 See Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 182–219; Jeremi Suri, Liberty’s Surest Guardian: Rebuilding Nations after War, from the Founders to Obama (New York: Free Press, 2011), 124–164. 18 The text of Secretary of State George Marshall’s speech at Harvard University, June 5, 1947, is available at: www.marshallfoundation.org/marshall/the-marshall-plan/marshall-plan-speech. 19 This is a central argument in Suri, Liberty’s Surest Guardian.

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4 DOES THE PAST STILL MATTER? Zoltán Boldizsár Simon

The Growing Footprint of the Future In the early twenty-first century, the future takes hold of the public imagination in a broad range of societal practices. From Hollywood blockbusters to Earth System science papers and reports of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it presides over both leisure activities and social anxieties – at least in the segments of societies that can afford such leisure and worries. With the emergence of a visual culture that directs much of the literary attention toward technology-boosted cinematic and online streaming experiences, technoscientific futures are among the major preoccupations of the film industry today. The promise and anticipated potential social dysfunction of technology futures are regularly turned into entertainment, from comedies to the likes of Upload to large-scale epics such as Westworld or Blade Runner 2049. Such technological utopias and dystopias not only appear on the screen but already pervade our social life. On the one hand, it is not necessary to dream with transhumanists about technologically enhanced beings with capacities that greatly exceed those associated with the biologically human life-form. Even smaller-scale technologies like neuro-prosthetic limbs are already entailing the promise of redefining humanity. On the other hand, the perils of advanced technologies are inseparable from their promises. As we give in to the consumption of dystopian climate fiction narratives and visual imagery on screen,1 algorithms are used to track our consumer choices. By now, such algorithmic technologies govern everything from dating choices to crime prediction,2 while, on larger scales, anxieties about the future fuel a form of “precautionary politics.”3 Technology is the main driver also of the Anthropocene predicament. It equally “fuels” multiple socio-environmental crises and the responses intended to manage these crises. From rapid biodiversity loss and the 2017 water crisis in Cape Town to ocean acidification and the immense scale of global plastic pollution – with an annual production in the last decade of ca. “40 kg of plastics produced annually for each of the 7 billion humans on the planet, approximating the total human biomass”4 – anthropogenic planetary change presents many intersecting threats. And it is very much unclear whether these are the bigger threats, or the proposed means of crisis management, which come in the shape of large-scale technological engineering projects, ranging from geoengineering to genetic de-extinction technologies. DOI: 10.4324/9781003026570-5

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Anthropocene threats are not produced equally, of course. Nor are they necessarily subject to first-hand experience. Much of the world’s population has more existential concerns that preclude worrying about Anthropocene prospects and anthropogenic changes in the condition of the Earth System. Not experiencing Anthropocene anxiety (or not experiencing it in the specific terms of academic knowledge production), however, does not mean being unthreatened by Anthropocene futures. As Julia Adeney Thomas makes abundantly clear, such futures suggest harrowing prospects on a planetary scale. Even if a so-called “Stabilized Earth” scenario could somehow mitigate against the “Hothouse Earth” trajectory of runaway warming, the story could only end “either horrendously or less horribly.”5 What this means is that “in the best-case scenario we should expect green and pleasant lands to become deluged scenes of death and places that once were merely lethargically hot to be scorching and unlivable for ourselves and many other species.”6 According to the Global Climate Risk Index 2021 of the NGO Germanwatch, the three most affected countries by extreme climatic events in 2019 were Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and the Bahamas.7 Two years earlier, in 2017, as Dahlia Simangan points out, five of the ten most affected countries were in the Asia Pacific region, meaning that “the region is experiencing the most pressure to reduce its emissions while pursuing economic development and human welfare.”8 The heightened vulnerability to catastrophic Anthropocene impacts has not been accompanied by an increased variety of crisis management options in the region. For one, the politicization of indigenous (im)mobilities by Pacific activists only adds new layers of complexities to the already complex issue of mobility, central to climate justice discourses.9 All in all, Anthropocene futures are highly contested in their framing, meaning, and political import. To make use of a fitting metaphor in the ecological discourse, it seems to me that the footprint of the future is more and more evident in a growing pool of societal practices. What is at stake, however, is not simply the size of the future’s footprint on contemporary life, but its specific character. Sometime around the mid-twentieth century, we began to conceive of new kinds of futures. The contested futures of the Anthropocene and new technologies (ranging from artificial intelligence to bio- and nanotechnolgies)10 represent qualitatively new modalities of the future. To get a better grasp of what this means, consider first the kinds of futures Western societies are most familiar with: the desired futures entailed in political ideologies. These emerged, together with the modern idea of history, in the period between 1750 and 1850, which Reinhart Koselleck has called the Sattelzeit in the European (mostly German) context, referring to the time when a set of interrelated concepts gained a temporal dimension, such as “utopia,” “progress,” “revolution,” or, for that matter, the concept of history itself. “Utopia,” for instance, was a spatial concept in early modern European thought, located in unknown places in the world. In the Sattelzeit, after most of the globe had been mapped, utopia in the Western imagination was relocated in the future, and assumed a temporal, rather than geographical, association. Instead of reaching it by sailing on water, one was supposed to arrive at utopia through an unfolding process that led to the future. The future and the modern idea of history were born together – and not only in Europe but, as Javier Fernández-Sebastián shows, also in the Hispanic world.11 The idea that we arrive at desired sociopolitical futures though unfolding historical processes, however, is receding. To begin with, the way we think about the future has changed radically. I have analyzed the futures we face in Anthropocene and technoscientific prospects in terms of a disconnection between past and future, and called the new kinds of futures “disconnective futures.”12 Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro mean something similar to this when they note that “the future ceases to be made of the same matter as the past.”13 As a concrete example, think of the futures of greater-than-human intelligence, which are, by definition, impenetrable to our limited human cognitive capacities. 44

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The question I  want to ask in this chapter is, however, not about the growing footprint of new kinds of futures, but about one of the consequences of their emergence. For as the future grows big and unfathomable, there is an existential question that the historically oriented human and social sciences typically avoid asking. Largely repressed, the question only grows more important and urgent. I believe that it is time to face it directly: does the past still matter? To be clear, the question does not imply that only the concerns of disconnective futures would be worth considering. Nor does it entail that all kinds of futures would part ways with all kinds of past. When the coming pages address this question, part of the answer will in fact explicitly point at relations to pasts which keep on assuming a temporal continuity between past, present, and future. Yet it cannot be denied that the necessity of posing the question about the instrumentality of the past is provided by the emergence of disconnective futures, which will lie at the heart of a four-step argument that I develop in this chapter. First, I elaborate on why it is important to pose the question in the first place by making clear that we make the past matter. Second, I review a few modalities of making the past matter in societal practices; third, I examine how this happens in the professionalized practice of historiography. Fourth, and finally, I offer an answer to the most pressing question of how we make the past matter even when new, disconnective futures increasingly seem to render the past inconsequential.

Does the Past Still Matter? Scholars of the human and social sciences – historians in particular – may dismiss the question about the value of the past as nonsense. They may be right to point out how tremendously important it is to point at past patterns and to call out the economic elite and tech gurus who claim to be paving the way to awe-inspiring transformations through disruptive innovations and ideas for the benefit of all. But does this necessarily mean that the past matters, in the ways that human and social scientists claim that it does? This is more doubtful. To see why exactly, consider that critiques of technology futures tend to revolve around two interrelated issues. The most frequently raised point concerns the question of who benefits from technological innovation. For the purposes of this chapter, however, it seems more interesting to note that asking such a question is often accompanied by reasoning that appeals to past analogies. Self-proclaimed innovators and innovations self-branded as transformative are often seen by the human and social sciences as merely redressing old patterns of thought in exploitative endeavors that mirror similar endeavors in the past. The projected images of high-tech devices and technology futures constructed by Silicon Valley companies make for good examples. Human and social scientific critique not only sheds light on how algorithm-driven and AI-inflected futures are erected upon the largely invisible on-demand “ghost work” of low-paid human labor;14 it also argues that such futures are reminiscent of older fantasies. Sun-ha Hong forcefully pursues this line of thought in analyzing the abundance of everyday self-surveillance technologies (from sleep monitoring to exercise trackers), whereby we are “asked to buy into the latest gadget in anticipation of its future ubiquity, to install software for its future functions, and to celebrate prototypes for their glimpse of what, surely, must be around the corner.”15 In Hong’s interpretation, data-driven surveillance relies on “the imagined legacy of the Enlightenment” and amounts to a “honeymoon objectivity,” where “the recurring hope that with this generation of technological marvels, we shall establish a universal grounding to our knowledge, a bedrock of certainty, a genuine route to the raw objective layer of the world around us.”16 Seeing a recurrence of past patterns is only one mode of interpreting present novelty and anticipated futures. Another prominent mode is to configure the relationship of past, present, and 45

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future as a developmental process that unfolds from a past origin (and points onward to potential futures), which is the paradigmatic operation of professionalized historical studies. By reasoning backwards and integrating experienced novelty and anticipated futures into larger processes that extend into the past, it subjects them to the “historical” argument that they are nothing new. Without denying its potential merits, I  have been criticizing this operation as a mode of temporal domestication that is becoming increasingly problematic in facing catastrophic Anthropocene and technoscientific futures.17 Seeing the Anthropocene as unfolding out of past conditions over a deep continuity offers invaluable insights into how the current planetary predicament is being fueled by known past patterns of colonial practices or capitalist modes of production.18 At the same time, focusing on the already known, this paradigmatically “historical” operation seems unable to recognize the claims of Earth System Science (ESS) and of the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) – commissioned by the geological community to study the formalization of the Anthropocene – that maintain the novelty of the Anthropocene predicament by arguing that “the base of the proposed Anthropocene time unit is not defined by the beginning of significant human influence upon the Earth.” Instead, the scientific basis of the Anthropocene, continues the AWG report, rests upon a mid-twentieth-century “rapid increase in scale and extent of global human impact on the planetary environment” which is “clearly recognizable from a wide range of synchronous stratigraphic indicators.”19 Whereas the ESS approach aims to capture the novelty of the systemic condition of the Anthropocene, as attested to by a large array of runaway social and Earth System indicators, human and social scientific interpretations align the Anthropocene with past practices out of which it is assumed to emerge over the course of a cumulatively unfolding historical process.20 Let me call the aforementioned historically oriented interpretive strategies that invoke the past in making sense of the present and the future the recurring past and the unfolding past, respectively. The former refers to seeing the present as a repeated version of the past, while the latter understands the present as the result of processes emerging out of the past. In principle, it is possible to project both interpretive strategies over the very same phenomena and thereby see different things. Moreover, neither of the two are confined to the scholarly world; they just as frequently occur in a variety of societal practices, too. Predictive policing and algorithmic crime prediction, for instance, entail both the unfolding and the recurring past. The unfolding past is present because predictive policing projects past criminal activity into the future on the assumption of behavioral continuity,21 and the recurring past is present because the predictive practice expects the recurrence of past behavior based on the “observation that the best predictor for victimization is in fact victimization itself.”22 Either way, both operations tend to reduce the potential future to that which is already assumed to be known about the past. Posing the question of whether the past matters gains importance in the clash between the claims to novelty in technology and science, on the one hand, and the historically minded humanist interventions based on an appeal to the past, on the other. Although the claims to radical novelty that today seem to accompany every minor occurrence are indeed badly in need of being contextualized, it seems equally hyperbolic that “historical” contextualization effectively reduces future novelty to old patterns of thought and practices of the past. Neither of these attitudes toward time and temporal relations seem sophisticated enough to attend to the complexities of our present – the point from which we make sense of the rapidly changing world by relating it with pasts and futures in a variety of temporal configurations. Phrased this way, the titular question of this chapter gains a new dimension. The question becomes less whether the past matters and more how exactly we do in fact (and, in the first place, whether we should) make the past matter in the face of great complexities and rapid changes in our lifeworlds, amid multiple long-term transformations due to the collision of 46

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society and nature. It is time, then, to have a closer look at the variety of modes in which we might make the past matter.

How the Past Matters in Societal Practices There are various modes in which the past can be said to be effective in the present across societal practices. I would like to discuss a number of them here in a structured manner, considering them as interpretive strategies to configure the relationship between past, present, and future. It seems reasonable to start with the two modalities of making the past matter discussed in the previous section. The unfolding past. The unfolding past as interpretive strategy is the most elementary, and, at the same time, most powerful tool of historicization, based on the premises of modern historical thinking which understands the world in terms of developmental processes.23 Max Weber’s thesis that sees capitalism unfolding out of Protestant ethics may be its paradigmatic example.24 More recently, seeing the Anthropocene as flowing from colonial practices and capitalist modes of production testifies to the same logic. In the early 2020s, colonial practices arguably are the most often highlighted unfolding past legacies, seen as driving and informing present practices from the large-scale process of globalization through contemporary modes of surveillance to biogeography as a knowledge formation.25 The recurring past. Seeing novelty in terms of a cyclical recurrence of past patterns is another pervasive philosophy of history. One might even be tempted to interpret the recurring past as itself a recurring modality of making the past matter, given that versions of it have been identified in Indian philosophy, Western antiquity, Chinese historical thought, Oswald Spengler’s philosophy of history, and Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence.26 Alongside the previously mentioned example of predictive policing, one can meet the recurring past in practices ranging from world-system analysis to financial strategies.27 The present past. In recent discourses on lingering historical injustices and in efforts to call out the racist legacies of certain publicly memorialized figures, the past is often seen as one that refuses to go away, as one that is stuck in the present. Whereas the unfolding past and its development over time ensure both continuity with the past and change that establishes temporal distance in historical interpretations, in the present past the performative break between past and present does not take place.28 Accordingly, the implied task here is, as Victoria Fareld puts it, “to deal with a past that persists as an immanent dimension of the present.”29 The associated past. The past can also be seen as persisting in the present through practices of voluntary endorsement. From nationalist discourses to diaspora identities, the past is embraced in various constructions of belonging. Across ideologies and political divides, identity claims grounded in the past – “imagined” but nonetheless real – ensure that the past remains effective in and constitutive of the present in one way or another. The inherited past. Heritage can be more ambivalent with respect to (in)voluntariness. When societies decide to conserve and preserve whatever they consider their heritage, they typically act with purpose. The inherited past, however, may comprise not only the heritage of past generations that present societies hope to keep but also unwanted heritages, including, for instance, the “toxic heritage” of nuclear waste.30 The ahistorical past. The modes of configuring temporal relations mentioned so far are indebted to modern Western European historical thinking in one way or another (including the currently dominant decolonializing approaches that historicize the present on the familiar premises of Western historicism). Ashis Nandy rightly notes that “historical” constructions of the past, despite their invasive spread across the globe, are not the only ways of meaningfully 47

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relating to the past. Nandy calls for a recognition of “ahistorical” constructions of the past against the historical worldview and its violent legacies, claiming that “millions of people live outside ‘history,’ ” and that those millions “do have theories of the past; they do believe that the past is important and shapes the present and the future, but they also recognize, confront, and live with a past different from that constructed by historians and historical consciousness.”31 What Nandy brings to view here is the distinction between having relations to the past and having a specifically historical relation to the past. Whether or not Nandy is right about the question of what exactly “historical” and “ahistorical” constructions of the past are is beyond the scope of this chapter. What needs to be emphasized here is simply the existence of “ahistorical” constructions of the past. This list could be extended to include video gaming, historical re-enactment practices, nostalgia, and other modes of what might be called the remembered past, or, with a slightly different emphasis, the cultivated past.32 At the same time, it is also important to note that modalities of making the past matter intersect and conflict with one another in a variety of constellations. The associative past of identity constructions, for instance, can equally intersect with inherited, unfolding, and present pasts. Given such an abundance of presently effective pasts, it may seem absurd to suggest that the past does not matter. Yet I will suggest something similar. We should recognize that there is at least an extent to which the past does not matter – even if we should do so only to see how the past that does not seem to matter may nonetheless matter. (More on this later, when I hope to bring resolution to this cryptic idea.) For now, what I want to emphasize is that we need to recognize the extent to which the past does not matter in order to affirm present claims to novelty. As the previous list intended to show, the prerequisite of this affirmation is the realization that we are the ones who make the past matter when attempting to gain an understanding of ourselves and the world. In the first decades of the twenty-first century, we are so accustomed to making the past matter in a large variety of ways that it may be difficult to recognize the fact that our engagements with the past might also have limitations and shortcomings.

How the Past Matters in Professional Historiography A convincing argument about the necessity of setting practical limits to our modalities of making the past matter must begin by acknowledging that there is a societal practice whose assigned task is to make the past matter: professional historical studies. The discipline of history (in particular) and the historically oriented human and social sciences (in general) have a vested interest in making the past matter: for historical studies, disciplinary or otherwise, the past cannot not matter. Since becoming an academic discipline, history has oscillated on a spectrum between two dominant versions of self-justification: the study of the past for its own sake and the study of the past for the sake of the present as an ethically and politically engaged practice.33 Histories of the discipline of history nevertheless agree that even when aiming at supposedly detached investigations of the past, the discipline could not escape serving the practical purposes of the present.34 Questioning the use of the past amounts to an existential threat to the discipline of history as the gatekeeper of making the past matter. Little wonder that the discipline’s response of late to practically any societal challenge is to argue that historical knowledge, historical thinking – and, by extension, the expertise of academic historical scholarship – have never been more needed. It is hard not to empathize with the struggles of the historical profession amid the multiple crises of the university as a bastion of education and knowledge production. In a climate of underfunded humanities, the discipline of history has been hit especially hard. Yet, claims that 48

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“history – the discipline and its subject-matter – can be just the arbiter we need at this critical time,” testify more to a sense of a desperate need for disciplinary reassurance than to a profound societal demand for the expertise of the academic discipline of history.35 This is not to say that professionalized historical studies evade self-reflection. Quite the contrary; the history of the discipline is also a history of constant critical self-reflection. It is just that such self-assessment seldom considers the shortcomings of obsessively historicizing the world in one particular way.36 Whenever it stumbles into crises and challenges, the discipline seems less concerned with exploring how these crises challenge historical expertise and more with bringing its established expertise to them, as Lynn Hunt did recently by aiming to “show why history matters now more than ever.”37 To prove her point, Hunt highlights a variety of practices – from the recent debates on monuments and lingering historical injustices, through the rise of post-truth politics, to the abundance of public histories – in which societies relate to the past and contest diverging interpretations of the past. And, indeed, as the previous section showed, the past in fact can be seen as pervading the present in manifold ways. What may be the problem then? Why do the discipline’s efforts at self-justification often come out as flawed, desperate, and without much resonance outside the scholarly world? It seems to me that the problem lies with mistaking a specific way in which the academic discipline of history makes the past matter for the very act of making the past matter. The abundance of modes in which a variety of societal practices entail various “historical” configurations of past, present, and future clearly testifies to a plurihistoricity,38 in which multiple modes of making the past matter co-exist. The discipline of history is, by and large, dominated by one such mode: narrating developmental process in the mode of the unfolding past. The problem is that, in bringing its own mode of making the past matter to societal practices that are “historical” in different ways, the discipline overwrites other kinds of historicities. Put somewhat differently, the discipline of history tends to mistake the existence of an abundance of societal engagements with the past for a largely illusory demand for its own specific expertise. It does so on the basis of the assumption that engaging with the past is equivalent to engaging with it through the operations and codes of professionalized historiography, as if such codes and operations represent the only socially and culturally sanctioned means of making the past matter. Regardless of whether this gatekeeping activity is intentional or merely habitual, it is problematic not only in regard to the plurihistoricity of societal practices but also in regard to a plurality of scholarly modes of making the past matter. As I have argued elsewhere, by the turn of the millennium, two major modes of historicization have been consolidated in the human and social sciences. Whereas the discipline of history remains, to this day, largely committed to its nineteenthcentury historicist founding principles in understanding present conditions and phenomena as developing out of past ones, constructionist approaches that came to prominence in the second half of the last century across the human and social sciences make sense of present objects and phenomena by seeing them as inventions of relatively recent pasts, prior to which they are seen as having had no existence. What constructionist approaches are challenging, therefore, is precisely the historicist mode of making the past matter; they offer a mode of historicization as an alternative to professionalized academic historiography’s investment in the unfolding past.39 Now, what exactly does this alternative consist of? Are there other alternatives, too, in the scholarly world? And, one might also wonder, is the discipline of history by definition excluded from deploying modes of making the past matter that are not historicist? These are extremely difficult questions, I have to confess. Calling attention to them by problematizing how we make the past matter in society and scholarship is already a strenuous job, and delivering feasible answers calls for a broader discussion. In the remaining pages, I will provide only some preliminary remarks on how this might be done. 49

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Before that, however, it seems important to point out that this analysis does not mean to imply that every single piece of academic historical scholarship is committed to the unfolding past as its modality for making the past matter. As is usual with conceptual analyses and with my previous studies of world-apprehension, knowledge, and ideas, the picture I paint concerns large-scale general tendencies. While it is relatively easy to find singular counterexamples, the fact remains that professionalized academic historiography’s general investment in the unfolding past characterizes not only the most traditional segments of historiography but also fringe approaches. For instance, the deep past that situates societal organizations and modes of existence within larger temporal frames stretching back to prehistoric times (as in deep history approaches) or within the more-than-human frames of the universe (as in big history approaches) typically remains committed to narrating developmental processes in the same way as the most conventional political, economic, and intellectual histories do.40 The same applies to the more-than-human histories of environmental history, which aim to “narrate the multispecies and multi-natural entanglements present in all historical processes.”41 It is equally true, however, that cross-disciplinary imperatives do not necessarily represent alternatives to the discipline’s mode of historicization. With the waning of the appeal of constructionism, recent decolonizing approaches across the human and social sciences, as mentioned earlier, typically sketch familiarly unfolding pasts. What exactly might then count as an alternative to familiar modes of making the past matter within the scholarly world? Can the past not matter? The question most certainly demands a closer look.

How the Past Matters Even When It Doesn’t Matter Probably the greatest invention of constructionism as an alternative mode of historicization is that, in rejecting the logic of unfolding, it renders the past preceding the social “construction” of the object being studied as irrelevant for understanding the workings of the object in the present. My favorite relevant example is Michel Foucault’s approach to the constitution of the human as an object of knowledge in the human sciences. In Foucault’s view, “[N]o philosophy, no political or moral option, no empirical science of any kind, no observation of the human body, no analysis of sensation, imagination, or the passions, had ever encountered, in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, anything like man” – the human (“man” in Foucault) simply “did not exist,” and “appeared only when man constituted himself in Western culture as both that which must be conceived of and that which is to be known.”42 What this means is that the pre-construction past is not the past of the constructed object. As seen from the identity of the constructed object, the pre-construction past cannot be other than what is best called the dissociated past, that is, the past seen as ineffective in the present, the past that supposedly does not matter. The dissociated past, however, cannot be reduced to the preconstruction past of constructionist approaches. Nor can it be confined to scholarly modes of making the past matter in the first place. The dissociated past is the past of any sort of identitydissociations with respect to past patterns of thought, behavior, social structures, and so forth, in scholarly and societal practices alike. Most importantly, it is the past that rapidly extends its reach due to the growing imprint of the new kinds of futures discussed in the opening pages of this chapter. For the decoupling of past and future is two-sided: the new kind of unfathomable disconnective futures necessarily entail the dissociated past in a constellation in which the two are not constitutive of each other. The dissociated past nurtured in the shadow of disconnective futures is the one that makes us wonder today whether the past still matters. And, indeed, there is an extent to which it

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does not. We need to be able to recognize the limits of the drive to make the past matter and acknowledge thereby futures of radical alterity as unfathomable transformations. To do so, we need to resist automated reflexes to project the unfolding past of modern historical thinking onto futures of other temporal constitution. This is the argument against temporal domestication mentioned earlier. Here, however, I would like to make a complementary argument that equally recognizes that we cannot simply give up on trying to understand what lies ahead, even when facing unfathomable and disconnective futures. This lands us in a paradoxical situation, whereby we cannot but try to understand the unknown by invoking the only means available: that which is known to us. For the past, the known, and the familiar remain our best shots at coping even with unfathomable futures. How to go about it then? How to make the past matter in situations when disconnective futures appear to render it insignificant? How to make the past matter in contexts where all we are left with is the dissociated past? The short answer is that we can make such a past matter precisely by virtue of its radical otherness. We can make the dissociated past matter by investing it with meaning in a way similar to how negative (apophatic) theology, under the assumption that God transcends earthly descriptions and thus cannot be captured through positive statements, attempts to depict God by describing what God is not. In an analogy to negative theology, I have recently called the past utilized in such ways the apophatic past.43 And this, I propose, is the short answer to the questions earlier posed: we can make the dissociated past matter by turning it into the apophatic past. The slightly longer answer must also address how exactly we can do that. Here, I would like to draw upon the ideas of David Roden, a theorist of disconnection in the context of technological posthuman futures. The aim of transcending the biological limitations of the human condition by recourse to advanced technologies in transhumanist thought has fueled a multifarious discourse on the ethical, epistemological, ontological, social, cultural, and political aspects of the enterprise.44 Roden contributes to the debate by developing a position he calls “speculative posthumanism” and making the case for the possibility of posthuman successors to humans, not moving beyond the fundamental claim that “there could be posthumans.”45 Set against the normative claims of transhumanism (that posthuman beings ought to be), speculative posthumanism upholds only the possibility of the succession of humans by posthumans as a metaphysical claim. Although posthuman successions are among the most prominent instances of disconnective futures, Roden’s speculative posthumanism is one of the few positions in the wider debate on technology futures that explicitly invokes the notion of disconnection to theorize the relation between the posthumans of the future and the humans of the past and the present. Most importantly, Roden’s philosophy parallels my invocation of negative theology to help understand whatever lies on the future side of the disconnection. True enough, Roden does not talk about the apophatic past as a modality of making the past matter. Instead, he proposes an “apophatic method” that eliminates claims about what counts as essentially human from the potential attributes of a successor posthuman being: [A]nthropological essentialism, if true, would allow us to identify each path to posthumanity with the deletion of some component of the human essence. This, in turn, would allow us to adjudicate the value of these paths by considering the ethical implications of each loss of an anthropologically necessary property. For example, an essentialist may claim on either a posteriori or a priori grounds that humans are necessarily moral persons with capacities for deliberation and autonomous agency. If so, one sure

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route to posthumanity would be to lose those moral capacities. Put somewhat crudely, we could then know that some conceivable posthumans are non-persons.46 It seems to me that the result of applying what Roden calls an apophatic method to disconnective futures is precisely what I call here the apophatic past: that is, the dissociated past made to matter. Let’s not forget that posthuman successions constitute only one instance of a broader set of disconnective futures that entail dissociated pasts. Nothing, in principle, prevents us from making other kinds of dissociated pasts matter by turning them into apophatic pasts through the application of an interpretive strategy that attempts to understand experienced novelty and anticipated futures by eliminating what novelty and futures are incapable of being. Yet we need to proceed with caution. For the plurihistoricity unveiled by the growing footprint of new futures means nothing other than a plurality of temporal constructions through which we make sense of a rapidly changing world. In that plurality, the past can play a variety of roles, including no role at all. Whenever we decide to make the past matter, the crucial thing is to invest the past with significance in modalities most appropriate for the specific cases we place under scrutiny. Each case may accommodate certain modes of making the past matter while being at odds with other potential modes in our interpretive toolbox. Let’s not overwrite plurihistoricity by elevating one (any) of the modalities of making the past matter to a dominant position.

Making the Past Matter By way of a conclusion, let me offer a brief inventory of the kinds of pasts touched upon in the previous pages, accompanied by one-liner definitions. The modalities mentioned here represent only a tiny fragment of the far larger variety we employ in making the past matter in societal practices and scholarly endeavors. The inventory is intended to serve as a reminder of the three takeaway messages of this chapter: first, that we are the ones who make the past matter; second, that the many ways in which we do so add up to a plurihistoricity of historical apprehensions of the world; and third, that given this plurihistoricity, we need to confront both the claims that see tremendous novelty around each corner and the opposite drive to deny novelty by overwriting plurihistoricity with the uniformity of the unfolding past (or any other past, for that matter). Keeping all this in mind, here is the inventory. The unfolding past is the result of configuring the relationship between past, present, and future in terms of developmental processes. The recurring past amounts to seeing present phenomena as the regular or irregular periodic return of the past. The present past is the past of injustice perceived as being stuck in the present and refusing to go away. The associated past is the mythical and invented but nonetheless “real” past of belonging in which identity claims are grounded. The inherited past is the past conserved for the future either voluntarily, by active approval, or involuntarily, by virtue of being burdened with unwanted baggage left by previous generations. The ahistorical past comprises non-historical constructions of the past set against the violent legacies of Western modes of historical thinking. The cultivated past is, again, a mythical and invented but nonetheless “real” past of popular engagements, from memory cultures to video games. The deep past is the result of seeing the past of human societies embedded in and entwined with prehistorical and more-than-human pasts. The apophatic past is that which makes the dissociated past – the past that does not seem to matter by virtue of being disconnected from the present and the future – eventually matter. And that, perhaps, matters the most at a time when future prospects increasingly seem likely to render previous modes of existence inconsequential. 52

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Notes 1 See Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow, “Cli-Fi: Birth of a genre.” Dissent 60.3 (2013), 58–61; Michael Svoboda, “Cli-Fi on the screen(s): Patterns in the representations of climate change in fictional films.” WIREs Climate Change 7.1 (2015), 43–64; Laura Wright, “Cli-Fi: Environmental literature for the Anthropocene.” In Sibylle Baumbach and Brigit Neumann, eds., New Approaches to the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 99–116. 2 Lee Mackinnon, “Love’s algorithm.” In Louise Amoore and Volha Piotukh, eds., Algorithmic Life: Calculative Devices in the Age of Big Data (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 161–175; Jude McCulloch and Dean Wilson, Pre-Crime: Pre-Emption, Precaution and the Future (London and New York: Routledge, 2015). 3 Kerry H. Whiteside, Precautionary Politics: Principle and Practice in Confronting Environmental Risk (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). 4 Jan Zalasiewicz et al., “The geological cycle of plastics and their use as a stratigraphic indicator of the Anthropocene.” Anthropocene 13 (2016), 5. 5 Julia Adeney Thomas, “The Anthropocene earth system and three human stories.” In Julia Adeney Thomas and Jan Zalasiewicz, eds., Strata and Three Stories. RRC Perspectives: Transformations in Environment and Society 2020/3, 56, www.environmentandsociety.org/perspectives/2020/3/ strata-and-three-stories. 6 Thomas, “The Anthropocene earth system and three human stories,” 54. 7 David Eckstein, Vera Künzel and Laura Schäfer, “Global climate risk index 2021: Who suffers most from extreme weather events? Weather-related loss events in 2019 and 2000–2019.” Germanwatch, https://germanwatch.org/sites/default/files/Global%20Climate%20Risk%20Index%202021_2.pdf. 8 Dahlia Simangan, “Situating Asia pacific in the age of the Anthropocene.” Australian Journal of International Affairs 73.6 (2019), 573. 9 Samid Suliman et  al., “Indigenous (Im)mobilities in the Anthropocene.” Mobilities 14.3 (2019), 298–318. 10 On a variety of technoscientific scenarios see Apolline Taillandier, “ ‘Staring at the singularity,’ and other posthuman tales: Transhumanist stories of future change.” History and Theory 60.2 (2021), 215–233. 11 See Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Lucian Hölscher, Die Entdeckung der Zukunft (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1999); Javier Fernández-Sebastian, “A world in the making: Discovering the future in the Hispanic world.” Contributions to the History of Concepts 11.2 (2016), 110–132. 12 For a theorization of the disconnection between past and future see Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, History in Times of Unprecedented Change: A Theory for the 21st Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2019); For the notion of “disconnective futures” see the “Historical Futures” project that I co-conduct with Marek Tamm and the journal History and Theory: Zoltán Boldizsár Simon and Marek Tamm, “Historical futures.” History and Theory 60.1 (2021), 3–22. In a collaborative research endeavor that aims to map modalities of “historical futures” across societal practices, we define such “historical futures” as the plurality of transitional relations between apprehensions of the past and anticipated futures. Asking the question of how to conceive of the multiple pasts when new disconnective futures are overwhelming is a complementary exercise. It is by exploring both a plurality of futures and pasts that we can get a better grasp of “historical” apprehensions of the world. 13 Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 26. 14 Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri, Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019). 15 Sun-ha Hong, Technologies of Speculation: The Limits of Knowledge in a Data-Driven Society (New York: New York University Press, 2020), 14. 16 Ibid., 16. Cf. Mateus H.F. Pereira and Valdei Araujo, “Updatism: Gumbrecht’s broad present, Hartog’s presentism and beyond.” Diacronie. Studi di Storia Contemporanea 43.3 (2020), 1–20. Pereira and Araujo argue that such technologies are manifestations of a present-oriented “updatism” that fills in the void left by modern historical thinking and its central to future-oriented notions such as “progress.” 17 Zoltán B. Simon, “Domesticating the future through history.” Time and Society 30.4 (2021), 494–516. 18 Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, “On the importance of a date, or decolonizing the Anthropocene.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 16.4 (2017), 761–780; Jason W. Moore, eds., Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland: Kairos, 2016).

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Zoltán Boldizsár Simon 19 Jan Zalasiewicz et al., “The working group on the Anthropocene: Summary of evidence and interim recommendations.” Anthropocene 19 (2017), 57. 20 Ironically, despite a century of criticism of the Western historicist project, this amounts to giving in to the most basic principles of the nineteenth-century historicism of Western historical thinking. On historicism, see Frederick C. Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Liisi Keedus, The Crisis of German Historicism: The Early Political Thought of Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Herman Paul and Adriaan van Veldhuizen, eds., Historicism: A Travelling Concept (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). 21 Bonnie Sheehey, “Algorithmic paranoia: The temporal governmentality of predictive policing.” Ethics and Information Technology 21 (2019), 49–58. Sheehey also highlights the racialized character of the practice in the US context in a Chicago case study. 22 Matthias Leese, “ ‘We do that once per day,’ cyclical futures and institutional ponderousness in predictive policing.” In Andreas Wenger, Ursula Jasper and Myriam Dunn Cavelty, eds., The Politics and Science of Prevision: Governing and Probing the Future (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), 213–226. 23 Cf. Frederick C. Beiser, “Historicization and historicism: Some nineteenth century perspectives.” In Moritz Baumstark und Robert Forkel, eds., Historisierung: Begriff – Geschichte – Praxisfelder (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler Verlag, 2016), 42–54. 24 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Talcott Parsons (London and New York: Routledge, [1930] 2001). 25 Anibal Quijano, “Coloniality of power, eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla: Views from South 1.3 (2001), 533–580; Yael Berda, “Managing dangerous populations: Colonial legacies of security and surveillance.” Sociological Forum 28.3 (2013), 627–630; Markus P. Eichhorn, Kate Baker, and Mark Griffiths, “Steps towards decolonizing biogeography.” Frontiers of Biogeography 12.1 (2020), e44795. 26 See, for instance, Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957); Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West: An Abridged Edition. Trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (Oxford: Oxford University, [1918–1922], 199); On-cho Ng and Q. Edward Wang, Mirroring the Past: The Writing and Use of History in Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005). 27 Immanuel Wallerstein, “Globalization or the age of transition? A long-term view of the trajectory of the world-system.” International Sociology 15.2 (2000), 249–265; Amin Samman, “Eternal return on capital: Nihilistic repetition in the asset economy.” Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory (2020), advance access article, doi: 10.1080/1600910X.2020.1763416; Elena Esposito, The Future of Futures: The Time of Money in Financing and Society (Cheltenham and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2011). 28 Berber Bevernage and Chris Lorenz, “Breaking up time: Negotiating the borders between present, past, and future.” Storia della Storiografia 63 (2013), 31–50. 29 Victoria Fareld, “Coming to terms with the present: Exploring the chrononormativity of historical time.” In Marek Tamm and Laurent Olivier, eds., Rethinking Historical Time: New Approaches to Presentism (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 57–70. 30 Gustav Wollentz, Sarah May, Cornelius Holtorf and Anders Högberg, “Toxic heritage: Uncertain and unsafe.” In Rodney Harrison et al., eds., Heritage Futures: Comparative Approaches to Natural and Cultural Heritage Practices (London: UCL Press, 2020), 294–312. See also Cornelius Holtorf and Anders Högberg, “What lies ahead? Nuclear waste as cultural heritage of the future.” In Cornelius Holtorf and Anders Högberg, eds., Cultural Heritage and the Future (London and New York: Routledge, 2021), 144–158. 31 Ashis Nandy, “History’s forgotten doubles.” History and Theory 34.2 (1995), 44–66. 32 See Vanessa Agnew, Jonathan Lamb and Juliane Tomann, eds., The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies: Key Terms in the Field (London and New York: Routledge, 2020); Jerome De Groot, Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2009); Siobhan Kattago, Encountering the Past within the Present: Modern Experiences of Time (London and New York: Routledge, 2020). 33 For the latest perspectives, see Stefan Berger, eds., The Engaged Historian: Perspectives on the Intersections of Politics, Activism and the Historical Profession (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2019). 34 See, for instance, Georg G. Iggers, “The professionalization of historical studies and the guiding assumptions of modern historical thought.” In Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza, eds., A Companion to Western Historical Thought (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 225–242; Chris Lorenz, “Drawing the line: ‘Scientific’ history between myth-making and myth-breaking.” In Stefan Berger, Linas Eriksonas and Andrew Mycock, eds., Narrating the Nation: Representations in History, Media and the Arts (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2008), 35–55.

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Does the Past Still Matter? 35 Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 7. 36 For a relatively recent powerful and provocative exception, see Martin L. Davies, How History Works: The Reconstitution of a Human Science (London and New York: Routledge, 2016). 37 Lynn Hunt, History: Why It Matters (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 2. 38 I coined the notion of plurihistoricity to account for the multiple historicities that inform societal practices in Simon, “Domesticating the future through history.” 39 Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, “Historicism and constructionism: Rival ideas of historical change.” History of European Ideas 45.8 (2019), 1171–1190. 40 Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Andrew Shyrock and Daniel Lord Smail, Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Cynthia Stokes Brown, Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present (New York: The New Press, 2011). 41 Emily O’Gorman and Andrea Gaynor, “More-than-human histories.” Environmental History 25.4 (2020), 728. 42 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 375–376. 43 Simon, History in Times of Unprecedented Change, 56, 63, 74–78. 44 See, for instance, Julian Savulescu and Nick Bostrom, eds., Human Enhancement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Max More and Natasha Vita-More, eds., The Transhumanist Reader (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013); Laura Y. Cabrera, Rethinking Human Enhancement: Social Enhancement and Emergent Technologies (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015); J. Benjamin Hurlbut and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, eds., Perfecting Human Futures: Transhuman Visions and Technological Imaginations (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2016); Melinda Hall, The Bioethics of Enhancement: Transhumanism, Disability, and Biopolitics (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017). 45 David Roden, Posthuman Life: Philosophy at the Edge of the Human (London and New York: Routledge), 6. 46 Ibid., 113.

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5 THE BIG HISTORY OF PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE Craig Benjamin

Since its origins, the discipline of history might be characterized as a conversation between past and present, with the present strongly influencing our understanding of the past. As the present is constantly changing, so interpretations of the past have also inevitably changed over the millennia that histories have been written. The proponents of the field of ‘big history’ are similarly engaged in a dialogue between past and present, but also bring speculation about the future into the conversation, which adds an additional dimension to our understanding of past and present. The big history narrative, which stretches from the beginning of time as we currently understand it to the ultimate fate of the universe in the very distant future, is thus considerably broader in scope than most traditional historical narratives. In order to construct this story of the whole of the past, present and future, big history incorporates the work of specialists from a wide range of scientific disciplines, including cosmology, astronomy, geology, and biology. Historians have always borrowed from other disciplines, of course, but big history is more explicitly transdisciplinary in its approach than most other historiographical approaches. These key elements – an ongoing conversation between past, present, and future, enhanced scope, an attempt to outline the whole of the past, present, and future, and the embrace of transdisciplinarity – distinguish big history from most other historical fields. These elements have helped big historians construct a story that is particularly useful for humans living in the twenty-first century, because it helps us think differently about the relationship between past and present. One way it does this is to identify and explore themes, such as increasing complexity, which serve as connecting threads through the big history narrative from the very origins of the cosmos to the appearance of planets, life, and hominins to the evolution of the contemporary interconnected global political, economic, and cultural system. The idea of increasing complexity also helps explain how we arrived at the current perilous moment in the history of our species and planet. Faced with the enormous challenges of the present, big historians hope that the broad and multidisciplinary perspective fundamental to the field is equipping students with the necessary vision and skills to help our species deal with the very problems that the past has bequeathed to us living in the twenty-first century.

History and Documents The big history account of the past has only been possible since the middle of the twentieth century, largely as a result of what pioneering big historian David Christian termed the 56

DOI: 10.4324/9781003026570-6

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‘chronometric revolution’.1 This revolution was a direct result of the discovery of new scientific techniques for more accurately dating past events. Although dates are fundamental to the discipline, early historians struggled with the challenges of precise dating. Historians have long been aware of the importance of getting events into some sort of chronological order, otherwise their accounts would be nothing more than a jumble of disconnected facts with no progression, no shape. Dates help us make sense of the past by placing them into what might be called a ‘map of time’.2 But until the mid-twentieth century these maps were vague and speculative, because historians could only offer absolute dates for a small portion of the past, relating to those events for which there was indisputable chronological evidence; that is, dates of events within recent human memory or dates written down in sources that most historians could agree with. This is partly why written sources have been so fundamental to the discipline, and why, even as historians have expanded their evidentiary tools to include, for example, visual and anthropological material, documents have remained the most important form of evidence for historians. There are problems with an over-dependence on written sources, however. Many historians, such as this author, who specializes in the history of nomadic cultures of ancient Central Asia, often have few documents with which to work, because nomads generally produced few if any written materials. Documents also tend to limit our knowledge of the past to just that small portion of history that happens to have been discussed in written sources. As a result, our knowledge of the past can become fragmented and disconnected, with numerous spatial and temporal gaps not mentioned at all in documents, leaving many empty spaces on our maps of time. There is another even more fundamental problem with an overdependence on documentary evidence. The documents available were generally produced by those wealthy and powerful groups that had the resources to have their achievements written down. So for long periods history was all about elites, their political and military activities, the gods they worshipped, about literate and educated humans, and mostly about men. This meant that much of human history was unknown, because we had no knowledge of the lives and beliefs of the vast majority of the human population whose existence had passed largely undocumented. The emergence over recent decades of the field of social history, with an emphasis on the lives of ‘ordinary’ people, including women and children, has done much to redress this imbalance, even though the evidence for these groups is often much more challenging to assemble. In this context it should be noted that, because of its sheer scale and broad scope, the field of big history is unlikely to add much to our knowledge of the minutiae of human existence. Yet, by viewing past and present on the largest scale possible, big history is able to illuminate the problems faced, and solutions devised, by humans as a species, rather than by select groups within human society. Not all historical accounts of the past were focused on elites; there have been many notable exceptions. Two of the very first practitioners of history, for example, the ancient Greek Herodotus and the Han Chinese Sima Qian, both made conscious efforts to be as inclusive as possible in their accounts. Indeed, Sima Qian often found himself in hot water with Han Emperor Wudi because of his propensity to record details about the lives of ‘uncivilized barbarians’ such as the Xiongnu.3 If the challenge of writing history was difficult enough even after the emergence of writing some 5,000 years ago, what of the millennia of human history that preceded the invention of writing? What did historians make of the early agrarian era that followed the transition to agriculture 10,000 years ago, or of the hundreds of thousands of years preceding agriculture that occurred during the long Paleolithic Era, which makes up about 95% of all human history? These important periods in the history of our species were largely neglected by historians (but embraced by archaeologists and anthropologists) before the emergence of big history late in the twentieth century. 57

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Ironically, the dependence of traditional historians on documents intensified in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, at the same time that pioneering geologists were beginning to get a real sense of the order of events in the stratigraphical history of planet Earth, and biologists were tentatively mapping some of the key stages in the story of life on earth, based on fossils found in those same strata. A major influence on the writing of history in the nineteenth century, an influence that continues through to today, is the work of Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886). Von Ranke’s methodology was centered upon the careful, intensive, and authoritative reading of primary sources, particularly official documents. He believed in an inductive approach to historical analysis: ‘From the particular one can carefully and boldly move up to the general; from general theories there is no way of looking at the particular’.4 This approach was somewhat at odds with the other giants of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German historiography, particularly Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel, who showed no hesitation in proposing general theories of history, expecting actual historians to find the particular evidence to support them. But with the exception of these philosophical German historians, until the emergence of world history and then big history late in the twentieth century, virtually all historical accounts were focused on authoritative readings of documents produced by small groups of political and religious elites that had the resources to have their stories written down.

History and Dates During the mid-twentieth century our map of the deep past was transformed by the discovery of new techniques to date accurately not only events in the human past but also events that occurred far back in the natural history of our planet and cosmos, including the emergence of life, the formation of the planet, and even the beginning of the universe itself. The most important of these new dating techniques was ‘radiometric’ dating, which uses the statistically measurable rates of decay of radioactive isotopes trapped in various materials to arrive at reasonably precise dates for events. By the late twentieth century techniques of radiometric dating were advanced enough to allow scientists to analyze fragments of rocks and comets to date tentatively the age of our planet and solar system. And once scientists began applying these same techniques to isotopes of elements such as uranium, which break down at still slower rates, it became possible to fix dates to events that occurred millions or even billions of years ago, with considerable accuracy.5 Of course these techniques still provide at best a probabilistic range of dates – they can rarely date an event to a specific day or year – but the chronometric revolution has undoubtedly allowed many disciplines to be a lot more confident in dating events in the deep past. Another significant development in the chronometric revolution was the realization that the dating of the rate of radiometric decay of the element carbon-14 (C-14) would allow for the first time reasonably accurate dating of much more recent events that occurred during the relatively brief period of human history. C-14 dating is based on the breakdown of an isotope of the element carbon, a technique developed by physical chemist Willard Libby in the 1950s, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize. The breakdown of the C-14 isotope occurs relatively quickly, allowing scientists to date materials containing carbon (found in the remains of nearly all living organisms) as far back as about 50,000 years ago. This is roughly ten times further back in time than the earliest examples of writing, so it is no surprise that C-14 dating revolutionized the field of archaeology.6 In addition to radiometric dating, other technologies emerged in the mid-twentieth century that offered new pathways to establish more accurate maps of the past. One such technology is genetic dating. Following the discovery in 1953 of DNA, the essential mechanism that explains how Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection actually works in organisms, 58

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scientists realized they could now compare differences in the DNA across numerous organisms. In the 1960s, biochemists Vincent Sarich and Allan Wilson demonstrated that DNA actually changes over long periods of time in a way that is statistically measurable, like some sort of a genetic clock.7 Evolutionary biologists were soon able to compare the DNA of related species and calculate approximately when they diverged from some common ancestor. This had particular relevance for the history of our own species. By using this technique researchers were able to show that humans and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor who had lived some 7 million years ago. The discovery of radiometric and genetic dating has utterly transformed our understanding of the deep past. For centuries historians had struggled to date accurately events in human history, let alone in the natural world. Today we are able to assign reliable dates to a myriad of events that have occurred on the human, planetary and even cosmic scale. The field of big history has embraced this chronometric revolution and celebrates the fact that for the first time in human history we are able to offer an accurate and comprehensive map of time that stretches back to, as far as we know, the beginning of everything, to offer, that is, an account of the whole of the past.

History and Science The transformation of history affected by the chronometric revolution occurred at more or less the same time as the historicization of science, particularly the fields of cosmology, astronomy, geology, and biology. Various European universal historians had attempted to articulate a relationship between history and the sciences, including Giambatista Vico in the eighteenth century, Leopold von Ranke in the nineteenth, and R.G. Collingwood in the twentieth century. All claimed to have applied ‘scientific principles’ to their analyses of the flow of human history, although their approach was not scientific in the way we understand it today. These historians used the term ‘science’ as a synonym for methodological empiricism, by which they meant the careful, objective piecing together of documentary sources to construct their historical accounts.8 By describing their approach as ‘scientific’, historians hoped to demonstrate the objectivity and thus the ‘scientific accuracy’ of their work. In the twentieth century practitioners of the physical and life sciences began to turn their accounts into historical narratives. Until the early eighteenth century most scientists believed the heavens and our planet had changed very little since the moment of creation. Astronomers used the Ptolemaic model to argue that stars and galaxies were in the same relative location as they had always been. Early geologists such as Charles Lyell (1797–1875) did acknowledge that forces such as wind, water, and ice erosion had led to minor changes in surface landscapes, but they also believed that fundamentally the planet had changed very little since the moment of creation.9 Biologists also assumed that the living species they observed flourishing in their own era were essentially the same species that had flourished since the Earth was born. But as more puzzling data was discovered, these paradigms increasingly came into question. The key evidence came from the discovery of enormous quantities of fossils, including species like trilobites that no longer existed. And mountaineers ascending peaks in the European Alps were finding fossils of marine creatures that had once lived on the ocean floor on the tops of mountains, presumably moved there by geological processes. The existence of such fossils suggested that the Earth had changed greatly over time, as had the creatures that dwelt upon it. It was because of discoveries like these that the disciplines of geology and biology both became historical, because it became clear that both the Earth and the life that teemed upon it had long and complex histories that could be recounted in the form of chronological narratives. And 59

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once the chronometric revolution occurred, these narratives could be told with increasing detail and precision. Along with radiometric and genetic dating, other technologies such as computing, radar, and sonar emerged in the Second World War that allowed geologists, biologists, and also astronomers to demonstrate that the past was very different to the present. This historicization of science also soon included cosmology, making it possible to construct a detailed history of the entire universe, and even, famously, of time itself.10 But even as scientists were embracing and sharing with the public their exciting new historical narratives, traditional historians tended to regard most of these breakthroughs as irrelevant to their interests, which remained focused on the smaller scale of national and biographical studies. Of course there were exceptions to this, notably the work of the Annales school in France. Annales historians like Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, and later Fernand Braudel, pursued a holistic and inclusive approach to historical analysis over long periods of time, what they called the longue durée, and avoided simplistic explanations. As Annales pioneer Georges Duby put it, the school was ‘reluctant to give a simple accounting of events, but strove on the contrary to pose and solve problems . . . to observe the long and medium-term evolution of economy, society and civilization’.11 It was in this environment of the historicization of science, and influenced by the approach of the Annales group, that big history emerged late in the twentieth century, intent upon offering a history of audacious scope, a history of all of the past, present, and even future.

Past and Present: A Story of Increasing Complexity Any attempt to offer a large-scale account of the past must first deal with daunting questions regarding how much detail to include and how to structure the material that is included, and this is certainly the case with big history. When this author, along with colleagues David Christian and the late Cynthia Stokes Brown, set out to write the first-ever big history textbook, we decided that the thread that runs through the story of past, present, and future was the theme of increasing complexity. That is, since the creation of the cosmos, gradually more and more complex entities have appeared, including, some 250,000 years ago, Homo sapiens, the most complex life-form in the universe, as far as we are aware. The theme of increasing complexity provides a new understanding of the relationship of past, present, and future. Increasing complexity is a scaffold upon which all of the stages and processes of cosmic, natural, and human history can be arranged, a structure that outlines a remarkable and relentless progression from simple to complex forms over the longue durée. It is this structure and progression that helps students make sense of the past in a way that was not previously possible. Of course the term ‘complexity’ can be difficult to define. At the most obvious level, we can think of complexity as the opposite of simplicity, although defining exactly what makes a complex entity complex is not easy to do. We can say that complex entities tend to contain more and diverse components, compared to simple entities. While a hydrogen atom might consist only of one proton and one electron, a molecule of DNA contains billions of atoms. Not only do more complex entities contain more component parts, but these are arranged in very careful and particular ways. Those billions of atoms in a strand of DNA would be useless unless they were arranged in specific patterns that allow them to link up and work together. These first two qualities of complex entities – the fact that they contain more and diverse components, and that these components are arranged in particular ways – lead to a third and crucial characteristic, the notion of emergent properties. By this we mean that when the component parts of something are arranged in just the right way, they can do entirely new things. For example, if a molecule of DNA is arranged correctly it provides all the necessary ingredients for the creation of a living 60

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organism. Such new possibilities are ‘emergent’ properties, which appear only when everything is arranged just so. Finally, complex entities also create new energy flows that help them maintain their structure and integrity. As a general principle the more complex something is, the more energy it requires and is able to generate. Astronomer Eric Chaisson has argued that planets are more complex than stars because they depend on much greater flows of energy than stars do.12 And using this same logic and calculation, human societies are much more complex, again because of the amount of energy they generate and utilize given their physical size in relation to that of the Sun, for example. Chaisson points out that although the Sun emits a vast luminosity, it also has enormous mass, so that each second an amount of energy equaling only 2 ergs passes through each gram of this star. By contrast, more energy flows through each gram of a plant’s leaf during photosynthesis, and much more rushes through each gram of grey matter in our brains while thinking.13 So to summarize, complex entities consist of many diverse components arranged in very precise ways that generate emergent properties that are held together by very particular flows of energy. In thinking through this theme of increasing complexity, we identified eight major thresholds of complexity in our attempt to help readers make sense of past and present. Of course, many different forms and stages of complexity have occurred in the long history of the universe, and it could be argued that these eight thresholds are rather anthropocentric in that they are the thresholds of particular interest to us as humans, but these are the thresholds we authors chose in order to provide a framework for our textbook, a scaffold for student comprehension of the past. We think of a threshold as literally a doorsill, the point at which, with one small step, you move from the outside to the inside of a building, whereby a small change gives rise to something entirely new. These thresholds also offer a clear outline of how big historians understand the past, and how the past differs from the present and future. The first of these thresholds of complexity was the creation of the universe itself, almost 14 billion years ago, essentially the beginning of everything as far as we know. The early universe was simple – no atoms, no stars, no planets, no living organisms – just a rapidly expanding entity consisting of crackling energy and the four fundamental forces: gravitational, electromagnetic, strong, and weak. After about 400,000 years of expansion the universe had cooled enough to allow for simple atoms of hydrogen and helium to form, and these were the first complex structures in the universe. These elements clustered together in huge clouds, and after about 200 million years gravity condensed and crushed many of these vast elemental clouds until stars and then entire galaxies lit up. The appearance of the first stars and galaxies is the second threshold, because it marked a new level of complexity in the cosmos. It was the death of some of these stars, particularly the very largest, that led to the creation of a huge range of new and more complex elements that were scattered into the space surrounding the explosive supernovae that marked the deaths of these mega stars. This is the third threshold, the creation of more complex elements generated by the cataclysmic death of large stars. The elements created by stars were vital to the subsequent evolution of complexity, including, eventually, life itself. Many new ‘second generation’ stars were soon born, replete with these new complex elements, and in some cases planetary satellites were formed that clustered around these stars. A fourth threshold was crossed with the birth of our own star the Sun, and the solar system of objects (including planet Earth) that were trapped by gravity into orbits around it. The 61

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formation of Earth was vital to the story of increasing complexity, because this was the planetary stage upon which life would appear. The appearance of planets rich in complex elements, including the building blocks of life, was not a uniform experience, however. Vast regions of the universe remained very simple, but where conditions were just right (the ‘Goldilocks Conditions’) more and more complex elements and life-forms evolved.14 It was on one such planet – the third rock from the Sun – that these simple organic life-forms emerged, marking the crossing of the fifth threshold of complexity. Even though the earliest lifeforms seem simple compared to those that would later evolve, this was a hugely significant step in moving from the relative simplicity of atoms and molecules on the early planet to the considerably increased complexity of living cells. These early life-forms flourished for billions of years in the warm seas of the young Earth, slowly changing the composition of the atmosphere through the process of photosynthesis. Then, around 600  million years ago, there occurred a major radiation of multicellular life at the beginning of the Cambrian Era. This astonishing increase in biological complexity led, in just a few hundred million years, to the evolution of a vast array of organisms including, some 250,000 years ago, our own species. With the appearance of humans the universe crossed the sixth threshold, creating an entirely new level of complexity. For the first 250,000 years after their appearance, members of the Homo sapiens species survived as nomadic foragers, but around 10,000 years ago some human communities made the transition from foraging to farming, crossing the seventh threshold of complexity. Once these communities became sedentary, populations began to increase, resources were accumulated, leaders emerged, and some villages became towns, then cities, then the hubs of powerful citystates and empires. All this was made possible by the Agricultural Revolution. The appearance of the first cities and states marks a type of mini-threshold, as does the bringing together of vast numbers of these cities and states into huge empires, such as that of the Persians, the Han Chinese, the Romans, and the Inca. Sometime in the eighteenth century human societies crossed the eighth threshold into modernity (the modern revolution), which drove us through industrialization and the astonishing changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Arguably, the eighth threshold is the most important of all. The crossing of each of the previous seven thresholds undoubtedly led to the appearance of new entities with emergent properties, but the modern revolution unleashed a positive tidal wave of changes, not least of which have been unprecedented human population growth and astonishing technological innovation. The results of both have created a fundamental threat to the very possibility of a future for much of life on earth, including our own species. And what of the future, what will the ninth and even tenth thresholds look like? Natural selection has built into many species the ability to predict, because our very survival often depends on trying to envision what will happen if we pursue a certain course of action. A wide range of humans are actively engaged in trying to predict the future, including stockbrokers, gamblers, astrologers, and many different types of scientists. We also expect our politicians at least to try and project the consequences of their policies, particularly in response to climate change, geopolitical conflicts, pandemic outbreaks, and long-term economic sustainability. We simply cannot stick our heads in the sand and avoid thinking about the future, since the decisions we make and the actions we take will affect the lives of our children, grandchildren, and human society as a whole. Big historians in particular are well equipped to contemplate the future, because they are used to analyzing the past and present according to very big trends, trends that we know will continue to unfold in the future. Unless we are content to leave humanity in complete ignorance of potential outcomes, we simply must use the perspective offered by big history and other future-focused disciplines to discourage harmful trends and encourage positive ones. 62

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The very distant future actually appears a lot less interesting than the immediate or middledistant future does. Science shows how the universe became increasingly complex over billions of years, creating extraordinarily complicated entities like life, modern humans, and human societies. But billions and billions of years from now the universe will actually become a lot less complicated, as it will have less and less energy available to create complex things, which is very different to the tale of increasing complexity that has characterized the past. So even as we navigate through a period of increasing complexity in the present, we know this will not last forever. As the universe gradually winds down to its eventual heat death, it will become a lot less interesting. So perhaps a final point to make about the present is that we happen to be living in one of the most interesting eras in the entire history of the universe, and those of you reading this chapter are amongst the most interesting products produced by the universe.

Conclusion: Big History and the Future It is hardly surprising that since the emergence of big history thirty years ago, many of its leading practitioners have come from the field of world history. Big history attempts to do the same thing that world history has done, but on even an greater scale. The world history lens is certainly wider than the lens more familiar to smaller-scale historians, but the big history lens examines human, planetary, and cosmic history at the widest angle thus far possible. Marnie Hughes-Warrington, a leading world and big historian, has argued that for far too long historians have limited the array of lenses available to them: ‘It is as if the lens through which we view the past has got stuck at a certain magnification – the viewing of individual actions lens – and over time we have forgotten that other lenses are available’.15 By consistently utilizing a particularly wide lens, big history has revealed a range of themes and patterns unfolding through the past and present that have not been easily discernible, even to the world historian. Big history provides the framework, not just for an understanding of the evolution of the modern global ‘human system’, but of the entire human species, and of the biological, geological, and cosmic stage upon which this species has played out its history. Practitioners of other disciplines beyond history have also become aware of the potential for big history to take interdisciplinarity to a much higher level of integration. As another pioneering big historian, Fred Spier, notes, even today ‘interdisciplinary studies in the form of theoretically integrated approaches are still rare’.16 Big history adopts a transdisciplinary approach to the past, present, and future as part of a genuine attempt to unify all human knowledge, something the late Edward O. Wilson described as ‘consilience’.17 This attempt has been supported by a number of astrophysicists, geologists, biologists, and evolutionary psychologists, several of whom have become members of the International Big History Association, and have presented papers from their own disciplinary perspectives at big history conferences. Some form of consilience is sorely needed in the twenty-first century, because the problems facing humans and planet Earth are much too big to be contained by narrow disciplinary thinking. In an address titled “The Future of World History”, given at the 2009 World History Association Conference, Alfred W. Crosby, Professor Emeritus of History, Geography, and American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, argued that big history is uniquely positioned, not only to address potentially catastrophic challenges like the climate crisis, but also to offer some reassurance that humanity might just be equal to the challenges posed by them.18 Crosby pointed out that world history’s greatest contribution to the discipline has been to emphasize the common historical experience of human life on earth, particularly the processes that have affected human adaptation to environmental change. Between 100,000 and 63

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10,000 years ago, he noted, in the face of wildly fluctuating global climates, humans were able to undertake extraordinary migrations and colonize every continent on the planet with the exception of Antarctica. Within the last 15,000 years, human migrants into the American world zone adapted to the ice-bound North American continent, the arid regions of central and upper South America, and then found ways of re-adapting to the ice-bound fjords of Patagonia, all within a couple of thousand years. What, Crosby asked, was the challenge of global warming compared to these proven adaptations? He concluded that those historians most aware of this long history of human adaptation and migration have acquired not only a deeper understanding of the human past but perhaps also of its future, and this might ultimately prove to be big history’s most important contribution to human knowledge. If big history can identify and explain the strategies humans have used to deal with major crises in the past, such as the onset and eventual waning of the most recent ice age, then it is well positioned to offer specific examples of how humans might deal with similar crises in the future. Unlike traditional history, then, big history is just as interested in the present and the future as it is in the past. Yet the big history story of the past is also innovative in that it is based squarely on the work of specialists from a wide range of other disciplines – cosmology, astronomy, geology, biology, anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, climate science. This makes the big history account of past, present, and future more broad and more inclusive than that offered by any other field of history, and it is this enhanced scope and inclusivity that makes the big history story the most appropriate and useful historical narrative for humans living in the twenty-first century. Central to this usefulness is the fundamental role played by the theme of increasing complexity, which connects the very moment of cosmic creation to the evolution of the interconnected global political, economic and cultural system we live in today. Big history thus helps us to make sense of the past and present in different ways, and to identify the origins of the many problems that our species is currently facing, problems that can only really be understood from a broad, transdisciplinary perspective. By offering a clear and comprehensive account of the whole of the past and present, big history helps us consider the possibility of a more resilient and sustainable future.

Notes 1 David Christian, “History and science after the chronometric revolution.” In S.J. Dick and M.L. Lupisella, eds., Cosmos and Culture (Washington, DC: NASA, 2009), 441–462. 2 See David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, 2nd edition (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 3 See Craig Benjamin, “ ‘But from this time forth history becomes a connected whole’: State expansion and the origins of universal history.” In W.G. Clarence-Smith, B.W. Andaya and M. Wiesner-Hanks, eds., Journal of Global History 9.2 (November 2014), 357–378. 4 Leopold Von Ranke, “The role of the particular and the general in the study of universal history.” In G.G. Eggers and K. von Moltke, eds., The Theory and Practice of History (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1973), 57–59. 5 See David Christian, Cynthia Stokes-Brown, and Craig Benjamin, Big History: Between Nothing and Everything (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2014), Chapter 2. 6 Ibid., Chapter 2. 7 See for example V.M. Sarich and A.C. Wilson, “Rates of albumin evolution in primates.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science USA 58.1 (July 1967), 142–148. 8 See for example Leon Pompa, Vico: A Study of the New Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 1–14; Leopold von Ranke, “On the character of historical science: A manuscript of the 1830s.” In The Theory and Practice of History (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973), 33–46; R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007). 9 See for example Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (London: John Murray, 1830–33).

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The Big History of Past, Present, and Future 10 See for example Armand Delsemme, Our Cosmic Origins: From the Big Bang to the Emergence of Life and Intelligence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (London: Bantam Dell Publishing, 1988). 11 Georges Duby, Le Dimanche de Bouvines, 27 Juillet 1214 (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1973), foreword. 12 Eric Chaisson, Cosmic Evolution. The Rise of Complexity in Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 13 Ibid., 185. 14 On Goldilocks conditions see Christian, Brown and Benjamin, Big History, Chapters 1 and 2. 15 Marnie Hughes-Warrington, “Big history.” Historically Speaking 4.2 (2002), 16–17, 20. 16 Fred Spier, “Big history: The emergence of an interdisciplinary science?” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 33.2 (2008), 141–152. 17 E.O. Wilson, Consilience (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998). 18 Alfred W. Crosby, plenary panel address, The Future of World History, WHA Conference, Salem MA, June 25–28, 2009.

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PART TWO

Cultures Past and Present

6 HISTORICAL FAITH AND FAITHFUL HISTORY Nicolas Steeves, SJ

Liturgical Prelude: “This Is the Day” “This is the day which the Lord hath made: we will rejoice and be glad in it!” At the heart of the 2011 British royal wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton, John Rutter’s new setting of Psalm 118 soared up to Westminster Abbey’s arches, gracefully borne by the choir. It offered powerful testimony for myriads of guests and viewers to the Jewish-based Christian belief that God and time are linked, and that this should cause joy – a belief shared by all Christians: Roman Catholics sing the same Psalm throughout the Easter Octave, the Haec dies’s Gregorian melismata hinting that the Church is at a loss for words in exulting at Christ’s rising.1 If death has lost its final word over history, time will never be the same. “Today” is the core time for Christian worship. Each day, the Divine Office opens with a temporal taunt: an ancient Hebrew optative begs worshippers to behave, believe, and be all ears – unlike their disbelieving forerunners. “O that today you would hearken to his voice! Harden not your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness, when your fathers tested me, and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work.”2 Today is the day to convert; now is the time to listen to God. But the present is not a time for penance alone. “Today” also resounds in the joyous celebrations of Jesus’ wonderful conception and birth. Riffing on biblical stories, the Antiphons that frame the Magnificat at Christmastide play with this mystery’s actualization: “Today, Christ is born. Today, the Savior has appeared. Today, the angels sing on earth and the archangels rejoice. Today, the just exult and say: Glory to God in the highest. Alleluia.”3 Today is the time for Christians to relive the historical events that wrought their salvation: not once upon a time, in a fairytale past that is no more, but in the here and now. But isn’t their belief preposterous? Should a past event happen all over again and bear spiritual fruit now as if one had been present for it originally? Do Christians have their past and present tenses confused? Note that every example herein is drawn from the liturgy: a wedding, Easter, daily morning prayer, and Christmas. For Christians, these holy times are not just chances for good food and drink. They belong to public worship – whose ritual forms may seem “timeless,” but are very much, in fact, grounded in specific events in the history of salvation that are the basis for DOI: 10.4324/9781003026570-8

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Judeo-Christian beliefs. For Catholic and Orthodox Christians especially, public prayer and belief are in fact inseparable, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church states: The Church’s faith precedes the faith of the believer who is invited to adhere to it. When the Church celebrates the sacraments, she confesses the faith received from the apostles – whence the ancient saying: lex orandi, lex credendi . . . according to Prosper of Aquitaine. The law of prayer is the law of faith. . . . Liturgy is a constitutive element of the holy and living Tradition.4 There is much to unpack here about how Christianity engages with the past and present: handing on faith via the Church’s “holy and living” tradition – capturing that suspension between the past and present; liturgical-sacramental prayer hearkening back to early Christianity; unblinkingly invoking a fifth-century “Church Father” as a valid authority today. Where do we start a methodical study of the rapport between past and present in the Judeo-Christian tradition? I hope I do not test too much the reader’s patience as I must first tackle issues of method and establish some limits, before finally staking and proving a central claim. This chapter, because it is short, must paradoxically take its time.

The Changing Fortunes of Historical Theology: Issues of Method In the midst of Reformation controversies between Catholics and Protestants, the Dominican theologian Melchor Cano suggested ten loci theologici (loosely, “theological hotspots”) from which Catholic theologians could draw their arguments. The Spaniard’s posthumous De Locis theologicis5 quickly became a classic. Like Protestant reformers, he sought to provide theology with methods to rid it of abstract late-Medieval punctiliousness, and make it credible again. Over Protestant sola Scriptura, however, Cano drew up a full list of authoritative theological sources: not just Scripture, but also Tradition, the Catholic Church, Church Councils, Fathers of the Church, the Roman Church, Scholastic theologians, natural reason (science), philosophers, and human history.6 He thus reclaimed the role of history in Christian theology. Protestants, too, of course, would claim they were following a history, attested in the Scriptures. Cano also provided a discrete method: Catholic scholars and apologists would base their (present) discourse not just on (a) (past) events told by Scripture, but also on (b) the full historical, hermeneutical process applied thereto, as well as (c) rational arguments for faith claims, prescinded from divine Revelation, thanks to science, philosophy, and secular history. Hermeneutical process (b) itself would be evidenced both in the Church’s official documents and her theologians’ theories. In fact, (neo-)Platonism and Aristotelianism’s influence on Christian theology for the previous millennium – once born out of a just concern for method and rational dialogue with nonChristians – had led to unfortunate ahistorical streaks. Christian theology could never ignore its foundational events, of course, but Platonism might tempt theologians to look at Divine Being and Oneness sub specie aeternitatis (from the perspective of the eternal), thus avoiding the messiness of the manger in Bethlehem or the gore at Golgotha. By pitting Platonic forms as reality vs. matter as mere corruption, necessarily contingent history lost its value. Now, the original magna charta of Christian apologetics, 1 Peter 3:15–16, instructed Christians to always be ready to make their defense to anyone who demanded an accounting for the hope that was in them, and to do it with gentleness and reverence. What, then, served this demand better? Abstract, ahistorical philosophy and perfectly logical, closed systems, or concrete historical events and sweeping hermeneutical histories? 70

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Answers have varied over the two millennia of the Gospel dispensation, as the fortunes of theologies unabashedly grounded in historical events waxed and waned in the Church. Theology, however, is always contextual. In the Bible itself, from one book to another, or even inside a single book, depictions of God and human beings vary significantly, thus implicitly revealing the shifting cultures in which its human authors lived. While some theologians today claim to have invented “contextual theology,” in reality, God-speak always holds up a mirror to a given time and place. See, for example, that monument to classic, early twentieth-century neo-Scholasticism, the Dictionnaire de théologie catholique (begun in 1898).7 It offers no entries for “history” or “time,” because philosophia/theologia perennis were then thought to be the best reason-based, systematic rebuttal Catholicism could give to triumphant atheistic rationalism and scientific positivism. By the mid-twentieth century, however, history as an academic discipline had made such an impact on virtually all fields of knowledge (including seemingly abstract sciences like mathematics) that theologians gladly embraced a historical approach, as they had at previous points in Christian history.8 And so, in the Catholic Church’s official teaching, methods for theological investigation had spun around in a mere fifteen years. Whereas Pius XII’s 1950 Humani Generis posited the Magisterium as the true foundation of Catholic theology,9 thus imposing the “regressive method” (whereby the Bible, used in snippets called dicta probantia, was reduced to the remotest proof of Catholic belief), by contrast, Vatican II’s 1965 Optatam Totius ushered in a strongly historical “genetic method,” rooted in biblical exegesis, and moving forward through each period of the history of theology, up to the present day. Its new rules for teaching Catholic seminarians are so paradigmatic that they warrant a lengthy quote here: during priestly formation, in addition to a primary, heavy emphasis on biblical exegesis and scholarship, dogmatic theology should be so arranged that these biblical themes are proposed first of all. Next there should be opened up to the students what the Fathers of the Eastern and Western Church have contributed to the faithful transmission and development of the individual truths of revelation. The further history of dogma should also be presented, account being taken of its relation to the general history of the Church. Next, in order that they may illumine the mysteries of salvation as completely as possible, the students should learn to penetrate them more deeply with the help of speculation, under the guidance of St. Thomas, and to perceive their interconnections. They should be taught to recognize these same mysteries as present and working in liturgical actions and in the entire life of the Church. They should learn to seek the solutions to human problems under the light of revelation, to apply the eternal truths of revelation to the changeable conditions of human affairs and to communicate them in a way suited to men of our day. Likewise let the other theological disciplines be renewed through a more living contact with the mystery of Christ and the history of salvation.10 One would be hard pressed to make a stronger, more systematic case for a historical approach to theology. But what warranted such an about-face from the “regressive” to the “genetic” method? Just as the Council’s first session was starting, Frederick Cwiekowski, drawing on renowned Swiss theologian Charles Journet, explained that, like document-based “positive theology,” historical theology also studies the documents, but it seeks primarily to understand revelation in terms of historical vicissitudes of the process by which it was made known. It is precisely by studying this process, this “genetic ordering,” that it hopes to understand 71

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better the data of revelation itself: it seeks to uncover the history-in-the-making of the “mystery which in other ages was not known to the sons of men, as now it has been revealed to the holy apostles and prophets in the Spirit.” (Ephesians 3[:]5)11 This is a prime example of methodological stakes for Catholic theologians engaging with the past and present. Is the truth about God, the world, and humanity attained more normatively (a) by citing present Magisterium and relating it to past documents or events (the “regressive method”); or (b) should one start from the past – Scripture – and move through the thicket of Tradition to present Church teachings and theological opinions (the “genetic method”)? Vatican II taught that (b) was the way to go, but popes, officials, and some Catholic theologians have implied that (a) is still an option. This chapter will both unpack and use the “genetic method,” initially tracking down the themes of time and history in Scripture, then explaining how hermeneutics of Scripture structure Christian theology and dogma. No reflection on Christian time, however, is complete without pointing to the future and to eternity, however briefly: such is the task of “Christhaunted”12 imagination and memory, in communal and personal prayer, and in the ethics of daily action.13

Research Limits and Central Claim As a Roman Catholic, my theology is obviously shaped by that tradition, but this chapter also welcomes Protestant reflections. As for Jewish beliefs about history, although my biblical material ties to it, I cannot speak, alas, for the wealth and depth of how past and present Judaism approaches time. Clearly, Jews and Christians chiefly diverge in how they relate Jesus of Nazareth’s story to the history and writings of the Jewish people14: in this regard, they take radically different approaches to past and present. At the root of the Christian faith lies the choice to read ancient Israel’s history in the light of Jesus’ then recent past, now constant presence, and eventual coming in glory at the end of time. Christianity’s central claim about Scripture is that Jesus of Nazareth fulfilled the covenants, promises, and prophecies of the Jewish Bible.15 It is most tersely expressed in Luke’s gospel, when Jesus, having read Isaiah’s prophecy in the Nazareth synagogue, declares, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” eliciting first the amazement, then the rage of his listeners.16 How much Judaism redefined itself over and against this choice (i.e., in setting the canon of the Hebrew Bible) is hotly debated.17 One final caveat: the material on time and history in Christian theology is overwhelming in scope and diversity. Only a small fraction of it will be referenced here. My key claim here is that Christianity, by essence, is a historical faith, based on a faith-infused reading of past and present, with a view to the future and to eternity. The great French historian Marc Bloch, no Christian himself,18 concurred: “Christianity . . . is essentially a historical religion; a religion, that is, whose prime dogmas are based on events.”19 As a historian, he grasped that not all believers took such a view of reality: “Doubtless, a religious experience apart from history is conceivable. For the pure Deist, it is enough to have the inner light to believe in God. But not to believe in the God of the Christians.”20 Interestingly, Bloch, who cites “religious history . . . only by way of example,”21 sharply distinguishes the origins of Christianity and such code as is daily laid down in our churches [today]. . . . The question is no longer whether Jesus was first crucified and then resurrected, but how it came to pass that so many fellow humans today believe in the Crucifixion and Resurrection. Now, 72

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wherever fidelity to a belief is to be found, all the evidence agrees that it is but one aspect of the general life of a group.22 For the historian’s craft, therefore, Bloch claims that knowledge of the past is crucial but insufficient: to explain current Christian beliefs and practices, one must use the equivalent of the “genetic method” that I described earlier. We now turn to Scripture to ground our short study of time and history in the Christian tradition. For, as Vatican II’s 1965 Dogmatic Constitution on divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, asserts, “Sacred theology rests on the written word of God, together with sacred tradition, as its primary and perpetual foundation . . . and so the study of the sacred page is, as it were, the soul of sacred theology.”23

Time in Biblical Perspective Much has been made of the various Hebrew and Greek24 terms the Bible uses to express time, especially of the New Testament chrónos-kairós dyad. It has often been argued that chrónos implies time as a quantity, making it closer to Greek thought,25 whereas kairós signals qualitative time, a “ ‘time for’ something,”26 nearer to Hebrew literature. Nonetheless, scholarship highlights that “there is no general word for ‘time’ in the O[ld] T[estament], nor are there specific words for the categories of ‘past,’ ‘present,’ or ‘future.’ ”27 Caution is called for while considering “lexical and syntactic features of biblical diction”28 about time, lest one, rather than listening to how biblical authors viewed time, inadvertently project one’s philosophical options about time into the text. Thus, Oscar Cullmann’s 1946 Christus und die Zeit, picked up by Karl Löwith’s 1949 Meaning in History, posited a radical rift between (a) a cyclical pagan Greek view of time based on myth; and (b)  a linear Hebrew Judeo-Christian chronology revealing a history of salvation (Heilsgeschichte) which, for Löwith, had eventually declined into the secularized, modern conceit of time as empirical or natural (Weltgeschichte).29 Cullmann claimed to base his theory on biblical wording and phrasing, using then favored historic-critical exegetical methods. Löwith, however, confessed that “one may object that Cullmann’s exposition is a philosophical construction rather than a faithful exegesis.”30 Even so, the cyclical-linear rift theory was widely taught over the past seventy years as final.31 But as early as 1962, biblical scholar James Barr challenged it. His Biblical Words for Time32 raised the objection anticipated by Löwith of a philosophical eisegesis33 into Scripture at Cullmann’s hands. Barr astutely observed how modern European languages offer words that only partly overlap with the English word “time” (French fois, German Mal; French temps also meaning “weather”), and drew similar observations about biblical Greek and Hebrew.34 He duly noted that, although kairós and chrónos may differ in usage, “in many contexts the two words are interchangeable.”35 In fact, linear history (to describe military and political events, for instance), was well known to the Greeks, despite their cyclical myths, while Judaism provided a complex system of liturgical cycles, in addition to a linear time frame that runs from creation to the eschaton.36 Barr then convincingly concluded that “if such a thing as a Christian doctrine of time has to be developed, the work of discussing and developing it must belong not to biblical but to philosophical theology.”37 Cruelly, but persuasively,38 he then stated: [W]e cannot take seriously Cullmann’s insistence that all philosophical considerations must be excluded, for the question he asks, namely ‘What is the nature of time and eternity in biblical thought?,’ is a question for which the Bible itself gives no precedent, 73

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and one for the answering of which it affords so little material that his appeal has to be one to the lexical stock of the Bible rather than to its actual statements.39 There is no warrant, therefore, to create a stark opposition between Hebrew and Greek mindsets about time in an idealistic manner. Words and thoughts are messy, especially when it comes to time. That is not to say, however, that Scripture offers nothing on time. French Protestant philosopher Paul Ricœur helps us draw four temporal notes from Scripture, provided we dispense with attempts at conceptualization and embrace narrativity and intertextuality as our methods.40 “Our act of reading seeks to grasp, by means of the reconstructive imagination, this labor of the text on itself.”41 Though limited to the Old Testament, his clear, coherent thought warrants exploring and explicating. Ricœur’s first claim is that the Pentateuch is never either purely narrative or purely legal; rather, it weds (hi)story and law. “From this union derives both a narrativization of ethics and an ethicization of narrative.”42 This technical comment has practical implications for the biblical notion of time: The Law qualifies not only the event of its donation, but all narratives in which this donation is enshrined, so that foundational events become events that do not pass, but remain. The Law, in fact, carries the dimension of an irrevocable anteriority, a past that is anterior to any other past – something the Old Testament expresses concretely in its theology of the Covenant, when it speaks of God’s faithfulness.43 Enshrining in story the gift of God’s Covenant (from Adam to Noah, from Abraham to Moses) prevents events in Israel’s history from dissolving into a “once and for all” or a “never again”44: today, in fact, the Covenant is still in full force because of God’s faithful, steadfast love, a love that bridges past, present, and future. In time, however, notes Ricœur, the Old Testament’s prophets collided with the legalnarrative textual corpus, shattering the threat of dull, continuous “mere tradition.” Time and again, they shook up God’s people to remind them that history, for better or worse, would catch up with how they lived out the Covenant. Prophecy thus triggered a “confrontation between an ideological use of tradition and a truthful discernment of present historical events [actualité historique].”45 While prophets of doom heralded the Covenant’s end, halting whatever was stifling or lethal in unquestioned day-to-day tradition, prophets of consolation sang of a future creatively linked to a golden past, one where “the new is not anticipated as radically other, but as a kind of creative repetition of the old.”46 Jewish prophets thus typically anticipated a return to the Holy Land from the Babylonian Exile. Later, Christians would use a similar, “typological” exegesis to portray Christ’s New Covenant as a “creative repetition” of the Old. How do sapiential writings – the third part of the Jewish Tanakh, including psalms, proverbs, and stories or writings that extoll individual and collective wisdom47 – deal with time? Despite their non-narrative, ahistorical character, they are not devoid of their own, suggestive sense of time. For instance, Proverbs “uniquely unite daily life and the immemorial.”48 By painting Wisdom as a figure predating time, this literature paints a backdrop against which it can ask immemorial questions, such as “Why do the just suffer?” – the motive question of the Book of Job. Ecclesiastes further portrays a humble, charming “dailiness” lying in the shadow of death, so bringing the future to bear on the present. These writings thus expanded further the richness of Judeo-Christian imaginings of time. 74

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Finally, Ricœur rejoices in the temporality of hymns and psalms. “Their time is that of today and at all times.”49 Circling back to our prelude on Christian worship, we can now grasp how it is the privilege of worship to re-actualize salvation, to reiterate creation, to remember Exodus and the settlement, to renew the Law’s proclamation, to repeat the promises.  .  .  . The Psalm is thus the recapitulation, in the present time of worship and mental prayer [oraison], of every specific temporality of narrative, law and prophets.50 It is therefore no surprise that Christian liturgy, with monks and nuns leading the way, largely tapped the Jewish Psalter to carry on constant worship of God. As noted, Ricœur stopped his foray into biblical temporality at the New Testament’s gates; I will now attempt to open these gates and explore New Testament time within the Catholic tradition.

Hermeneutics of Scripture: Tradition, Dogma, Magisterium How do you interpret past biblical texts for present believers? This key question is not new: Scripture itself offers stories where a character ironically struggles to read one of its other, more obscure passages.51 The issue has, however, grown more pressing. For one, the cultural worlds that birthed the Bible are long gone. For another, Christians and Jews read the Hebrew Bible through divergent lenses. Even different Christian denominations read key biblical passages in differing ways. Paradigmatically, Jesus’ solemn declaration to Peter at Caesarea Philippi, “I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church,” means very different things for Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Protestants in the Reformed tradition, and Orthodox Christians. That is not to say that there are no rules of engagement with biblical texts for present believers who wish to avail themselves of a hermeneutical method, especially under their church’s aegis. So, in 1993, the Pontifical Biblical Commission in Rome published “The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church,” listing a wide array of methods to reach “an interpretation of the Bible that is as faithful as possible to its jointly divine and human character”52: (A) historical criticism; (B) “new methods of literary analysis,” viz. (1) rhetorical, (2) narrative, and (3) semiotic analyses; (C) “methods based on Tradition,” like (1) the canonical approach, (2) the use of Jewish interpretative traditions, and (3) the study of the history of the text’s effect; (D) approaches based on human sciences, such as (1) sociology, (2) cultural anthropology, and (3) psychology; and finally (E) contextual approaches, e.g. (1) liberationist theology and (2) feminist theology. Biblical fundamentalism, listed as (F), is identified as ahistorical. The document further explains how philosophical hermeneutics can assist biblical interpretation, recalls Scripture’s main senses (literal, spiritual, sensus plenior), and ends with certain expectations for Catholic biblical exegesis. Additional methods may appeal to those who read the Bible today. Exegesis is an incredibly vast world, full of helpful critique but also mutual criticism. After all, the sad present disunity of Christianity,53 as well as its original parting from Judaism, were chiefly born out of conflicts about the interpretation of Scripture. “Heresy” and “schism” are not sins for which Christians can rebuke, say, Muslims or Buddhists or Hindus, whose sacred texts are wholly other54; heresy and schism arise out of divergent readings of accounts of seminal words and deeds from the biblical past. These competing interpretations impact the present of Christian belief; they become the stuff of history; and, in turn, cause hermeneutic battles in the future. But biblical hermeneutics is not the only interpretative key that Christian theology uses to engage with the past and present. The Bible did not fall from the sky as a gold-edged, leatherbound book. Its stories, laws, prophecies, wisdom, and events, along with hermeneutical and 75

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apologetical choices,55 were first transmitted orally,56 then collected and edited many times over, until they were rendered in writing, and again handed on. Scripture was born inside a living Tradition. But once Scripture was set, it, too, reshaped Tradition. For Catholics, Tradition and Scripture jointly express divine Revelation. Poetically, Vatican II proclaimed that this sacred Tradition, therefore, and Sacred Scripture of both the Old and New Testaments are like a mirror in which the pilgrim Church on earth looks at God, from whom she has received everything, until she is brought finally to see Him as He is, face to face.57 This introduces, noticeably, two sides of time to which this chapter has not yet paid much attention: the future and eternity. On the one hand, drawing on the New Testament, the Church firmly believes that in “Christ the Lord . . . the full revelation of the supreme God is brought to completion.”58 In that sense, Christians believe that divine Revelation was once and for all completed in a past event: “The Christian dispensation, therefore, as the new and definitive covenant, will never pass away and we now await no further new public revelation before the glorious manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ.” As that last temporal clause discloses, the Second Coming of Christ at the end of time to judge the world and manifest himself in glory will open up a new, final phase of the divine-human relationship: the “beatific vision,” which defines eternity itself.59 According to almost all Christian denominations, this Tradition, qua divine Revelation, includes certain set interpretations of Scripture, called dogma.60 Dogma, too, did not fall from the sky. The need to define neatly, in short sentences or creeds, what beliefs united Christians in worship and action, arose against interpretations of Scripture judged deviant, distortions of truths once revealed in the past but now obscured. The second-century North African theologian Tertullian, a lawyer by training, claimed that a “rule of faith” (regula fidei) inherited from the apostles was the gold standard by which to judge whether emerging theological opinions were true to past beliefs.61 Three centuries on, the Commonitorium attributed to Vincent of Lérins famously asserted that “in the Catholic Church itself, all possible care must be taken, that we hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all.”62 But it also upheld progress (profectus) in doctrine, provided that beliefs suffered no alteration (permutatio): Some may say: Shall there be no progress of religion in Christ’s Church? Certainly; all possible progress. For who is there, so envious of men, so full of hatred to God, who would seek to forbid it? But only provided that it be a progress of faith, and not an alteration.63 Dogma, especially in its ancient anathematic form, essentially sought to establish the boundaries of biblical interpretation – and thus, ecclesial membership – as paradigmatically faithful to the past. Now, this tension between “conservative” and “progressive” hermeneutics applies not only to Scripture, but also to Tradition, and to Church Magisterium, qua Revelation. In 1845, as he was leaving the Anglican Communion for the Church of Rome, John Henry Newman published An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. Part 2, “Doctrinal Developments Viewed Relatively to Doctrinal Corruptions,” provided seven “notes” to judge whether a doctrinal development – a new dogma or a theologian’s novel theory – was genuine or corruptive. In Newman’s words, these were (a) preservation of type; (b) continuity of principles; (c) power of assimilation; (d) logical sequence; (e) anticipation of its future; (f) conservative actions upon 76

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its past; and (g) chronic vigor.64 His inquiry directly related to his ecclesiological concerns, but his seven notes have much broader implications, and have since then been convincingly used to assess the faithfulness of developments such as Vatican II’s doctrine of religious freedom.65 Many of the heated debates inside the Catholic Church over the past fifty years have borne on hermeneutics. Firstly, Catholics disagree on how well or how authoritatively Vatican II’s texts interpreted divine Revelation, as expressed in Tradition, Scripture, and Magisterium. Further, Catholics argue about how to interpret Vatican II’s texts themselves. Finally, they quibble about the Council’s status as a historic(al) event. In fact, the Council had barely started when the understanding of the Church’s Magisterium in relation to time and doctrine became a burning issue.66 Pope John XXIII’s intention was clear: fidelity to the Church’s tradition could be lived out today only if the “deposit of faith” was expressed in words that made it more receivable.67 Throughout the papacies of Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis, factions within the Catholic Church have argued over which hermeneutics apply to Vatican II. Benedict XVI tackled the topic in a 2005 Christmas Address to the Roman Curia, opposing a harmful “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture” with a “hermeneutic of reform, of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us,” which the Pope called “a right hermeneutic.”68 But as the current pope, Francis, picks priorities perceived by many as more progressive than his predecessor’s (Francis himself has several times cited Vincent of Lérins’ defense of progress69), the temporal framing of the interpretation of divine Revelation – past, present, and future – is changing once again. “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever,” the Bible proclaims.70 How Christians relate to Him over time, however, varies quite considerably. In Pope Francis’ colorful words, The word of God cannot be moth-balled like some old blanket in an attempt to keep insects at bay! No. The word of God is a dynamic and living reality that develops and grows because it is aimed at a fulfilment that none can halt.71

Fulfilment, Imagination, and Memory: The Future and Eternity Now, this “fulfilment” referenced by Francis is different from the historical one believed by Christians to have taken place in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, dogmatically defined as the “incarnate eternal Word of God.”72 Is the word of God thus to be fulfilled twice, or even time and again? Oscar Cullmann coined a jewel of a phrase for the time in which Christians find themselves between Christ’s Ascension and his Second Coming: the “already . . . but not yet.” It is the final time before the end (1 John 2:18), because, no matter what its still-undetermined duration may be (Acts 1:7), the mid-point has been passed. It is already the time of the end, and yet is not the end.73 This phrase arises from a tension that runs through the New Testament: Christians are already adopted in Christ, but not yet adopted; already redeemed, but not yet; and so on.74 Writing in the aftermath of the Second World War, Cullmann chose a striking military simile: “The present period of the Church is the time between the decisive battle, which has already occurred, and the ‘Victory Day’.”75 A final, huge question is therefore: how do Christians relate to this “in-between time,” the “time of the Church”? Many battles have been fought inside the Church on this issue: Joachim of Fiore’s infamous “three ages” (the Old Covenant under the God the Father, the Gospel life 77

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of Christ the Son, the time of the Church led by the Spirit) excited early Franciscans so much that St. Bonaventure had to write the Collationes in Hexaemeron as a magnanimous rebuttal to save his Order from disintegrating. Later, Hegel and Marx picked up on Joachim’s three ages; later again, Henri de Lubac wrote a new rebuttal warning Catholics not to espouse that heretical time frame.76 The first Jesuit confrère who taught me the history of the Church asked our group of novices the key question: “Where do you, personally, think the golden age of the Church and the world is to be found? In the past? In the present? In the future?” Jews and Christians throughout the ages will bring varied answers to that timeless question, drawing more on their psychology or their philosophy than on their theology to provide an answer.77 At the end of the day, though, Christians are to focus on the now: As the Italian liturgist Cesare Giraudo expertly established,78 the structure of all prayer, as manifested especially in the Eucharist, revolves around a hopeful memorial of the past, which the believers ask God to actualize. “What you did for our ancestors in the faith [protasis], O God, we now [kai nun/et nunc] ask you to realize for us [apodosis].” The God who saved his people from slavery and sin, the Father who rose his Son from the dead, is called upon today, though the Holy Spirit, to change his people into a holy Church, and to make this bread and wine his Son’s Body and Blood. This transformation, however, is not to occur passively: Christians are expected to welcome God’s grace and cooperate with it so their words and deeds realize here and now the Kingdom of God which Jesus once preached. This, they believe, conditions their entry into eternity to share in God’s timelessness. Jesus calls his disciples to pray and “keep awake therefore, for [they] know neither the day nor the hour”79 in which the Son of Man will come again. For Christians, to engage with the past in the present is also to fix one’s eyes on the day to come, and ultimately, on the Today, somewhere off in the Future, where time is no more. This, for Christianity, as one descendant of ancient Judaism, is the true term of a historical faith and a faithful history, as mediated in particular by memory and the imagination.

Notes 1 Numbered Psalm 117 in St. Jerome’s Latin translation of the Bible, the Vulgate. 2 Psalm 94:7–9. All Biblical quotations herein are taken from the 1989 New Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition. 3 Liturgia Horarum juxta ritum romanum editio typica altera. Volume I (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2000), 361: “Hodie Christus natus est: hodie Salvator apparuit: hodie in terra canunt angeli, laetantur archangeli. Hodie exsultant justi, dicentes: Gloria in excelsis Deo. Alleluia.” On the twelfth day of Christmas, the Epiphany is likewise actualized in chant, conflating three biblical narratives in a single exultation: “Three mysteries mark this holy day: today the star leads the Magi to the infant Christ; today water is changed into wine for the wedding feast; today Christ wills to be baptized by John in the river Jordan to bring us salvation.” Liturgia Horarum, vol. I, 492: “Tribus miraculis ornatum, diem sanctum colimus: Hodie stella Magos duxit ad praesepium: Hodie vinum ex aqua factum est ad nuptias: Hodie in Jordane a Joanne Christus baptizari voluit, ut salvaret nos, Alleluia.” Similar liturgical texts could be found in the liturgies of the Eastern churches. For instance, Byzantine Christians sing the following kontakion on Christmas Day: “Today the Virgin gives birth to the Transcendent One, and the earth offers a cave to the Unapproachable One! Angels with shepherds glorify Him! The wise men journey with a star! Since for our sake the Eternal God was born as a Little Child!” Erich Przywara’s Nuptiae Agni. Liturgie des Kirchenjahrs (Nuremberg: Glock und Lutz Verlag, 1948) likewise offers its Christmas meditation under the title “Hodie” (61–83). Christian mysticism also posits as necessary the connection between Christ’s physical birth in the past and his spiritual birth in the soul at present; so, Angelus Silesius: “Had Christ a thousand times, /Been born in Bethlehem, /But not in thee, thy sin/Would still thy soul condemn.” Rhyming translation by Paul Carus, “Angelus Silesius.” The Open Court XXII (Chicago, 1908), 296. The use of the liturgical “today” is not limited to Christmastide, whether for Western or Eastern Christians, but it provides striking poetic instances of actualizing an

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Historical Faith and Faithful History ancient mystery. St. Thérèse de Lisieux’s 1894 poem “Mon chant d’aujourd’hui” is a polyhedric, plaintive petition to God, asking for small graces “just for today,” leading up to the “eternal Today” of the afterlife. 4 Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd edition (Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), No. 1124. The in-text reference is to Prosper of Aquitaine, De gratia Dei et libero voluntatis arbitrio (Paris: Migne, PL 51, 1861), cap. VIII (XI), 209–210. 5 Melchior Cano, De locis theologicis libri XII: cum indice copiosissimo atque locupletissimo (Lovanium: S. Saffenus–A. Byrckmann, 1564). 6 See Juan Belda Plans, ed., De locis theologicis Melchor Cano (Madrid: BAC, 2006), 7–8. 7 A. Vacant, E. Mangenot, and E. Amann, eds., Dictionnaire de théologie catholique contenant l’exposé des doctrines de la théologie catholique, leurs preuves et leur histoire (Paris: Letouzey, 1923–1972), 33 vols. 8 In general, early Christian apologists and Church Fathers gave greater emphasis to history than most of their medieval successors who sought to build cathedral-like academic summae. Predictably, however, early Christian views on history would be typically very different from modern and postmodern ones. Further, as noted later, medieval Christian mystery plays and vita sanctorum maintained a certain emphasis on story and history, even as contemporaries in universities took a more systematic approach. 9 Pius XII, Encyclical Humani Generis (1950), No.  18: “hoc sacrum Magisterium, in rebus fidei et morum, cuilibet theologo proxima et universalis veritatis norma esse debet.” (“this sacred Office of Teacher in matters of faith and morals must be the proximate and universal criterion of truth for all theologians”). 10 Vatican II, Decree on Priestly Formation. Optatam Totius (1965), No. 16. 11 Frederick J. Cwiekowski, “Biblical theology as historical theology.” The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 24.4 (1962), 408. He refers to Charles Journet, The Wisdom of Faith (Westminster: Newman, 1952), 120. Italics mine. 12 See Flannery O’Connor, “Some aspects of the grotesque in Southern fiction.” In Collected Works (Library of America No. 39, 1988), 813: “I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christcentered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn’t convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God.” 13 On the imagination see Nicolas Steeves, Grâce à l’imagination. Intégrer l’imagination en théologie fondamentale (Paris: Cerf, 2016): Italian translation Grazie all’immaginazione. Integrare l’immaginazione in teologia fondamentale (Brescia: Queriniana, 2018). On Christian imagination and ethics in particular, see William Spohn, Go and Do Likewise: Jesus and Ethics (New York: Continuum, 1999). Spohn masterfully shows how ethics, through an imaginative, prayerful, analogical hermeneutics of the Gospel, based on Saint Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, plays a key role in making past teachings of Jesus present to our time. On memory, especially in medieval Christianity, see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 14 For a great study of how the Catholic Church officially considers the Jewish people and the Hebrew Bible, see: Pontifical Biblical Commission, The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2001). 15 Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd edition (Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), No. 129: Christians therefore read the Old Testament in the light of Christ crucified and risen. Such typological reading discloses the inexhaustible content of the Old Testament; but it must not make us forget that the Old Testament retains its own intrinsic value as Revelation reaffirmed by our Lord himself. [Cf. Mk 12:29–31] Besides, the New Testament has to be read in the light of the Old. Early Christian catechesis made constant use of the Old Testament. [Cf. 1  Corinthians 5:6–8; 10:1–11.] As an old saying put it, the New Testament lies hidden in the Old and the Old Testament is unveiled in the New. [Cf. St. Augustine, Quaestiones in Heptateuchum. 2, 73: PL 34,623; Vatican II, Dei Verbum, No. 16]. 16 Luke 4:21; see Luke 4:22–30 for the shift in how his listeners at the synagogue in Nazareth, Jesus’ hometown, reacted. 17 Heinrich Graetz’s 1871 theory that the Council of Jamnia fixed the canon of the Hebrew Bible ca. 70–90 CE as a reaction against the early Church’s scriptural choices – the prevailing scholarly consensus for most of the 20th century – has been increasingly challenged. See Lee Martin McDonald and James A. Sanders, eds., The Canon Debate (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2002). 18 Raised in a secular Alsatian Jewish family, Bloch was an agnostic, if not an atheist: see S.R. Epstein, “Marc Bloch: The identity of a historian.” Journal of Medieval History 19 (1993), 276.

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Nicolas Steeves, SJ 1 9 Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft. Trans. Peter Putnam (New York: Vintage, 1953), 31. 20 Ibid., 1. 21 Ibid., 32. 22 Ibid. 23 Vatican II, Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum (1965), No. 24. 24 Ancient Hebrew and Greek each conjugate verbs in a very special way, which implicitly structures how the past is thought through and expressed (e.g., the Hebrew imperfect (qatal) or the Greek aorist/ perfect dyad). 25 See the pithy summary in Paul Ricœur, “Temps biblique.” In Archivio di filosofia Anno LIII (Padova: Cedam, 1985), 23: “Ainsi se distinguerait radicalement le kairos biblique du chronos grec.” 26 This pithy phrase encapsulates what kairós means: Jeremiah Unterman and Paul J. Achtemeier, “Time.” In Paul J. Achtemeier, ed., The HarperCollins Bible Dictionary, Revised edition (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996), 1152. 27 Unterman and Achtemeier, “Time,” 1151. 28 Henri Blocher, “Yesterday, today, forever: Time, times, eternity in biblical perspective.” Tyndale Bulletin 52.2 (2001), 185. 29 See Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1949), 250; Oscar Cullmann, Christ and Time. The Primitive Christian Conception of Time and History (London: SCM Press, 1951). Parallel reflections can be found in Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), originally published in 1949 like Löwith’s Meaning in History; or in Thorleif Boman, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek (London: SCM Press, 1960), originally published in 1954. Also see Ricœur’s distinction between “cyclical time” and “kerygmatic time in “Manifestation et proclamation.” Le Sacré, études et recherches, Actes du colloque Castelli (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1974), 57–76. 30 Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1949), 250. 31 See e.g. Jean-Yves Lacoste, “Time.” In Jean-Yves Lacoste, ed., Encyclopedia of Christian Theology (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 1585. 32 James Barr, Biblical Words for Time (London: SCM Press Ltd, 1962). 33 An interpretation of a biblical text by reading into it one’s own ideas. 34 Barr, Biblical Words, 108–109. 35 Ibid., 121. 36 See Paul Ricœur’s clear, synthetical article: in “Temps biblique,” 23–25. 37 Barr, Biblical Words, 149. 38 As an inside joke, Blocher humorously applies the transliterated Hebrew phrase “kešôd miššadday” to Barr: in Isaiah 13:6, the original Hebrew (‫ )ּכְ ׁשֹ֖ ד ִמּׁשַ ַ ּ֥די‬translates as “destruction from the Almighty”! Blocher, “Yesterday, today, forever,” 185. 39 Barr, Biblical Words, 150. 40 See Paul Ricœur’s methodological choices in “Temps biblique,” 26. 41 Ricœur, “Temps biblique,” 27: “Notre acte de lecture veut être la saisie, par l’imagination reconstructrice, du travail du texte sur lui-même.” 42 Ricœur, “Temps biblique,” 28. 43 Ibid., 28. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., 30. 46 Ibid., 31. 47 The Hebrew acronym Tanakh helpfully uses the initials of the three parts of what Christians call the Old (or First) Testament: the Law (Torah); Prophets (Nevi’im); and other Writings (Ketuvim). According to the New Testament, some Jews at the time of Jesus used a bipartition instead (Scriptures = the Law and the Prophets); see Luke 24:27; John 1:45. Ricœur was well aware that Roman Catholic Bibles typically include more sapiential books than most Protestant Bibles (e.g. the Book of Wisdom; Sirach/Ecclesiasticus; Tobit; Judith). This does not substantially change his point. (Eastern and Oriental Orthodox bibles may include even more books.) 48 Ricœur, “Temps biblique,” 32. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid., 34–35. Ricœur also shrewdly ties in Deuteronomy with the same reiterative process as the Psalms: its constant injunction to obey the Law has today as its temporal horizon. Today is the day when Moses’ Law is given anew.

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Historical Faith and Faithful History 51 A well-known instance of such intra-biblical perplexity is Acts 8:30–35, where an Ethiopian eunuch of Queen Candace battles with an ancient prophecy by Isaiah. The apostle Philip, who happens to pass by, explains it to him at length as “the good news about Jesus.” The explanation is convincing enough that the man asks for baptism then and there. Elsewhere in the New Testament, 2 Peter 3:16 wryly comments that “some things” in St. Paul’s letters are “hard to understand” – a point well taken by Christians throughout the ages! 52 Pontifical Biblical Commission, The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1993). The ensuing list follows the document’s lettering and numbering. 53 Just before his death, according to John’s Gospel, Jesus prayed with his disciples: “I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” The Christian ecumenical movement in the twentieth century has sought to overcome rifts and divisions that accrued and hardened over time. One may argue that some explicit causes for inter-Christian division (e.g. beards and hair, liturgical languages, indulgences) were born from varying hermeneutics of Tradition more than of Scripture, but they are deeply intertwined. 54 1983 Code of Canon Law: Can. 751: Heresy is the obstinate denial or obstinate doubt after the reception of baptism of some truth which is to be believed by divine and Catholic faith; apostasy is the total repudiation of the Christian faith; schism is the refusal of submission to the Supreme Pontiff or of communion with the members of the Church subject to him. 55 On the apologetical concerns of New Testament authors, arising in particular from objections raised against the earliest apostolic preaching, see Avery Dulles, A History of Apologetics, 2nd edition (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), chapter 1. By hermeneutical choices, I chiefly mean how the four gospels or the Pauline letters quote and interpret Hebrew Scripture, enshrining these choices in separate texts which eventually would jointly become a new “Scripture” for Christ’s disciples, the “New Testament.” 56 With a few exceptions such as Pauline (or other New Testament) letters, which started as written documents. 57 Vatican II, Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum (1965), No. 7. 58 Ibid.; The Scriptural bases evoked for this claim are 2 Corinthians 1:20; 3:13–4:6. 59 For a short, thorough synthesis on eternity, see e.g. Irène Fernandez, “Eternity.” In Jean-Yves Lacoste, ed., Encyclopedia of Christian Theology (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 493–494. 60 Almost all Christian denominations agree with and believe what the earliest ecumenical Councils of the Church defined dogmatically about Jesus Christ and his human and divine natures, and about the person of the Holy Spirit, and hence, the divine Trinity. They differ on the validity of later Church councils about the Virgin Mary, the sacraments, grace, papal infallibility, etc. Belgian theologian Adolphe Gesché writes convincingly about how dogma is essentially a hermeneutic of Scripture: see Adolphe Gesché, “Du dogme comme exégèse.” Revue théologique de Louvain 21 (1990), 163–198. 61 Tertullian, “On prescription against heretics.” In Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds., The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers Down to A.D. 325 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1977–1979), 12: “Let our ‘seeking,’ therefore be in that which is our own, and from those who are our own, and concerning that which is our own, – that, and only that, which can become an object of inquiry without impairing the rule of faith.” (“Quaeramus ergo in nostro et a nostris et de nostro: idque dumtaxat quod salva regula fidei potest in quaestionem devenire.”) Italics mine. 62 Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium, II: “In ipsa item catholica ecclesia magnopere curandum est, ut id teneamus quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est.” Italics mine. 63 Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium, XXIII: Sed forsitan dicit aliquis: Nullusne ergo in ecclesia Christi profectus habebitur religionis? Habeatur plane et maximus. Nam quis ille est tam invidus hominibus, tam exosus Deo, qui istud prohibere conetur? Sed ita tamen, ut vere profectus sit ille fidei, non permutatio. 64 See John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1909), Chapter 5, 169–206. The seven notes listed here are exact quotations from his section titles. 65 See Ian Ker, Newman on Vatican II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), Chapter 2, 65–71. In note 96 (65), Ker cites his original article on the topic, “Is Dignitatis Humanae a case of authentic doctrinal

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Nicolas Steeves, SJ development?” Logos 11.2 (Spring 2008), 149–157. Ker also refers to Gerald O’Collins, “Newman’s seven notes: The case of the resurrection.” In Ian Ker and Alan Hill, eds., Newman after a Hundred Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 337–352, but notes that “O’Collins is considering there a possible future development, whereas Newman saw his tests or notes as applicable to ‘the actual decisions of authority.’ ” 66 See Joseph Komonchak’s English translation of Gaudet Mater Ecclesia, Pope St. John XXIII’s opening speech on October 11, 1962. The official text of the pope’s Latin speech translates to: In calling this vast assembly, [I] intended a renewed affirmation of the Church’s teaching authority which is unfailing and perdures until the end of time. This teaching authority, taking into account the errors, needs, and opportunities of our age, is through this Council being exhibited in an extraordinary way to all people throughout the world. The original Italian he had drafted, however, had read much more hopefully: In calling this vast assembly, [I] wished to affirm again the continuity of the Church’s teaching authority in order to present it in an extraordinary form to all the people of our age, taking into account the deviations, needs, and opportunities of the modern age. https://jakomonchak.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/john-xxiii-opening-speech.pdf The shift in weight and valued between past, present, and future is obvious. 67 John XXIII, Gaudet Mater Ecclesia, 15: What is needed is that this certain and unchangeable doctrine, to which loyal submission is due, be investigated and presented in the way demanded by our times. For the deposit of faith, the truths contained in our venerable doctrine, are one thing; the fashion in which they are expressed, but with the same meaning and the same judgement, is another thing. (Komonchak’s translation of the official Latin text) 68 Benedict XVI, Address to the Roman Curia Offering Them His Christmas Greetings, December 22, 2005, www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2005/december/documents/hf_ben_xvi_ spe_20051222_roman-curia.html. 69 See Francis, Address to Participants in the Meeting Promoted by the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization, October 11, 2017, www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2017/ october/documents/papa-francesco_20171011_convegno-nuova-evangelizzazione.html. Also see Francis, Interview with Fr. Antonio Spadaro, Civiltà Cattolica, September 30, 2013, www.vatican.va/ content/francesco/en/speeches/2013/september/documents/papa-francesco_20130921_intervistaspadaro.html. 70 Hebrews 13:8. 71 See Francis, Address, October  11, 2017. The July  2021 battle over the (dis)continued use of the pre–Vatican  II Roman Missal for the celebration of the Eucharist elicited the following comment from American vaticanista John Allen, which uncannily rejoins this book’s own theme: “the current contretemps in Catholicism over the Latin Mass is a classic symptom of a religious community relitigating its past rather than engaging its present.” (Italics mine.) Allen argues that similar phenomena may be observed in various parts of the Muslim world. John L. Allen Jr., “Decline in religious architecture like a warning light on our dashboard.” Cruxnow, August 22, 2021, online edition, https://cruxnow.com/ news-analysis/2021/08/decline-in-religious-architecture-like-a-warning-light-on-our-dashboard. 72 Literary experts have noted that, whereas medieval Passion plays typically read and acted out history as focusing on the life of Jesus of Nazareth for as much as 80% of world history, modern accounts of history barely mention him, even as the terms “before Christ” and “Anno Domini” have lost currency. See William Lynch, Images of Faith: Exploration of the Ironic Imagination (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1973), especially chapter 1. Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, a keystone of Jesuit formation, also typically invite the exercitant to focus on the events of the vita Christi. In a different perspective, Karl Barth also explored the notion of “Christological concentration”: Karl Barth, “Parergon.” Evangelische Theologie (1948/49), 272 (text drafted in 1938). 73 Oscar Cullmann, Christ and Time. The Primitive Christian Conception of Time and History (London: SCM Press, 1951), 145. Italics original. 1 John 2:18 starts with “Children, it is the last hour!,” while Acts 1:7 has Jesus saying, just before his Ascension into heaven, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.”

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Historical Faith and Faithful History 74 See Romans 8:15 (“you have received a spirit of adoption”) vs. Romans 8:23 (“we wait for adoption”); Ephesians 1:7 (“In him we have redemption through his blood”) vs. Ephesians 4:30 (“you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption”). Many other examples of this in-between time abound in the Pauline corpus. 75 Cullmann, Christ and Time, 145. The author is writing in the immediate aftermath of World War II, which would have struck him particularly strongly as an Alsatian on the border between France and Germany. 76 See Henri de Lubac, La postérité spirituelle de Joachim de Fiore (Paris: Lethielleux; Namur: Culture et Vérité, 1979–1981), 2 vols. 77 See the inspiring entry by Henri Bourgeois, “Temps.” In Dictionnaire de spiritualité, ascétique et mystique, doctrine et mystique, tome XV (Paris: Beauchesne, 1991), cols. 162–191. This is an abridged version of Henri Bourgeois, Pierre Gibert and Maurice Joujon, L’expérience chrétienne du temps (Paris: Cerf, 1987). 78 See Cesare Giraudo, La struttura letteraria della preghiera eucaristica. Saggio sulla genesi letteraria di una forma (Roma: Analecta biblica 92, 1981), especially the synoptic table inserted between pages 106 and 107. 79 Matthew 25:13.

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7 CONFUCIAN CULTURE AND THE IMMINENCE OF THE PAST Yves Vendé

“Confucianism” connotes in English the name of a spiritual and intellectual tradition commonly called rujia儒家 in Chinese. In the Analects – a record of conversations with Confucius compiled by his disciples1 – and later Confucian texts such as the Mencius or the Xunzi, the character ru儒 refers to literati who desired to transform the culture of the past jia家 into a school of thought.2 Marc Bloch’s assumption that Western civilization, unlike others, is unique in paying attention to memory should be challenged.3 Two other names are sometimes used in Chinese to speak about Confucianism. The first one, Confucian learning (Ruxue儒學), refers more to Confucianism as an academic discipline and to Confucianism as a philosophy established in modern universities at the beginning of the 20th century.4 Rujiao儒教 is sometimes employed to emphasize the religious dimension of Confucianism and the importance given to remembering ancestors and performing rituals. Confucians, or “ruists,” then, are concerned with transmitting past culture and interpreting it in the present. This orientation started with Confucius himself, who never regarded himself as an innovator but instead as a transmitter of the Zhou culture (Analects 7.1). He regularly made reference to an idealized past and its symbolic objects in assessing, contrasting, and criticizing the political and moral behaviors of his contemporaries, and invited his disciples to join a process of “self-cultivation” that would ultimately lead them to endorse their public responsibilities.5 According to Confucius, the heritage of the Zhou contains three aspects: 1. The Zhou rituals (zhouli周禮), especially funerals and practices related to mourning one’s parents. Carrying out mourning rituals properly was not only a way to locate oneself in a lineage and thus acknowledge that one receives life from others; it was also a means of acting according to one’s role in a social hierarchy; 2. The Classics (jingdian經典), which are books inherited from the past that Confucian disciples are invited to meditate and comment on; and 3. Embodying the Sages’ ideals, i.e., the sense of propriety that comes through rituals and learning the Classics. Confucian disciples are expected to enact former Sages’ social behavior and thus act as true Kings.6 These three aspects – the practice of rituals, learning the Classics, and embodying Sageliness ideals (especially in daily life and in concrete political action) – jointly constituted the 84

DOI: 10.4324/9781003026570-9

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Confucian Way (dao道). It made the Sages’ wisdom from the past instrumental in handling personal and political interactions in the present. These three aspects are part of a cyclical understanding of history.7 Although the Confucian Dao (or “way”) has been lost and found time and again over the ages, searching for it has remained a concern for Chinese intellectuals.8 Thus, every time Chinese culture has undergone a crisis, intellectuals have gone back to the past and explored their tradition’s resources, searching for symbolic tools (texts, objects, and practices) to address contemporary challenges. For example, neo-Confucians did so when the Song dynasty faced the challenges of Buddhism. For Zhu Xi朱熹 (1130–1200), the most prominent of the Song neo-Confucians, offering sacrifices to ancestors and ancient Sages was not only a way to reflect on one’s insufficiencies but also a tool to achieve a transformation of one’s character, by connecting oneself with the transmission of an orthodox lineage of Confucius’ message (daotong道統). Zhu Xi’s relation to the Classics is also based on the same assumption: to learn the Classics compiled by Confucius was first a matter of embodying the heart of the Ancient Sages.9 As a reformer and transmitter of the Confucian tradition, Zhu Xi thus also aimed at preparing his students for public responsibilities. This chapter will now explore how learning the Classics and performing rituals serve as two cornerstones of the Confucian relation with the past. It will initially treat Confucius’ and Mencius’ relation to the Classics and Confucius’ and Xunzi’s developments on rituals. It will then move to the neo-Confucian reinterpretation of both mediations. In both Classical Confucianism and neo-Confucianism, cultural mediations inherited from the past are integrated into self-cultivation, that is, to attempt to become a superior person (junzi君子), i.e. someone who may be put in charge of public government because of their moral and intellectual lineage and refinement.

Transmitting Classics From the Past Transmitting Zhou Culture Confucius (Kongzi孔子, 551–479 BCE) was born in a time of corruption and chaos during which several states competed for hegemony in China (Libengyuehuai禮崩樂壞). By then, the previously common culture of the Zhou周 (1046–771 BCE) and the rituals that had helped to manage feudal relationships had collapsed, leading different clans to wage war against one another. In this context, Confucius received a noble education and was trained in the six arts (Yi藝): Rituals (Li禮), or a sense of etiquette; Music (Yue樂); Archery (She射); Charioteering (Yu禦); Calligraphy (Shu書), and Mathematics, or Reckoning (Shu數). These six arts formed the totality of what one had to learn, according to the Zhou Book of Rites.10 Subsequently, Confucius entered the government of Lu, and then, at the age of 50, became a high-ranking official. Due to political intrigue, however, he was forced into exile. For thirteen years, he moved from one state to another, traveling and teaching, accompanied by his disciples. Still, he could not find a suitable setting in which to develop his political and social thoughts. The Analects record the following statement: The Master said, “At age fifteen I  set my heart upon learning (志於學); at thirty I took my stand (立); at forty I became free of doubts (不惑); at fifty I understood the Heavenly Mandate (知天命); at sixty my ear was attuned; and at seventy I could follow my heart’s desire without overstepping the bounds of propriety.” (Analects 2.4)11 85

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In this sentence, not only is Confucius speaking about his experience; he is also offering a curriculum that displays a core feature of his philosophy. For Confucius, symbolic mediations inherited from the past can change and refine people through a process of cultivation closely associated with learning –understood as not only memorizing or accumulating knowledge, but also putting it into practice (Analects 17.2). To refine themselves, Confucius’ disciples and readers must therefore first master the earlier Zhou Classics, including The Book of Changes, The Book of Music, The Book of Poetry, The Book of Documents, The Book of Rites, and The Spring and Autumn Annals. Even if the systematization of the Five Classics in the Analects should not be overstated, these five texts came to constitute what we might call a “canon” (see Analects 7.18 and 8.8).12 By insisting on learning traditional texts inherited from the Zhou, Confucius wanted his disciples to receive and use the ancient cultural heritage, as we read in Analects 3.14: The Master said, “From the vantage point of the Zhou, one’s gaze can encompass the two dynasties that preceded it (週監於二代). How brilliant in culture it was! I follow the Zhou (鬱鬱乎文哉！吾從周).” During the earlier Zhou dynasty, China had been united and at peace. Confucius’ interpretation of this era was that the Zhou cultural system of Classics and rituals allowed for different classes of noblemen to live together harmoniously through ritualized interactions.13 For him, the challenge of social life was to establish responsible relationships between subordinates and superiors: Duke Ding asked, “How should a lord employ his ministers? How should a minister serve his lord?” Confucius replied, “A lord should employ his ministers with ritual, and ministers should serve their lord with dutifulness.” (Analects 3.19) By transmitting the traditional Zhou heritage, Confucius promoted both a method for selfcultivation and a political vision. This was a way to handle relationships at court and regulate interactions among states, just as former kings had done in unifying China (see Analects 2.12). But by transmitting the Way of Zhou, Confucius also established himself an interpreter of it.14 The importance of Zhou culture explains why Confucius did not style himself as a creative thinker but rather as a transmitter (Analects 7.1), as well as an editor and commentator of the Zhou Classics.

Reading the Zhou Classics When Confucius first mentions “humanities” (wen文) in the Analects (3.14), he does so in reference to the set of Zhou Classics. For Confucius, the Classics – texts inherited from the past – are the stuff of daily life. For example, when he envisions the moment of his death, Confucius insists on the benefits of reading the Book of Changes: The Master said: “Give me some years, I  will spend fifty in studying the Book of Changes, and then might be able to be without great fault.” (Analects 7.17) 86

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The purpose of learning the Classics was to be able to connect what is in the book with different aspects of one’s experience: The Master said, “Zi Gong! do you think that I learn (學) many things and keep them in memory?” Zi Gong replied, “Yes – but perhaps it is not so?” “No, I look for a single thread to unite [them] (非也，予一以貫之).” (Analects 15.3) Careful reading of the Classics leads to self-unification, with all one’s knowledge organized around a clear, central axis. Much can be learned from reading them, but there is only one thing to be sought, namely, to become human, for which to know how to behave in relationships is essential: Chen Kang asked Bo Yu [the son of Confucius], saying, “Have you heard any lessons from your father different from what we have all heard?” Bo Yu replied, “No. He was standing alone once, when I  passed below the hall with hasty steps. He asked me: ‘Have you learned the Book of Poetry?’ (學詩乎) On my replying: ‘Not yet,’ he added: ‘If you do not learn the Book of Poetry, you will not be able to speak (不學詩無以言).’ I retired and studied the Book of Poetry. Another day, he was, in the same way, standing alone, when I passed by below the hall with hasty steps, and he said to me: ‘Have you learned the Rites?’ (學禮乎) On my replying: ‘Not yet,’ he added: ‘If you do not learn the Rites, you will not be able to take your place (不學禮無以立).’ I then retired, and learned the rules of Propriety. I have heard only these two things from him.” (Analects 16.13) Confucius is depicted here as standing alone. This is traditionally interpreted as an attitude of practicing learned things (Analects 1.1) and as an allusion to the technique of self-examination (xing省, see Analects 1.4, 2.9, 4.17, 12.4). Further, Confucius refers to two ancient sources: the Book of Poetry and the Rites. Studying the former trains one to speak and engage in dialogue with others; by studying the latter, one learns the behavior necessary at court, such as taking a stance (li立) in public situations (see Analects 2.4, quoted earlier). The Book of Poetry’s role is actually defined several times in the Analects, as it is here at 17.9: The Master said, “Little Ones, why do you not study the Book of Poetry? (何莫學夫詩) The Book of Poetry can be a source of inspiration and can broaden your perspective; they can be used to bring you together with others as well as to give vent to vexations and complaints (詩，可以興，可以觀，可以群，可以怨). In the domestic sphere, they articulate the proper manner to serve your father, (邇之事父) and in public life they describe the proper manner to serve your ruler (遠之事君). They also acquaint you with the names for a wide variety of birds and beasts, plants and trees (多識於鳥獸草木之名).” (See also Analects 11.25) The purpose of learning the Classics was thus to transform practical behavior, stimulate the heart-mind, and learn to reflect. Collectively, these actions constitute moralization, or fighting against one’s “depraved thought”: The Master said, “The Odes number several hundred, and yet can be judged with a single phrase: ‘Oh, they will not lead you astray’ (siwuxie 思無邪’).” (Analects 2.2) 87

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Now, siwuxie思無邪 is an implicit quotation from the Book of Poetry,《诗经，Odes of the temple and the altar颂，Odes from Lu鲁颂，Jiong駉》: 薄言駉者、Fat and large are the stallions, On the plains of the far-distant borders. [. . .] 以车祛祛。[All], stout carriage horses. 思无邪、His thoughts are without depravity; 思马斯徂。He thinks of his horses, and thus serviceable are they.15 In Analects 2.2, Confucius draws a comparison between a chariot driven by swift horses and one’s heart yoked to the Book of Poetry: like the chariot, it is led down a path without evil. There is a parallel here with Analects 15.3, where Confucius finds a unity among the things he learns: a single sentence sums up the message he leaves. In this combined episode of reading and moralizing oneself, to learn without practicing is useless: The Master said, “Imagine a person who can recite the several hundred odes by heart but, when delegated a governmental task, is unable to carry it out, or when sent abroad as an envoy, is unable to engage in repartee. No matter how many odes he might have memorized, what good are they to him?” (Analects 13.5) Reading the Book of Poetry should therefore impact one’s deeds. It is an ongoing process of self-cultivation, like polishing and carving ivory or jade: Zigong said, “Poor without being obsequious, rich without being arrogant – what would you say about someone like that?” The Master answered, “That is acceptable, but it is still not as good as being poor and yet joyful, rich and yet loving ritual.” Zigong said, “An ode says, ‘As if cut, as if polished; As if carved, as if ground.’ Is this not what you have in heart-mind?” The Master said, “Zigong, you are precisely the kind of person with whom one can begin to discuss the Book of Poetry. Informed as to what has gone before, you know what is to come.” (Analects 1.15) In his second answer, Zigong expands on Confucius’ thought by means of a quotation. Similar interactions between the master and his disciples around the Book of Poetry can be observed in Analects 3.8 and 8.3. These passages and quotations from the Book of Poetry show that this Classic from the past is used to: (1) illustrate a thought; (2) prove a thought proper; (3) develop and complete the views of the Master; and (4) express one’s feelings or intentions. This list is consistent with what is described in Analects 16.13 and 17.9. In Confucius’ mind, Classics from the past help us to handle present situations. Even if Confucius never ultimately tackles the actual origin and authorship of the Five Classics, to study them means to become familiar with the words of the Ancient Sages themselves (Shengrenzhiyan聖人之言, Analects 16.8). Confucianism is, therefore, best understood as a school of thought concerned with compiling, editing, and transmitting symbolic resources from the past. To put it bluntly, Confucius was obsessed with the Five Classics of the Zhou dynasty because they constituted a reservoir of symbolic tools for human beings who sought to be socially responsible. The Classics helped to name, channel, and handle emotions, especially predominantly negative feelings prompted by challenging personal or public circumstances. This perspective will now be developed through our examination of the Mencius, another key Confucian text. 88

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Reading the Classics in the Mencius The Mencius offers further reflection on the need to refer to past resources to shape present humanness (ren仁). For the Mencius – a compilation of texts centered on the figure of Mencius (372–329 BCE), a Confucian philosopher who lived several generations after Confucius – reliance on the Classics comes from the need to develop the roots of goodness in humanity: Mencius said, “Humaneness is the human heart-mind (xin心). Rightness is the human path. To quit the path and not follow it, to abandon this heart-mind and not know enough to seek it, is indeed lamentable. If a man has chickens and dogs that become lost, he knows enough to seek them. But when he has lost his mind, he does not know enough to seek it. The way of learning (學問之道) is none other than this: to seek for the lost mind.” (Mencius 6A11)16 For Mencius, learning is one way to recover the “original” human mind, or human nature (Mencius 6A6). In the Analects, Confucius had hardly spoken about human nature (xing性). By contrast, the Mencius raises a debate on this issue: is human nature fundamentally good (shan善) or evil (e惡)? Based on the observation that all human beings are moved by the same pleasures (Mencius 7B24) and by empathy – e.g., anyone witnessing a child about to fall into a well is going to try and save this child (Mencius 2A6) – a vision emerges wherein the seeds of morality are present in every human heart. Once fully grown, these seeds become virtues of social character (Mencius 4A27).17 Therefore, Mencius affirms that human nature is both biological and moral: it is in fact the result of a process of self-cultivation (Mencius 6A1–4). Of course, violence can alter human nature, but in itself human nature is oriented toward the good: Mencius said: “[. . .] Man’s nature is naturally good just as water naturally flows downward. There is no man without this good nature; neither is there water that does not flow downward.” (Mencius 6A:2) For Mencius, the feelings of compassion (Ceyinzhixin惻隱之心) and reverence (Gongjinzhixin恭敬之心) are as natural and intrinsic as the desire to drink or to enjoy good food. They always remain present even if their manifestations vary depending on the external situation (Mencius 6A5). By claiming that human nature is good, Mencius means that human beings are “able to be good.” If natural human goodness can be developed, then why are there not Sages everywhere? According to Mencius, the senses and the heart-mind (xin心) have different tendencies: the heart-mind desires virtue, but the mouth wants good food and such, as the King Xuan of Qi explains (Mencius 1B5, 7B24). Most of the time, human beings do not listen to their deepest yearning – the one to be moral – but to the one that lies on the surface. For Mencius, if the heart-mind can think, feel, and will, it can also discern among different needs and desires and arrange them into a hierarchy. It is capable of cultivating the “psychophysical stuff” (Qi氣) (Mencius 2A2). “One guides one’s qi toward compassion when one perceives the immediate situation as giving rise to a reason to help someone.”18 The heart-mind can learn to use the Qi properly, which means finding an equilibrium between its various inner motions, especially when one wants to act as a genuine king (Mencius 1A7). 89

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Again, for Mencius, this discernment of desires is achieved through reading the Classics and adjusting one’s heart to the hearts of the Sages from the past (Mencius 3A2 and 3B14).19 When disciples read the Classics, two principles should guide them: 1. to go back to the intention of their authors (Sages from the past): In explaining an ode, one should not use a word to distort a phrase nor use a phrase to distort the overall intent. If one thinks about understanding the intent, one will get it (yiyinizhi以意逆志).20 (Mencius 5A4) and 2. to become acquainted with the world of the classical authors (yilunqishi以論其世): That scholar, whose goodness (shan善) is the most outstanding in the world, will become a friend to all the good scholars of the world. . . . When this scholar feels that being a friend of all the good scholars of the world is not enough, he will go back in time to consider the people of antiquity, repeating their poems and reading their books. Not knowing what they were like as persons, he considers what they were like in their own time. This is to go back in time and make friends. (Mencius 5B8) This situation is Mencius’ personal experience: he could not meet directly with Confucius (Confucius died at least one century before Mencius’ birth), but through the Classics, he could learn to refine his character (Mencius 4B22). In conclusion, for the Mencius, human nature is fundamentally capable of good, but this disposition has to be cultivated through texts inherited from the past. For both Mencius and Confucius, therefore, the opportunity to develop goodness lies in reading the Classics and embodying their values in familial relationships (Mencius 2A5). Once human beings have practiced love inside their homes, they may, and in fact must, extend this feeling to others (Mencius 1A7; 3A5), until one day, hopefully, their love becomes universal (Mencius 3B3–4). In the preceding paragraph, I described the relationship of Confucius and Mencius with the Classics. The Classics carry tools from the past that help handle present inner motions and relationships. But, for both Confucius and Mencius, the Classics do not stand alone. They always exist within a dynamic network of symbols, practices, and communities. The strength and status of the Classics depend on the creativity of the commentaries and interpretations they subsequently inspire. For this reason, from the Confucian perspective, the relationship with past culture can be mediated not only through the Classics themselves but also through commentaries, which serve as one type of direct interaction between the Classics and culture. In Confucianism, besides the Classics, there is another factor mediating the relation with the past: rituals. The next section will turn to how rituals, in the paradigmatic process of refining human nature, offer another form of mediation with the past because these rituals help develop a sense of propriety.

Rituals Connecting With the Past I have already mentioned that in Confucius’ mind, the Zhou dynasty constituted an ideal moment in the past, when rituals were correctly carried out and preserved social harmony. 90

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During the Zhou period, rituals served a twofold purpose: (a) they organized a social hierarchy; and (b) they connected the living with ancestors and ultimately with Heaven.21 Confucius came after this golden age, but he tried to preserve it through rituals, as can be seen in the Analects.

Confucius and Rituals Rites – rituals, or a sense of etiquette (Li禮) – are a recurring theme in the Analects: sometimes as an actual book, specifically the Classic of Rites (especially in Analects 16.13); at other times, they are described more as an attitude or a collection of actions.22 There is an ongoing debate in the Analects regarding which set of rituals should be performed, especially during mourning. It’s a tricky business because mourning is an expression of filial piety and involves serving relatives according to the rules of propriety (Analects 2.5). It comes as no surprise that, in this debate, Confucius prefers the Zhou rituals from deep in the past (Analects 2.23; 3.9 and 15.11) to all other sets of rituals. Many sentences in the Analects highlight the importance of observing or at least being acquainted with the right set of rules of propriety (Analects 3.18; 3.22; 7.31; 14.41; 15.33). Indeed, the process of becoming a gentleman (Junzi君子) is achieved by studying the Classics, practicing ritual propriety (Li禮), and achieving humanity (Ren仁). Fundamentally, this encompasses an ability to handle interpersonal relationships. When we are born, we don’t know how to improve on our own; rather, we must train by studying the humanities and the rituals, as Confucius makes clear: The Master said, “Someone who is broadly learned with regard to culture (博學於 文), and whose conduct is restrained by the rites (約之以禮), can be counted upon to not go astray.” (Analects 6.28; Also Analects 9.11; 11.15) Analects 6.28 offers a parallel to Analects 2.2 on rituals. Both rituals and the Classics provide structures for performance according to the Confucian Way, by supporting each other in refining the self, for instance, by learning music (Analects 3.3 & 8.8). Thus, Li, as one aspect of the cultivation of the self, does not refer merely to formal ceremonies. Li is in fact the faculty of acting appropriately in all public and social relationships, viz. a sense of etiquette: The Master said, “If you are respectful but lack ritual (禮) you will become exasperating; if you are careful but lack ritual (禮) you will become timid; if you are courageous but lack ritual you will become bold (禮); and if you are upright but lack ritual (禮) you will become inflexible. If the gentleman (Junzi君子) is kind to his relatives, the common people will be inspired toward goodness; if he does not neglect his old acquaintances, the people will honor their obligations to others.” (Analects 8.2) In the first part of Analects 8.2, therefore, the purpose of rituals is not to make people sticklers for rules. They aim instead at attaining an aesthetic of life where the presence of others is enhanced by means of a ritualistic atmosphere, as we read in Analects 1.12: Master You said, “When it comes to the practice of ritual, it is harmonious ease (he和) that is to be valued. It is precisely such harmony that makes the Way of the Former Kings so beautiful.” 91

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For Confucius, rituals, in fact, are tools that positively shape a quality of presence to others. In everyday life, human beings move from one relational situation to another: Things seem to be “banging against each other and reacting to each other – the reactions always being different in each situation because the things that happen to appear in each situation will always be different. Such are our lives. [.  .  .] [H]owever, this is inadequate: the goal is to achieve a fixed purpose through repeated study. Such a fixed purpose is defined as ‘‘‘propriety’ – responding to things properly, instead of by immediate disposition.”23 The importance of rituals, therefore, resides in the inner dispositions, in the feelings channeled and shaped in those who partake in them: The Master said, “Someone who lacks magnanimity when occupying high office, who is not respectful when performing ritual, and who remains unmoved by sorrow when overseeing mourning rites – how could I bear to look upon such a person?” (Analects 3.26). Circling back to the second part of Analects 8.2, Li thus appears as a twofold quality in a gentleman: (a) Li needs to be practiced for one to be embodied, but (b) it is also part of governing, and essential to becoming a nobleman.

Rituals and Public Responsibilities According to Analects 1.12, just mentioned, rituals are therefore one means to access the Dao (Way) of the former kings and to enact their policies. Laws and sanctions can prevent people from acting wrongly, but unlike rituals, they do not encourage people to act properly: The Master said, “If you try to guide the common people with coercive regulations (zheng 政) and keep them in line with punishments, the common people will become evasive and will have no sense of shame. If, however, you guide them with Virtue, and keep them in line by means of ritual (禮), the people will have a sense of shame and will rectify themselves.” (Analects 2.3; see also 2.2) Confucian rituals are therefore also an invitation to behave properly at a basic, nonlinguistic level. Rituals involve the body; they aim at communicating with the living, as well as with ancestors and their spirits in a nonreflexive way (Analects 8.21). If learning the Classics focuses on language especially (without neglecting one’s emotions and imagination), rituals, by contrast, address the whole human being and serve to assess one’s public deeds. Rituals thus connect with the exercise of political responsibilities as a transformative experience: a humane leader needs to know how to act according to rituals and exclusively that: “The Master said, ‘Is Shun not an example of someone who ruled by means of non-action? What did he do? He made himself reverent and took his proper [ritual] position facing south, that is all’ ” (Analects 15.5). Merely by properly performing rituals, a good ruler will effectively transform the social order. Indeed, by duly sacrificing to his ancestors, he enters into a lineage that enables him to perform his role according to what is expected (Analects 19.18): The later-born sages deemed some of these actions exemplary, and as such defined them as part of a ritual canon that people in general should enact. The goal of such an enactment would be to refine one’s own dispositions: by re-enacting exemplary 92

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actions from the past, one trains one’s responses so that one can achieve propriety. Building a better society, therefore, is based upon ritualization: building a canon of practices that everyone should follow.24 This is why the Analects go full circle about rituals: the book’s last sentence echoes the first on how to become a nobleman: Confucius said, “One who does not understand fate (不知命) lacks the means to become a gentleman (Junzi君子). One who does not understand ritual (不知禮) lacks the means to take his place (無以立). One who does not understand words lacks the means to evaluate others (不知言，無以知人也).” (Analects 20.3) Now here, in Analects 20.3, “fate” refers to what we receive by “nature.” The term “fate” (命) does not represent a blind force threatening from above.25 For Confucius, there is humility in welcoming reality as a given. Such humility is a practice developed through rituals and the acquisition of language via the study of the Classics.26 Both the rituals and the learning of the Classics highlight how symbolic resources help the gentleman to stand up on his own and acquire the necessary social skills for public office while embodying the way of the former kings (xianwangzhidao先王之). Since, in the Classics, rituals come from the past (Analects 2.23 and 3.9), Confucius clearly did not invent them. For this very reason, he focused on how to perform them (Analects 3.4) rather than on their composition. For example, he held that the pronunciation of ancient ritual formulae did not need to be changed to suit modern elocution (Analects 7.18). Now, this fidelity to past practice could have been perceived as suspicious by Confucius’ contemporaries (Analects 3.18). Still, for him, the purpose was less to stick rigidly to rituals than to relate flexibly to them as a means to make those who partook in them to be more present to their lives: “If I am not fully present at the sacrifice, it is as if I did not sacrifice at all” (Analects 3.12).27 Here, rituals are meant to reconnect humans with virtue and goodness: “A man who is not Good – what has he to do with ritual?” (Analects 3.3). For Confucius, the practice of rituals inherited from the past shapes our spiritual presence in social relationships. Rituals help us to focus on self-cultivation and train us to do what is right and behave as humane persons.28 While learning the Classics and rituals are the first two steps of cultivation, and music a form of achievement (Analects 17.11), the process is completed by carrying out public responsibilities. Indeed, through this curriculum, Confucius fundamentally offers the means to prepare disciples for public responsibilities as noblemen by encouraging their moral cultivation, drawing on resources from the past. I now turn to how Confucius’ insistence on rituals as a transformative process for the individual and for society as a whole unfolded in subsequent Chinese tradition.

Xunzi and Rituals Xunzi (298–238 BCE), who lived after Confucius and Mencius, also championed the importance of rituals as a practice essential to transmitting Confucian ideals. For him, as opposed to the Mencius, human nature was fundamentally evil, and rituals appeared as the best way to fix this. The Xunzi – a compilation and edition of texts from this philosopher – thus declares: And so, learning comes to ritual and then stops, for this is called the ultimate point in pursuit of the Way and virtue (道德之極). In the reverence and refinement of ritual, 93

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the balance and harmony of music, the broad content of the Odes and Documents, the subtleties of the Spring and Autumn Annals all things between Heaven and Earth are complete. (Xunzi ch.1.12)29 Rituals alone do not teach the practice of the Way. They are, however, a key contributor to understanding and learning it: “If at best you cannot like the right person, and at worst you cannot exalt ritual, then you will simply be learning haphazard knowledge and focusing your intentions on blindly following the Odes and Documents” (Xunzi ch.1.15).30 Thus, if a Confucian disciple does not understand ritual, he cannot fully grasp the Five Classics edited and taught by Confucius: “If you do not take the regulations of ritual as your way (不道禮憲), but instead go at it with just the Odes and Documents, then it will be like trying to measure the depth of a river with your finger” (Xunzi ch.1.15).31 Rituals give discipline and support the moral effort of learning. But there is more: they are also “pragmatic devices (wei) that gesture at ideals – but not fixed or determined ones.”32 Embodying a sense of rituals in every aspect of life is a matter of developing an aesthetic of life rather than an orthopraxy (Xunzi ch.19.495). For Xunzi, rituals are in fact at the heart of the construct of community: forefathers and ancestors, lords and teachers brought about order via rituals (Xunzi 19.497). Rituals, nonetheless, do not necessarily refer to a “transcendence,” as Ebrey puts it: Of early thinkers, Hsün Tzu went the furthest in articulating a theory of rites based on secular principles. Sages who understood human nature and the needs of society had created the rituals. Mourning rites express love and gratitude toward the dead; they have nothing to do with helping the soul find its way or propitiating supernatural forces.33 Thus, even if rituals do not connect to a spiritual realm, their social and psychological effects make them useful. From a Confucian perspective, rituals are tools inherited from a tradition. They both precede and ground the dynamism of the study of the Classics, as well as support the moral effect of such study in the practices of individuals and social bodies. Rituals, as a deep-seated sense of etiquette, invite us to perform our roles appropriately in all human interactions, by teaching us to take our proper place in public according to the Way of the former Sages. Such was the Confucian perspective as it coalesced in the early days of the classical Confucian tradition. These principles of self-cultivation in relation to the past remained key aspects in later stages of development of Confucian thought.

Unfolding the Tradition During the Han dynasty (206 BCE –220 CE), the primary set of Classics was the Five Classics of the Zhou compiled and edited by Confucius. During the Song (960–1279 CE), however, the Four Books – composed of the Analects, the Mencius, the Great Learning, and the Doctrine of the Mean – became the new Confucian canon under Zhu Xi’s influence. By changing the Confucian canon, Zhu Xi presented himself as Confucius’ chief heir and authoritative interpreter. He sought to make the Confucian Dao more accessible to his students and to help them find symbolic tools to answer the challenges of their times.34 Not only did Zhu Xi renew Confucian tradition by changing the Classics deemed canonical, he also offered a reformed version of daily 94

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rituals to help his contemporaries connect with their ancestors and organize their social lives.35 By renovating the canon of Classics and rituals, Zhu Xi thus helpfully revealed one of the main truisms of the Confucian relationship to tradition: the past has not disappeared; rather, it can help us enter fully into our humanity. Zhu Xi developed a robust curriculum based on the Classics and rituals inherited from early Confucianism in order to build up his students’ character. The latter were expected to commit themselves personally to the Confucian Way, which required them to read the texts written by the Sages and to train to find “the pattern(s)-coherence(s)” (Li理) within them (gewuqiongli格 物窮理). Then they would have to practice what they had learned. They were also expected to enter into an attitude of reverence (jing敬): “In the learning effort, it is only necessary to keep reverence, to look for the pattern(s) is second” (Zhu Xi, Classified Conversations of Master Zhu, Zhuziyulei《朱子語類》 Scroll 9, par. 18, translation mine).36 For Zhu Xi, the Classics and rituals constituted a guide to “the pattern” – a term he had inherited from Xunzi – the highest layer of reality, the coherence of things, events, and relations. To read and to perform rituals, therefore, was not merely an intellectual exercise but also a moral, spiritual, and even physical practice.

Zhu Xi and the Classics The 10th and 11th scrolls of the Classified Conversations with Master Zhu contain what is commonly called Zhu Xi’s “reading method.” At the heart of his method of reading the Classics (dushufa讀書法) is the conviction that students had to experience the Four Books personally.37 In these passages compiled by his students, Zhu Xi gave them advice on three questions: Which books should be read? How should they be read? Why read them? When instructing his students about the first question, Zhu Xi emphasized the importance of reading the Four Books first, before reading other sets of books (the Five Classics, Histories, and other texts like the Zhuangzi or the Daodejing): “First, read the Analects, the Book of Mencius, and the Doctrine of the Mean. Then read one of the Classics. Then read the Histories, which, at that point, will be easy to understand” (CCMZ 5.66). The reason for giving preference to the Four Books is that they provide easier access to the intention(s) of the Sages from the past (CCMZ 11.91). They help students establish a framework and become familiar with pattern(s). There are many texts that can offer help for self-cultivation, but it is better first to be acquainted with pattern(s) through the Four Books before going on to read others (CCMZ 11.18). Indeed, a person committed to learning can be tempted to give up by the apparent opposite “truths” present in other books, especially the Histories. However, by reading the Four Books first, students will avoid confusion and will acquire the tools necessary to help them subsequently evaluate the content of other books: In learning, we must first establish the great base: at the outset, learning should be concerned largely with what’s essential; in the middle stage, largely with breadth; and in the end, with what is essential again. [. . .] Thus we must first read the Analects, the Book of Mencius, the Greater Learning, and the Doctrine of the Mean in order to examine the intentions of the sages and worthies; we must read the histories to examine the traces of dynastic preservation and ruin, order and disorder; and we must read the thinkers of the hundred schools to observe their various faults. There is a proper sequence to these steps; we can’t skip over any of them. (CCMZ 5.42) 95

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Regarding the second question – how to read the Classics? – Zhu Xi outlines three phases (not necessarily in chronological order) and two attitudes: 1. Before reading, the reader should resolve to read the text in a well-disposed way. Students are first invited to settle their will (lizhi立志, cf. CCMZ 11.13). To read a Confucian Classic is indeed to join a process of “becoming a Saint/Sage” (Zhu Xi, Classified . . . , Scroll 8, par. 29). By this process, the reader becomes fully engaged. Another prerequisite is to have an open mind (Qiongli yi xuxin jinglu weiben “窮理以虛心靜慮為本”, CCMZ 9.46), a mind bereft of preconceived ideas, lest readers project their opinions on the text. In fact, in reading the Classics, there is no other suitable method but to empty one’s mind in order to receive the content of the text (CCMZ 11.84). Several bodily practices can help students better predispose themselves: for example, paying attention to how they sit (CCMZ 11.21). Also, students are asked to read slowly and with total concentration, for Zhu Xi gives great importance to the “letter” of the Classics. For him, their written characters are the repository of the words with which the Sage(s) chose to display the Confucian Way. Notes and commentaries (Zhujie注解), while helpful, only serve to give access to the process of cultivation by putting students in touch with the letter of the Classics themselves (CCMZ 11.106). 2. Therefore, while reading, students are invited to examine several levels of the text: characters, sentences, and finally, the full text and its context. They must find an appropriate rhythm of reading (CCMZ 11.18), alternating sitting quietly and relaxing their mind, with reading and discussing the issues raised by the text with fellow students and teachers (CCMZ 11.72). During this process, students must entirely focus on their reading and not pay attention to other matters. They should especially not waste any time considering whether or not their efforts will bring them a position as a state official (CCMZ 10.97). 3. After reading, students should spend time assimilating the message of the Ancient Sage(s), to become thoroughly familiar with the pattern(s) contained in the text itself (CCMZ 10.50). Readers must embrace the materials from the Classics in their own heart (CCMZ 10.68), integrating into their personal life what they have read (CCMZ 13.1). Alongside this applicatio (a term of Hans-Georg Gadamer), readers are encouraged to enter into dialogue with the ancient Sage(s), to make the latter’s words their own, to modify their intentions and read the Sage(s), bearing in mind the latter’s intentions (以聖賢之意觀聖 賢之書, CCMZ 9,78).38 By consequence, not only does the vocabulary and the structure of the text come to “belong” to readers, but the readers’ very intentionality must adjust to that of the Sage(s). For Zhu Xi, the Sages’ intention is manifest in the text, and readers are also invited to read according to the intentionality of the Sages. In a nutshell: the reader is to become a Sage himself. Therefore, according to Zhu Xi, to read a book is to strive to accumulate knowledge and to train the will and exert the “psychophysical stuff” (Qi氣). To read the Confucian Classics is a moral and spiritual training, a way to learn to behave as a humane person (CCMZ 10.5). As with Confucius, so too with Zhu Xi: the Classics do not stand alone. They constantly interact with the rituals, as the following brief study will show.39

Zhu Xi and Rituals In Classified Conversations Scroll 2, Zhu Xi explains how to offer prayers to ghosts and spirits of people from the past (guishen鬼神). This text also provides instructions about 96

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how to hold a memorial service for Confucius (jikongzi祭孔子), ultimately leading to an orthodox transmission of Confucian doctrine (daotong道統). To read the Classics is not enough to connect with Confucius and his spirit. Rituals and memorials are necessary too. 40 One of the reasons why Zhu Xi speaks about guishen is that the Classics mention them, and some people experience their presence. For Zhu Xi, this is also a personal experience with his family members and Ancient Sages. He firmly believed, in fact, that spirits and ghosts were part of the natural world. In his vocabulary, therefore, guishen refers to a variety of natural and regular phenomena. To put it simply, if the Qi (the life energy) has not exhausted itself when people die (for example, if someone suffers a violent or unexpected death), they could become ghosts.41 This life energy lingers on until it is actively dispersed. In that sense, guishen are only one manifestation of the global energy (Qi氣) (Classified Conversations Scroll 2, pars. 6–7). By connecting his reflection on spirits and ghosts and his understanding of Qi, Zhu Xi “sought to provide a rational explanation within his philosophical system by discussing strange ghosts in terms of qi, especially ‘incorrect or abnormal’ (bu-zheng不正) qi.”42 His search for rational explanation for ghosts and spirits notwithstanding, Zhu Xi remained receptive to traditional practices regarding ancestors and guishen, for which he provided a conceptual framework.43 In the case of a familial lineage, ancestors and descendants share the same Qi lineage. Therefore, descendants can summon the Qi of their ancestors through rituals. Memorials to ancestors make the lingering Qi coalesce. For this reason, it is vain to sacrifice to someone else’s ancestors because there is no connection of Qi.44 Why, then, do Zhu Xi’s Classified Conversations also speak of interactions with the spirits of Sages from the past, such as Fu Xi, Zhou Dunyi, and Confucius? There is a connection here between the prayers Zhu Xi addresses to the spirits of Sages from the past and the coining an intellectual lineage: for his generation of thinkers, it was a way to reconstruct a common culture: The newly risen Song literati lineages were indeed broken or at least difficult to trace with any specificity back many generations beyond the tenth century. Having risen relatively recently into elite ranks with resources to commemorate and maintain records of early ancestors, these literati (it seems to me) probably felt a filial compulsion toward retrieval and remembrance. In other words, the fact that most family genealogical records had gaps might have influenced Song men’s conception of how the transmission of the Way was retrievable.45 Zhu Xi could articulate the continuity of an intellectual lineage between him and Confucius only thanks to the notion of numinous Qi. Sacrifices to such spirits were similar to sacrifices to the natural elements.46 Therefore, for Zhu Xi, it was possible to connect one’s Qi with that of one of the Sages from the past via prayer, as Tillman explains.47 Thus, Zhu Xi connected his coining of the concept of an orthodox transmission of the Confucian Dao (daotong道統) with the prayers he addressed to the spirits of Sages from the past. The shaping of the Daotong concept was in fact crucial for Song literati. Over the centuries, the Confucian Dao had been lost, and now, recovering the past solely through the Classics was not enough. For Zhu Xi, rituals for ancestors and teachers were enacted as a true “spiritual communion.” 48 This “communion” served to foster the embodiment of the Confucian Dao in one’s life. It made Confucian disciples intellectual and moral descendants of Confucius and Sages from the past, i.e., persons responsible for implementing the politics of the Ancient Sages. 49 97

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By sacrificing to Confucius, Zhu Xi was claiming a form of kinship with him. Consequently, for students, to see Zhu Xi performing rituals associated with Confucius would also invite them to repeat the practice in memory of Zhu Xi. Zhu Xi thus reinterpreted classical Confucianism within a new conceptual framework.50 Classics and rituals inherited from the Ancient Sages were a means to learn how to investigate things individually (格物窮理) and to relate to the pattern(s)-coherence(s) of things in the world. Confucianism is a tradition heavily bent on transmitting the past and its cultural objects: Classics, rituals, practices. Every time Chinese culture has faced a crisis, Confucian literati have gone back to traditional resources from the past, reinterpreting them to answer new challenges arising in their day. By compiling and editing symbolic resources from the Zhou, Confucius initially created a new line of interpretation of the past. Neo-Confucian intellectuals like Zhu Xi did likewise during the Song dynasty. The effort to reconstruct Confucianism in the 20th century by people like Tu Weiming, the director of the Yenching Institute at Harvard University for years and now at Peking University, inevitably followed a similar pattern. In one word, the relationship to the past in Confucianism is fundamentally ethical, rather than explanatory. This dynamic has been summarized by Vandermeersch: [T]he Chinese historian operates the synthesis at the level of the interpretation of events, whereas the Western historian seeks to explain the facts by reconstructing between them relations of cause and effect, while the Chinese historian seeks not to explain the facts, but to read in their unfolding the sense of history: what each event can reveal of the sense of the general functioning of the world and what meaning the general evolution of the world gives to each event.51

Notes 1 According to Zhu Xi, who follows Ban Gu. See Tae Hyun Kim and Mark Csikszentmihalyi, “History and formation of the analects.” In Amy Olberding, ed., Dao Companion to the Analects (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), 21–36, here 27. This view has been challenged since the Tang. See, Donald Ostrowski, “Who wrote the analects?” In Who Wrote That? Authorship Controversies from Moses to Sholokhov (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020), 39–57, here 43. 2 See Chen Lai陈来, Ancient Religion and Ethics – the Origin of Confucian Thought《古代宗教与伦理 – 儒家思想的根源》(Peking: Peking University Press 北京大学出版社, 1996), 17. 3 Marc Bloch, Apologie pour l’histoire ou le métier d’historien, Cahier des Annales, 3, 2nd edition (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1952), ix: “Car, à la différence d’autres types de culture, [l’Occident] a toujours beaucoup attendu de sa mémoire” [“For, unlike other cultures, the West has always paid close attention to memory.”] 4 Chen Shaoming陈少明, “Research on the history of Chinese philosophy and the creation of Chinese philosophy《中国哲学史研究与中国哲学创作》.” Academic Monthly《学术月刊》3 (2004), 5–14, here 12. 5 Tu Wei-ming, Way, Learning, and Politics : Essays on the Confucian Intellectual (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), 2: “Confucius’ insistence that he loved the ancients and that he was a transmitter rather than a maker symbolizes his attempt to provide a transcendental anchorage for human civilization.” In the Analects, and in later Confucianism, self-cultivation is the tradition of 修身. In the Mencius 7A1, it is a cultivation/shaping the moral character in order to be able to “behave,” to stand in the world and act as one should do. 6 This theme will unfold as neishengwaiwang內聖外王, to be a sage inside and a king outside in Chinese thought. 7 From Dong Zhongshu董仲舒 (179–104 BCE) to Zhu Xi, many Chinese thinkers have developed a cyclical understanding of political history. See Gary Arbukle, “Inevitable treason: Dong Zhongshu’s

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Confucian Culture and the Imminence of the Past theory of historical cycles and early attempts to invalidate the Han mandate.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 115.4 (1995), 585–597; Yu Yingshi余英時, The World of Zhu Xi, Research in the Political Culture of Song Literati, 朱熹的歷史世界 – 宋代士大夫政治文化的研究、 shenghuo dushu xinzhi Sanlian Shudian (publishing house) 生活‧讀書‧新知三聯書店, 2004. The first chapter is dedicated to this common debate among Song literati and focuses on Zhu Xi. 8 Zhu Xi offers an example of this attitude in the twelfth century. Sebastien Billoud’s article describes the very same phenomena in the twentieth century. See Sébastien Billoud, “Confucianism in Chinese society in the first two decades of the 21st century.” In Kiri Paramore, ed., The Cambridge History of Confucianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 9 Daniel Gardner, “Transmitting the way: Chu Hsi and his program of learning.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 49.1 (June 1989), 141–172, here 151: “Chu was determined that reading should not become excessively scholastic, devoid of moral and spiritual significance.” 10   《周禮·保氏》:“養國子以道，乃教之六藝：一曰五禮，二曰六樂，三曰五射，四曰五禦，五曰六書, 六曰九數。” For the digital version of the text, I  use Donald Sturgeon, Chinese Text Project, a dynamic digital library of premodern Chinese, https://ctext.org/rites-of-zhou/ens. 11 For translation of the Analects, I generally rely on the translation of Edward Slingerland, Confucius’ Analects with Selections from Traditional Commentaries (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003). I have introduced some modifications, since, for example, I prefer to translate junzi as “nobleman” instead of “gentleman”; I also use “endowed nature” rather than “native substance” for the word zhi. I use https://ctext.org/ analects for the Chinese version of the text and follow the numbering of this last version. 12 Michael Nylan, The Five “Confucian” Classics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). 13 See Gao Hengtian高恆天, “Commentary on the ‘I inherit the Zhou Dynasty’ of The Analects of Confucius.”《论语》“吾从周”诠释评述 Forward Position 前沿, 1.417 (2019)年1期, 33–39. 14 As Tu Wei-ming comments, “The Confucians were unique in transmitting what they took to be ‘this culture’ (si-wen 斯), the cumulative wisdom of the ancients” (Way, Learning, and Politics, 17). 1 5 For the digital version of the text, I  use Donald Sturgeon, Chinese Text Project, a dynamic digital library of premodern Chinese, https://ctext.org/rites-of-zhou/ens. Here I use the English transition of James Legge provided by Sturgeon from The Chinese Classics, volume 4, first published in 1865. 16 Regarding the translation of the Mencius, I usually rely on the translation by Irene Bloom and edited by Philip Ivanhoe, Mencius (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). I have nonetheless introduced some modifications. I use https://ctext.org/analects for the Chinese version of the text. I follow the numbering of this last version. 17 David Wong, “Growing virtue: The theory and science of developing compassion from a Mencian perspective.” In Brian Buya, ed., The Philosophical Challenge from China (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 23–58, here 25: “The beginnings of the virtues in human nature are sprout-like in the sense that they take shape only if there is significant nurturing of them within the right sort of social environment and conditions of sufficient material security.” 18 David Wong, “Reasons and analogical reasoning in Mengzi.” In Xiusheng Liu and Philip J. Ivanhoe, eds., Essays on the Moral Philosophy of Mengzi (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2002), 187–220. “Psychophysical stuff” is the terminology coined by Stephen Angle and Justin Tilwald in their Neoconfucianism. A Philosophical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2017). 19 This perspective of the Mencius is thoroughly explored by Chun-chieh Huang’s article： “Mencius’ hermeneutics of classics.” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 1.1 (2001), 15–29; and in Huang’s Mencian Hermeneutics: A History of Interpretations in China (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Transaction Publishers, 2001). 20 The character ni逆 refers to flowing waters (Mencius 3B9): it is about going back to the original stream of the meaning of the text. 21 Michael Puett, To Become a God. Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China. HarvardYenching Institute Monograph Series 57 (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 67: Zhou hymns and inscriptions were based on building a proper ancestral pantheon that would then work on behalf of the living to maintain Di’s (or Heaven’s) support. The ancestors were called on to descend to the human realm, receive sacrifices as well as ritual exhortations, and then ascend to the realm of Di to serve him and maintain divine support for the Zhou line. 22 For a complete description of the different aspects of the different sets of rituals, see Michael Puett, “Combining the ghosts and spirits, centering the realm: Mortuary ritual and political organization

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Yves Vendé in the ritual compendia of early China.” In John Lagerway and Marc Kalinowski, eds., Early Chinese Religion. Part One: Shang through Han (1250 BC–220 AD) (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 695–720. 23 Michael Puett, “Ritual and the subjunctive.” In Adam Seligman, Robert Weller, Michael Puett and Bennett Simon, eds., Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 17–42, here 33. 24 Michael Puett, “Innovation as ritualization: The fractured cosmology of early China.” Cardozo Law Review 28.1 (2006), 23–36, here 30. 25 The full interpretation of 20.3, especially of the notion of Heaven, should be done together with Analects 1.1, 2.4, 7.23, 9.5, 11.9, and 14.35. In the Analects, Confucius seems to have a special relation with Heaven which possesses a form of consciousness in charge of worldly affairs; it also offers moral guidance to men. 26 See Joshua Mason, “Confucius as an exemplar of intellectual humility.” Journal of Value Inquiry online only (2021), https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-021-09806-0. 27 See Patricia Ebrey, Confucianism and Family Rituals in Imperial China: A Social History of Writing About Rites (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 17. 28 As such, performing rituals helps to develop humanity (ren仁), See Analects 12.1. 29 Eric L. Hutton, trans., Xunzi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 67. 30 Ibid., 68. 31 Ibid., 69. 32 Kurtis Hagen, “Xunzi and the nature of Confucian ritual.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71.2 (2003), 371–403, here 373. 33 Ebrey, Confucianism and Family Rituals, 28. 34 Gardner, “Transmitting the way,” 155. 35 Ebrey, Confucianism and Family Rituals, 104. 36 Regarding Classified Conversations with Master Zhu, Zhuziyulei《朱子語類》, I use Daniel Gardner’s translation in Learning to Be a Sage: Selections from the Conversations of Master Chu, Arranged Topically by Chu Hsi (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), when I quote from scrolls 7 to 13. I translate myself when I quote from other scrolls. Hereafter in this paper I will refer to this document as CCMZ. I. 37 Daniel Gardner, 155: “Only if [the student] made the texts his own would they be truly meaningful to him.” 38 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method. Trans. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (London: Sheed & Ward, 1975). 39 John Berthrong, “Master Zhu’s wisdom.” In Michel Ferrari and Georges Potworowski, eds., Teaching for Wisdom (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008), 93–110, here 98: “Ritual, according to Zhu, was not just the prerogative of the imperial government but accessible to anyone who could follow his precise descriptions of the important life rituals.” 40 Ebrey, Confucianism and Family Rituals, 145. 41 Joseph Adler, “Varieties of spiritual experience: Shen 神 in neo-Confucian discourse.” In Tu Weiming and Mary Evelyn Tucker, eds., Confucian Spirituality. Volume 2 (New York: Crossroad, 2004), 120–148, here 124. 42 Hoyt Tillman, “Zhu Xi’s prayers to the spirit of confucius and claim to the transmission of the way.” Philosophy East and West 54.4 (2004), 489–513, here 491. 43 Ebrey, Confucianism and Family Rituals, 103. 44 Ibid., 104. 45 Tillman, “Zhu Xi’s prayers,” 494. 46 Ibid., 499: One’s status and relationship to the spirits of the natural world was apparently a crucial consideration for Zhu Xi, for there were rules about who could rightfully offer sacrifices to great natural objects and phenomena. [. . .] Hence, one’s ability to reach such spirits depended on one’s relationship to them, a relationship that was grounded in one’s official status. 47 Chen Xi and Hoyt Tillman, “Ghosts, gods, and the ritual practice of local officials during the song: With a focus on Zhu Xi in nankang prefecture.” Journal of Song-Yuan Studies 44 (2014), 287–323, here 297: Nowadays, someone who is carrying out the Way of sages and transmitting the sages’ ideas is then undertaking their mission, so his qi, thus interacts with them.今行聖賢之道，傳聖賢之心，便 是負荷這物事，此氣便與他相通。如釋奠列許多籩豆，設許多禮儀，不成是無此姑謾 為之！人家子孫負荷祖宗許多基業，此心便與祖考之心相通’。To further justify offering

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Confucian Culture and the Imminence of the Past sacrifices to evoke the spirits of sages with whom one had no blood relationship, Zhu Xi drew parallels to the common song practice of joining in offering sacrifices to one’s wife’s or mother’s natal family members. Such expansions of the idea of allowing sacrifices to those beyond one’s own ancestors and immediate teachers were utilized by Zhu Xi to establish the legitimate potency of his special qi category of the true learning. 48 Joseph Adler, “Chance and necessity in Zhu Xi’s conceptions of heaven and tradition.” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 8.1 (March 2016), 143–162, here 151. 49 Tillman, “Zhu Xi’s prayers,” 505. 50 John Berthrong, “Inventing Zhu Xi: Process of principle.” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 32.2 (June 2005), 257–279, here 270: “knowledge was also pragmatic because Zhu wanted correct knowledge in order to act and carry out one’s proper business in the world. But in order to do so, a person must both study and act in a reverent manner, . . . have respect for the uniqueness of the various affairs and things of the world.” 51 Léon Vandermeersch, “Vérité historique et Langage de l’histoire en Chine.” Extrême-Orient ExtrêmeOccident 9 (1986), 13–25, here 21.

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8 PAST, PRESENT, AND HERITAGE William F. Stoutamire

Heritage is a concept for which historians often feel a great degree of ambivalence. Reactions to the concept range wildly, from revulsion to acceptance, based on different understandings of what heritage is and the functions it serves, and on how historians perceive their roles as mediators between past and present. This ambivalence is made more confusing, and more important, by the abundance of heritage claims in the present day. For many members of the public, history and heritage are almost interchangeable. Both terms speak to a connection between past and present at the core of a host of social and cultural functions. Communities take pride in their history – and in their perceived heritage – by appropriating the past for contemporary needs. The recent renewal of the history wars in the United States, visible in debates over how the history of racism should be taught in American schools, reveal how history and heritage are both used and abused.1 At their core, heritage claims involve ascribing meaning and value to the past in ways that serve present needs and interests. Debates over heritage are not just struggles about what happened but about who has the authority to speak about the past in the present day. Etymologically, heritage bears a close relationship to inheritance, something passed down over generations and owned by those living in the present. Heritage conflicts, in turn, are often debates over who should own the past and interpret it in the public sphere. This chapter will argue that heritage claims must be viewed through structures of social and political power, which have long influenced debates over the ownership of the past. Not all appeals to heritage have the same ultimate goals. The concept of heritage has, historically speaking, been used both as a tool of nostalgic oppression and of cultural empowerment; as a means of both colonizing the past and calling for greater global consciousness. How public historians engage with and respond to heritage claims in the present often relate to these differing aims. This is not intended, however, to imply a rigid and inflexible duality. As this chapter will show, public institutions that once embraced more nostalgic and exclusionary interpretations of the past contain the potential, in responding to contemporary needs and demands, and through adopting the tools of public history, to connect the past with the present in more meaningful and productive ways. This chapter considers only those ways in which the past is related to the present through the lens of heritage, which often involves contentious and important debates over the public interpretation of the past and the ownership of its material remains. Heritage matters, Ned Kaufman reminds us, are nearly always “inextricably intertwined with issues of race, 102

DOI: 10.4324/9781003026570-10

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diversity, and social justice.”2 Recent scholarship has helped to reveal how social justice concerns have long informed the work of some public historians. In her groundbreaking volume on the “radical roots” of public history, Denise Meringolo presents a series of essays from more than two dozen public historians that examine “an activist thread – a conscious effort to connect history-making to the promotion of social justice – which runs through the profession of public history,” making the discipline “uniquely political.”3 Even before the culture wars of the 1990s animated debates over the interpretation of the past in the United States, many public historians were doing community-based work that aimed to promote social change, advocate for social justice, and challenge systemic inequalities. That work continues today by members of a discipline increasingly interested in “harnessing history-making for the dual purpose of creating an inclusive historical record and countering immediate oppression.”4 Public historians may certainly interrogate other relationships between the past and present. For some, this involves the application of historical research skills to inform public policymaking or legal matters. For others, this may mean serving as an expert voice or public intellectual providing historical context for contemporary events. These forms of practice encompass what historian Leisl Carr Childers has called, in her own work, the public turn – “doing publicfacing history in the public sphere as a public service.”5 These practices are not without note or merit. The perspective in the following pages, however, reflects the ability of public history, by connecting the past and present and engaging critically in heritage matters, to serve as an instrument in the advancement of social justice, to promote more equitable practices in history institutions, and to encourage inclusive interpretations of the past. In seeking to understand what role public historians might play in heritage debates, it is perhaps useful to begin by more firmly distinguishing the practice of history, as traditionally defined in academic circles, from the public embrace of heritage as a means to link past and present. While historians have long since abandoned claims that their work is the noble pursuit of objective truth about the past, most historians continue to insist on studying the past on its own terms.6 The work of professional historians might shed light on contemporary issues and ask questions of the past informed by present-day concerns, but rarely do historians intimately relate the past to the present or engage with the communities who do so systematically. By contrast, heritage is, by its very nature, avowedly presentist in outlook, seeking to make a distant past useful and relevant to present-day communities. For many historians, this presentism is antithetical to proper historical practice. Isn’t history, after all, intended to be separate from our current moment, to examine the past as a “foreign country” where, in the famous words of L.P. Hartley, they do things differently?7 Attempts to distinguish history from heritage abound. For David Lowenthal, whose landmark works helped give rise to the field of heritage studies, heritage is a paradox that should be understood as fundamentally distinct from history. It is, in his mind, a “declaration of faith” in the past, which “exaggerates and omits, candidly invents and frankly forgets, and thrives on ignorance and error.”8 Yet not all historians would agree, particularly those who work most closely with the public. Writing in The American Historical Review, Michael Frisch – one of the early voices in the public history movement – found himself “disappointed and dismayed” by Lowenthal’s at times dismissive attitude towards heritage claims, noting that “the most exciting developments in recent public history scholarship and practice have explored the troubled borders [between history and heritage] by creatively engaging, not abandoning, the very distinction.”9 Rather than dismissing heritage as something other than history, Frisch suggests that historians might instead work to understand better why appeals to heritage remain powerful and pervasive among diverse publics today. 103

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Part of this power comes from the manner in which heritage claims ground people in their pasts, whether personal, familial, communal, regional, or national. Borrowing from the discourse in environmental psychology around a sense of place, historian David Glassberg has argued that a “sense of history,” which he describes as akin to Lowenthal’s understanding of heritage, provides people with “a sense of locatedness and belonging.”10 Heritage, in this vein, helps to inform us about our place in space, time, and society. It is a sense of history, deeply felt and often personal, that enables us to better understand ourselves and our present circumstances, as well as our possible futures. While it may differ substantially from the kinds of history typically practiced in the halls of academia, it nonetheless contains the potential to be more useful, relevant, and engaging for publics who often want to feel a sense of connection with those who came before them – and to see themselves in representations of the past in the public sphere. One aspect of heritage that fundamentally distinguishes it from more traditional understandings of historical practice is this relationship to personal and communal identity. While historians typically assume some distancing from their subject, at least in theory, heritage more often openly embraces the past as a fundamental part of one’s present. It defines who we are and where we have come from. This connection to individual and collective identity also helps to explain why heritage claims can become so contentious and, in the event they fabricate or misrepresent the past, so difficult to dislodge. Contemporary debates in the United States over Confederate monuments have much to do with arguments over the history of the Civil War and the relationship between slavery, white supremacy, and secession. But they have equally as much to do with a perception of heritage that has become important to many white Southerners. The debate over Confederate monuments is a contentious issue because it has the potential to call into question the foundational racial hierarchies and social identities on which much of Southern white society has been built. Accepting the fictitious nature of these heritage claims would require a fundamental restructuring of an identity and a sense of history to which many white Southerners remain deeply attached.11 Whether or not historians choose to engage in these discussions, the heritage industry is here to stay. The proliferation of heritage is a well-documented aspect of modern life, propelled by a host of forces beyond the control of any one profession. “All at once heritage is everywhere,” wrote Lowenthal in 1998, “in the news, in the movies, in the marketplace – in everything from galaxies to genes.”12 In the nearly three decades since the publication of Lowenthal’s classic text, heritage claims have only grown. While Lowenthal at times bemoaned what he called the cult of heritage and the attendant material glut, the expansion of interest in heritage also reflects an increasing democratization of the past. Today, more voices demand representation in museums, historic societies, preservation, and other treatments of the past in the public sphere.13 And more people than ever before want to know something about the forces – genetic, familial, and cultural – that shaped them. The rapidly growing heritage tourism industry, which promises to provide such knowledge, delivers millions of visitors a year to historic and cultural sites around the globe. These visitors hope to receive not just information about the past, but to experience a sense of physical and emotional connection with their predecessors.14 For many, these heritage connections are fundamentally ancestral and involve reuniting with any number of lineal ancestors who, in some way, shaped them. In the United States, the evergrowing popularity of genealogical research among diverse members of the public speaks to this fascination with discovering one’s personal and familial heritage. Genealogical websites boast millions of regular users who seek to uncover their ancestry through digitized census and probate records, immigration documents and church registries, and perhaps reveal connections with distant relatives on a similar quest. Services such as AncestryDNA and 23andMe promise scientifically sound means of establishing this heritage. As Jerome de Groot writes in a recent 104

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issue of The Public Historian, such services “add genetics to heritage . . . [and] have a profound impact upon the way in which millions of nonacademic historians conceive of themselves and their relationship to the past.”15 For those interested in pursuing such activities, the relationship between the past and the present unfolds without the mediation of professional historians. Even so, some professional history organizations and history practitioners have also come to acknowledge that a usable past is, perhaps, not entirely anathema to historical practice. The National Council on Public History (NCPH), which represents hundreds of public historians in the United States and abroad, embraces a mission of “putting history to work in the world.”16 Its popular blog, History@Work, features regular vignettes about public history practice provided by historians both inside and outside of academia who recognize that their work on the past fundamentally addresses the needs and concerns of communities in the present.17 Today, public historians ask important questions about the relationship between past and present and engage with diverse communities for whom the distance between the two is more a matter of academic concern than lived reality. For more than forty years, public historians have worked to develop their own set of theories, principles, and tools for effectively engaging the past in the present without sacrificing historical rigor. These practices can prove helpful for historians seeking to navigate contemporary heritage debates. When public history emerged as a defined field in the late 1970s through the work of Robert Kelley and others, it adopted the concept of applied history, although often limiting its application to business and government interests. Writing in the inaugural issue of The Public Historian in 1978, editor G. Wesley Johnson argued that the new field of public history represented a break with the traditional profession, which had long steered clear of asking questions pertinent to the present, emphasizing instead temporal distance and the sense of perspective that distance could afford inquiries into the past. Public history, Johnson informed his readers, “emerged at a point in the twentieth century when modern society [was] sending signals to the historical profession, asking for help.”18 Social upheaval, environmental concerns, and the lingering Cold War all encouraged historians to begin asking questions that were relevant to the needs and concerns of contemporary audiences. For Kelley, the thought that historians should “produce things which are interesting, which are essential to the human spirit, but which are not immediately useful” was a “fundamental misconception which must be swept away.”19 In the decades since, public historians have continued to refine their practice. Their realm of application has broadened from government and corporations, and museums and historical societies, to include communities that have been historically marginalized or excluded by those institutions. The principle of civic engagement, at the core of modern public history practice, encourages public historians to embrace such community partnerships as a fundamental aspect of their work. It also encourages “linking events of the past to today’s issues such as environmental concerns, human rights, racism, or violent conflict” by providing historical context for contemporary events and using sites of history to engage the public in conversations that confront the problems of today.20 Emboldened by social history and concerns about issues of social justice, many modern public historians see themselves as mediators or facilitators of public conversations about the past and its enduring relevance in the present. Others define themselves as activists for ongoing social causes. In turn, public historians often find themselves engaged in the heritage realm, confronting its use and abuse of the past for present-day purposes. The recent growth of interest in the study of historical memory, which seeks to understand how and why communities remember the past in certain ways, speaks to this ongoing challenge.21 How do public historians wade through these potentially competing claims? One tool that has proven particularly effective in balancing community interests, critically evaluating heritage claims, and engaging new audiences in discussions about the past is the practice of “shared 105

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authority,” a term coined by Michael Frisch. Shared authority involves setting aside the longstanding belief that the work of the historian is simply to distribute knowledge from a learned position – whether a university, museum, or comparable institution. Public historians, Frisch argues, should instead “redistribute intellectual authority, so that this might be shared more broadly in historical research and communication rather than continuing to serve as an instrument of power and hierarchy.”22 While not absolving the historian of intellectual and scholarly rigor in public projects, shared authority nonetheless encourages a more open and empathetic dialogue with public audiences about the meaning of the past because, as Frisch writes, “these reflections about history take place in, and should have meaning for, the present.”23 Shared authority thus promises a more democratized version of history, one that encourages open debates among a variety of perspectives about the enduring relevance of the past and an understanding of how historians and history institutions have long been instruments of power and repression.24 It is this last point that perhaps can help us better understand the ambivalent and at times contentious relationship that historians have had with the concept of heritage. Both history and heritage have been used to silence voices and perspectives that challenge power structures within society. Academic institutions, museums, historical societies, and other sites of “history” have used their authority to project narratives about the past that tell an incomplete story or fail to engage with the needs and perspectives of diverse audiences. For one historian, heritage is “by definition a voice that venerates and shapes progressive narratives of national experience . . . and [history] an antidote against coarse triumphalism and preening ethnocentrism.”25 Has not the history profession been equally guilty of such faults? These narratives, long since discredited by more contemporary historical scholarship, nonetheless form the foundation of many of the more insidious heritage claims today. Heritage has thus served as a mode of relating the past to the present through a nostalgic and simplified lens. It has also, in turn, been used as a tool to perpetuate racial and colonial hierarchies, and to oppress narratives of dissent and conflict that contain the potential to challenge established systems. Ironically, those whose voices have long been excluded by institutions of authority have also turned to the concept of heritage to voice their concerns. For generations, immigrant, Black, and Indigenous communities in the United States have embraced heritage as a means of affirming and asserting their unique place within American society, in the past and the present. These claims challenge historians to think more critically about the unequal power dynamics that the profession itself has perpetuated. For those whose voices have not been traditionally represented in museums and history texts, calls to embrace one’s heritage serve as opportunities for cultural empowerment and as a challenge to institutions that historically practiced exclusion. In working with these communities today, through the practices of civic engagement and shared authority, public history offers an opportunity to amplify these voices and to encourage more critical reflection about the past and the ways it shapes the present. Heritage, analyzed as containing the potential for both nostalgic oppression and cultural empowerment, reveals much about contemporary debates over social and political power, as well as the ownership of the past. *** In their most regressive form, public efforts to connect past and present in the name of heritage result in a simplified past that evokes nostalgia for people and places that never were. Such deployments of heritage rewrite the past to rid it of its more difficult and problematic components and engage in the erasure of dissident voices and histories that may challenge or call into question the political or societal status quo. These efforts are often scaffolded by outdated historical scholarship which propagates key myths and narratives that remain prevalent today. In the 106

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United States, for example, the work of historian Frederick Jackson Turner continues to inform popular myths about westward expansion, pioneers, and the American frontier, narratives that have long since been challenged by more contemporary scholarship that incorporates Indigenous voices and perspectives.26 In its most insidious form, heritage thus deployed can be used to protest and resist contemporary social change. Museums and other public institutions in the West have also contributed to these issues, such as through the theft of the cultural property of colonized and Indigenous peoples around the globe, often undertaken under the banner of both racialized pseudo-science and the supposed preservation of an emerging world or national heritage.27 For many Americans, the concept of heritage perhaps most immediately elicits images of pickup trucks bearing Confederate flags and “Heritage not Hate” bumper stickers. The continued presence of the “Lost Cause” of the American Civil War in modern American society speaks to a memory of that conflict that embraces nostalgia and avoids questions about the history of race and racism in the American South. Rather than confront the causal relationships between slavery, white supremacy, and secession, Confederate heritage organizations like the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) and the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) work to reframe the Civil War as a battle over more “noble” principles, such as the question of states’ rights. These principles align closely with the conservative politics of the members of these organizations today. In so doing, they attempt not only to vindicate and absolve their ancestors of racial violence and insurrection but also to repurpose the past in order to resist challenges to present social and racial hierarchies and to make contemporary political statements regarding their opinions on the appropriate power of the federal government.28 For some Confederate heritage activists, however, the racially exclusionary politics of the Lost Cause in its historic form, which helped mobilize resistance to desegregation across the South, are no longer salable, particularly in the aftermath of the Civil Rights movement and amid shifting political dynamics in the Southern states. Hoping to hold on to a nostalgic, simplistic, “moonlight and magnolias” image of the antebellum South, partisans of the Lost Cause have turned today to a new fictitious narrative that argues instead for a racially inclusive Confederacy, filled with regiments of so-called Black Confederate soldiers. As historian Kevin Levin has argued, “Stories of armed black men marching and fighting would make it easier for the descendants of Confederate soldiers and those who celebrate Confederate heritage to embrace their Lost Cause unapologetically without running the risk of being viewed as racially insensitive or worse.”29 For Confederate heritage advocates who embrace the myth of Black Confederates, the politics of the Confederacy can, thanks to the malleability of heritage claims, be conveniently updated to reflect better the more racially inclusive politics of today. Just as Confederate heritage organizations have embraced nostalgic narratives that repress or avoid the history of racism and resistance, so too have pioneer heritage organizations across the American West perpetuated narratives regarding the period of westward expansion and settlement that absolve ancestors of connections to racial violence and the forcible removal of Indigenous peoples. In the early years of the American West, such connections were often openly acknowledged, forming the basis of justification for the creation of heritage societies, museums, and historic sites across the region. “We are met upon historic ground,” proclaimed one Nebraska judge during a 1909 pioneer reunion at Fort Kearny, along the Oregon Trail, which advocated for the establishment of a Fort Kearny National Park. “Here the white man planted an outpost of civilization. Here he wrested from the savage red man his dominion over a desert. . . . The red men were killed or driven away in order that more and better men might live. It was and is all according to the plan of God.”30 For these early proponents of pioneer heritage, such language was in keeping with their social values and helped to justify their enduring presence on Indigenous lands, and to repress stories of ongoing Indigenous resistance. 107

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In order to continue to celebrate the pioneer experience today, many local historical societies and heritage organizations have sanitized the narrative of settlement and conquest to exclude or occlude the elements less acceptable by today’s standards. Cynthia Culver Prescott’s recent work on Pioneer Mother monuments illustrates these dynamics, arguing that for many Americans, when it comes to the American West “we embrace the myths, but choose to erase the inconvenient truths of our settler colonial heritage . . . habits of mind [that] motivated the erection of pioneer monuments.”31 Instead, through monuments, memorial associations, pioneer days, frontier festivals, and other forms of heritage expression, many Americans embrace a heroic narrative about westward expansion that lionizes individualism, ignores the presence of Indigenous peoples on supposedly “free land,” and simplifies the past into a feel-good story of exploration and adventure. These heritage claims highlight the protagonists’ supposedly rugged individualism, a virtue still mythically associated with the western United States, yet fail to confront the enduring legacies and impacts of settler colonialism in American society.32 The same individuals who initially perpetuated these myths regarding pioneers and the American frontier founded many of the first Western museums and historical societies. It is perhaps not surprising, then, to find that these institutions were likewise engaged in efforts to fashion a new regional and national heritage built around a nostalgic view of the past. My own research has examined how in the American Southwest some local museums developed alongside the process of Euro-American settlement in an effort to protect their imagined heritage in the region. These efforts included the appropriation of Indigenous cultural sites as belonging primarily to local settlers, even going so far as to directly argue that the sites possessed no connection to contemporary Indigenous peoples. Concerned about the looting of several nearby pueblos and cliff dwellings by tourists and pothunters, for example, one southwestern newspaper complained that “our country is being rapidly depleted of archaeological treasures and we who have the best right to them [emphasis added] will soon have none.”33 Here, debates over who owns the past – who has the right to the Southwest’s “archaeological treasures” – typically excluded the Indigenous communities still living in the region. Museums, operating as institutions of power and authority, worked to dictate to whom the past belonged.34 The culpability of museums and other history professionals in these efforts reflects how, without an embrace of shared authority and a willingness to decenter traditional forms of institutional power, heritage claims can resemble efforts to colonize another community’s past. To this end, heritage has operated as an extension of settler colonialism, enabling non-native archaeologists and western museums to dictate the terms on which Indigenous cultural patrimony was collected, stored, and interpreted. Such inequities were also written directly into associated legislation. The American Antiquities Act, passed in 1906 to protect southwestern archaeological sites from further looting, speaks directly to this issue. The act outlawed looting by tourists and pothunters but allowed archaeologists to request federal permission to excavate archaeological sites on federal land. These archaeologists, in turn, used their findings to construct narratives about “antiquity” that ignored the presence of living Indigenous peoples and appropriated their heritage for a still new nation without an ancient heritage of its own. Indigenous communities, though at times still living adjacent to the sites in question, were not consulted in the act’s passage or implementation. Under the Antiquities Act, archaeologists removed thousands of Indigenous cultural artifacts and human remains to museums across the United States and overseas.35 When taken abroad, such resources were often disassociated from the politics of their removal and rebranded as part of an emerging world heritage which was, in reality, a reflection of European colonialism. Here they experienced another death, removed from the land and people to whom they rightly belonged and utilized by museums and other professional 108

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history organizations to justify ongoing colonialism, while often making the violent nature of their acquisition invisible. The British Museum is among the more notable contributors to this colonial project, displaying materials from around the world under the guise of interpreting a shared world heritage. In his recent award-winning work on the relationship between museums and colonialism, Pitt Rivers Museum curator Dan Hicks explores this practice. “Are museums,” he asks, “just neutral containers, custodians of universal heritage, displaying a common global cultural patrimony to an international public?” The answer, for Hicks, is clear: “For as long as they continue to display sacred and royal objects looted during colonial massacres, they will remain the very inverse of all this: hundreds of monuments to the violent propaganda of western superiority.”36 To this day, the British Museum continues to resist efforts to repatriate the Benin bronzes, hundreds of Egyptian mummies, and other cultural and sacred objects looted from across the globe during the period of British colonialism. *** Given these legacies, how can public historians and museum professionals contribute productively to conversations around heritage today? In addition to challenging forms of heritage that misrepresent the past to justify the power structures of the present, historians might also look to how communities against whom heritage claims have been deployed as a means of exclusion have now begun to push back, asserting their right to own and interpret their cultural heritage in the public sphere. Many public history and heritage professionals have done just that, using their voices and sharing their authority to help elevate heritage claims that contest nostalgic and simplified iterations of the past. In her work on the subject, public anthropologist Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels argues that these efforts can mobilize heritage in favor of progressive social change. “Leveling the heritage playing field by deepening its democratic nature shapes and changes the goals and fundamental ethos of heritage practice,” she writes. “Most notably, the guiding values supporting heritage practice are shifting to more socially responsive concerns as communities and stakeholders reclaim authority over heritage matters and insist on more participatory roles in management.”37 Heritage, thus deployed, can serve as a means of cultural empowerment and encourage critical reflection on how institutions of authority have long ignored certain voices and narratives. Such heritage work assists communities in a reclamation of cultural identity against a larger heritage and history sector that has historically worked to marginalize and misrepresent so many. Efforts to use heritage as a means of retaining and asserting cultural identity against larger social and political forces are not entirely new, nor have they always been entirely effective. In the United States, immigrant and ethnic heritage organizations have helped descendants of different European communities – Swedish, Norwegian, German, Irish, Czech, and the like – retain an attachment to their ancestry, language, and cultural traditions. At the same time, these efforts have historically been mediated by powerful assimilationist forces which sought to negate some of the more potentially subversive or radical elements of ethnic heritage celebrations. Historian John Bodnar has closely examined these constructions of ethnic heritage, which he places at the intersection of assimilationist narratives of patriotism and loyalty with desires to retain distinctive ethnic identities. For Bodnar, contemporary pressures to assimilate and embrace patriotism “diminished the importance of immigrant pioneers and the ethnic homeland, and removed a sense of human struggle and conflict from memories of the ethnic past.”38 Internal and external pressures simplified and reformulated the heritages of diverse immigrant communities who settled in the United States into “bland expressions such as food and music,”39 which today serve as a focus of many immigrant community heritage celebrations. 109

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Some of the more successful efforts to embrace cultural heritage and mobilize it on behalf of social change emerged during and immediately after the Civil Rights movement, often without the participation of professional historians, at least initially. An examination of the Black museum movement in the United States by public historian Andrea Burns situates the development of several Black neighborhood and community museums within the context of the larger Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which called for renewed pride in Black heritage and traditions. These institutions, she suggests, emerged to challenge the “conspiracy of silence” within existing mainstream museums and other history organizations, which often either misrepresented Black history or ignored it entirely. As Burns argues, leaders of Black museums “believed that their institutions could, if not supplant mainstream museums, at the very least offer African Americans . . . a meaningful alternative to mainstream America’s insistence on black history’s invisibility and misrepresentation.”40 The call for such museums was part of broader contemporary demands by Black Power advocates and other civil rights leaders for equality and greater participation in the public sphere.41 Established American public history organizations have also in recent years begun to embrace the language of cultural heritage to argue forcefully for the need for greater representation of Black experiences in museums and other arenas of public history practice. In 2017, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the leading preservation nonprofit in the United States, established the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, billed as the largest effort ever developed to support the preservation of historic sites associated with African American history. To date, the fund has raised over $70 million and helped coordinate more than 200 projects across the country. But these efforts are not merely about saving endangered historic sites. “The African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund is about making room – within our understanding of history, preservation, and social justice – for a movement that uses preservation as a force for enacting positive social change,” declares the National Trust’s webpage, above a link to the organization’s support for the Black Lives Matter movement. “In modeling this approach and in partnering with other organizations around the country, we challenge ourselves to realize equity-driven outcomes that benefit all Americans.”42 Here the language of cultural heritage is deployed not as a force that seeks to absolve the present by simplifying the past, but instead amplifies representation of Black history in historic preservation and, in so doing, promotes engagement with both more complex pasts and issues of social justice today. Beginning in the late 1960s, the American Indian Movement (AIM) undertook similar efforts to redress the representation of Indigenous experiences in many American museums and historic sites. Responding to the mistreatment of Indigenous cultural property by archaeologists and museums over the past two centuries, AIM activists deployed the rhetoric of heritage to advocate for the repatriation of sacred objects and human remains. These efforts coincided with and helped to support ongoing activism for the rights of Indigenous peoples. In 1990, facing increasing pressure from AIM and other groups to take action on these issues, the federal government passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). In the over three decades since, NAGPRA enforcement has led to the return of thousands of human remains, sacred objects, and other pieces of Indigenous cultural property. While far from perfect, NAGPRA and similar pieces of legislation that have since been passed at the state level significantly require consultation with representatives of the affected communities on any repatriation claims. Questions of ownership can be challenging to resolve, but repatriation laws like NAGPRA nonetheless remain vital in ongoing efforts to reclaim the physical cultural heritage once stolen from many Indigenous communities.43 Encouraged by such developments, Indigenous scholars have also challenged other professional historians and archaeologists to engage thoughtfully with questions regarding cultural 110

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heritage and Indigenous patrimony. Law professor and Pascua Yaqui Tribe member Rebecca Tsosie argues that these questions are fundamentally related to cultural survival for many Indigenous communities today. “One important aspect of the fight for cultural survival,” she writes, “is the issue of who has control over the past. . . . As Indian nations strive to overcome the legacy of [assimilation], their future survival as distinct cultures rests to some extent on their ability to understand and protect their ancestral past.”44 Here again, the question of heritage – of who owns the past – remains central to the debate, with potentially wide-ranging implications for the communities most impacted by heritage loss. Others have taken this question a step further, arguing that museums must be decolonized, with power shared and control over the management of cultural heritage returned to those represented within the institutions.45 For Ho-Chunk scholar Amy Lonetree, decolonization offers the opportunity, not just to stake a claim to ownership of one’s past, but to transform “sites of colonial harm into sites of healing and restoring community well-being . . . sites of revitalization and autonomy.”46 This deployment of cultural heritage as a means for community revitalization and healing is also an ongoing effort across the globe. In contrast to the recalcitrance of the British Museum on matters of repatriation, the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience serves as a powerful case study for the collective impact of open dialogue, shared authority, and civic engagement at the intersections of past and present. “For better or for worse, heritage is a key terrain on which societal conflicts are expressed,” writes founding director Liz Ševčenko. “Instead of treating conflict over heritage sites defensively, shielding them from attack, we can take proactive steps to offer heritage sites as resources for addressing contested social questions.”47 With over 300 institutional members today, the coalition operates as a global network of museums, historic sites, memorials, and other locales of place-based memory that work to engage diverse communities in critical dialogue about the past and its effects on the present. Rather than appropriating the past under the guise of a supposedly universal world heritage that largely perpetuates colonialism, the coalition models the possibility of more robust international partnerships in heritage work.48 If public engagement with the past in the present through the lens of heritage is to remain a desirable goal for the foreseeable future, what role might historians – particularly public historians, whose work is fundamentally engaged with modern public audiences – play in these conversations? This chapter suggests that an answer to that question may lie in a more complex understanding of how heritage operates in society and to what use(s) those claiming a heritage are deploying their understanding of the past. As this chapter has shown, heritage claims can operate to bolster or justify existing inequities and power structures, in museums, at historic sites, and in society at large. They can also work to simplify the past through a nostalgic lens in order to avoid critical conversations about conditions in the present. Simultaneously, heritage can be positioned as a direct challenge to these same inequities, calling attention to the exclusion of certain voices from many museums and historic sites. For immigrant, Black, and Indigenous communities in the United States, among others, heritage has been deployed as an empowering concept, to assert ownership over the material remains of the past, and in an effort to reclaim their cultural identity from the grips of a larger society that has historically preferred erasure through assimilation. Through adopting the tools of public history and listening to the needs and demands of contemporary communities, public institutions that once embraced a more limited conceptualization of heritage and more exclusionary interpretation of the past possess the potential to connect the past with the present in more meaningful and productive ways. The Museum of Northern Arizona (MNA) is one example of just such an institution. Established in Flagstaff, Arizona, in 1928, MNA began as an institution dedicated primarily to an Anglo-American 111

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interpretation of the art, culture, geology, and history of northern Arizona. Its origins, which I discuss in a recent article in the Journal of Arizona History, stem from longstanding debates in the region over the rightful disposition of archaeological materials from northern Arizona’s pueblos and cliff dwellings. Many Anglo residents of Flagstaff considered these materials – including sacred artifacts and human remains – to be their “rightful inheritance,” and expressed concern that professional archaeologists associated with the Smithsonian Institution and other eastern museums and colleges were looting “our antiquities” and the dwellings of “our ancient predecessors” through their own archeological work in the region.49 Such a framing of regional heritage aimed to assert Flagstaff’s ownership over what was more accurately the cultural heritage of the region’s many Indigenous communities. These claims operated in tandem with the conclusions of professional archaeologists in the early 1900s, which often disassociated the Indigenous communities of the Colorado Plateau – the Hopi, Zuni, Navajo (Diné), and others – from their own ancestral sites. For many early settlers and archeologists, the cliff dwellings and pueblos of northern Arizona were not the home of Ancestral Puebloan peoples, the ancestors of modern Indigenous groups, as those communities claimed. Instead, they were the forgotten homes of an extinct race of people, the Anasazi or the Sinagua, who, in the words of one local Flagstaff newspaper, “were undoubtedly destroyed by a race of savages whose descendants have been the bloody foes of a later civilization in the southwest.”50 This rhetoric had real impact on local Indigenous peoples, who were banned from engaging in traditional cultural and religious practices at the more notable sites and who watched largely from the sidelines as non-native archeologists removed their physical cultural heritage to museums such as the Museum of Northern Arizona. Like many museums throughout the early American West, MNA’s engagement with contemporary Indigenous communities and their present-day concerns was, for much of its history, limited in scope. Interpretation of archeological materials was largely conducted through a Western, scientistic lens, with limited consideration of Indigenous traditions, oral histories, or desires for a voice or ownership over interpretation. Museum-sponsored archaeological excavations collected thousands of pieces of Indigenous cultural property, including sacred artifacts and human remains, for research and display in Flagstaff. Popular museum programs, such as Native arts and crafts fairs, included few opportunities for the Indigenous participants to speak on behalf of their art and traditions. Instead, these programs limited Indigenous artistry to a few acceptable and supposedly unchanging craft traditions – pottery, silversmithing, and rug-making – and served largely as spectacle for non-native residents and tourists. While the museum did occasionally hire Indigenous staff, most notably a Hopi artist named Jimmy Kewanwytewa, who provided lectures on Hopi culture and traditions, it did not engage in concerted and intentional efforts to include Indigenous communities in all levels of the museum process until much more recently. At the same time, the seeds of change existed within the administrative philosophy of the museum’s founders, Harold and Mary Colton. The Coltons may be considered what Denise Meringolo has called “prototypical public historians,” individuals who early embraced (if imperfectly) many of the principles that would later come to define the field of public history.51 They understood that museums should serve as “living institutions,” responsive to the present needs of the local community. As the late MNA historian David R. Wilcox argued, the Coltons also adopted a spirit of collaboration and cooperation in their most successful efforts, including partnerships with other professional organizations and community stakeholders.52 Their work in many ways reflected a nascent form of the civic engagement and shared authority that defines the practice of public history today. As the Coltons’ definition of the community that the Museum of Northern Arizona might serve broadened to become more inclusive of their 112

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Indigenous neighbors in subsequent years, so too did the museum expand its conceptualization of its role in curating northern Arizona’s regional heritage. The Museum of Northern Arizona today is a remarkable institution that works much more closely with Indigenous communities in interpreting the region’s past and present. The museum’s mission, reaffirmed in 2004, is “to inspire a sense of love and responsibility for the beauty and diversity of the Colorado Plateau through collecting, studying, interpreting, and preserving the region’s natural and cultural heritage.”53 Yet MNA defines this cultural heritage broadly now, enabling opportunities for different voices and perspectives to speak in its exhibits and programs. Multiple members of the museum’s staff and Board of Trustees are of Indigenous ancestry, reflecting a commitment on the part of the museum to be more representative of the diverse region in which it is situated. Exhibits and programs that engage with Indigenous heritage are developed in collaboration with Indigenous communities, rather than entirely by non-Native scholars. And these programs no longer relegate Indigenous communities to representation by traditional crafts and a “prehistoric past”; rather, they engage openly with contemporary artwork and the present-day lived experiences of Indigenous peoples. One recent exhibition, Native Peoples of the Colorado Plateau, developed through a partnership with forty-two individuals from ten different Colorado Plateau tribes. These individuals shaped every stage of the exhibit, from the selection of appropriate objects to represent their communities to the interpretations of tribal history, culture, and tradition, which appear in their own words. The materials on display also reflect both the past and present of their communities – including everything from weavings and pottery to toys and a skateboard. Responding to Indigenous efforts to reclaim ownership over their cultural heritage and ancestral remains, which resulted in the passage of NAGPRA, the museum has also engaged in a comprehensive program of repatriation, returning much of the cultural heritage taken by its own archeological work to representatives of the appropriate Indigenous communities. While some museums remain reluctant to repatriate their collections, MNA acknowledges repatriation as “one way to address the inequities, injustices, and lack of respect for tribal sovereignty that are all part of the colonial legacy of the United States.”54 Repatriation is, in other words, a way to engage in reparative justice for present-day communities. MNA has also gone beyond the letter of the law, voluntarily repatriating Peruvian artifacts to the government of Peru and serving as a location for consultations between tribal representatives and federal agencies on repatriation issues. Its new collections center, opened in 2009, was also developed through consultation with a Native American Advisory Committee, which had input in many elements of the building’s design. In so doing, the Museum of Northern Arizona honors not just the Indigenous past of the region but also the Indigenous present. While sharing authority through community partnerships is one way for institutions like MNA to connect past and present in productive ways, other public historians have suggested a somewhat more radical approach, one that works directly for communities and their present-day needs. An award-winning exhibit, Waccamaw Indian People: Past, Present, Future, at the Horry County Museum in South Carolina, speaks to this possibility. Curated by students and faculty at nearby Coastal Carolina University in collaboration with members of the Waccamaw Indian People, the exhibit aims to correct several misunderstandings about the Waccamaw community. As the faculty behind this project write in a recent issue of History News, the exhibit “firmly places the Waccamaw Indian People in the present narrative and in their local community as contemporary, rather than antique curiosities.”55 It also advocates for their future goals, with one portion of the exhibit dedicated to addressing the desire of the Waccamaw Indian People to have their tribe recognized by the federal government, a formal designation that provides an affirmation of sovereignty and access to federal benefits. For public historians interested in 113

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issues of social justice, connecting past and present opens opportunities for both redressing past injustices and advocating for future change. As John Daehnke and Amy Lonetree remind us in a recent edition of The Public Historian, the field of heritage studies has matured, broadened, and become more politically aware. The study of heritage is no longer about simply preserving the past, but rather the social, political, and economic dynamics of utilizing the past in the present and in efforts to shape the future.56 Through civic engagement and shared authority, public historians today can work in and alongside diverse communities to help elevate their narratives and encourage the repatriation of the looted cultural patrimony that still fills the shelves of many museums in the Western world.57 Through an understanding of how heritage operates to effect social change, public historians can work to encourage healing, reconciliation, and critical reflection through a more complex understanding of the past, as well as conversations around “resistance, repair, recovery, decolonization, and resilience.”58 Through an awareness of how power has historically operated to highlight certain voices and silence others, public historians can work to build a profession that is more cognizant of its biases and sensitive to the voices of traditionally marginalized and underrepresented communities. For a profession that has never been as disconnected from the present as many would like to believe, perhaps a greater willingness to engage with such heritage claims can help build a better future.

Notes 1 For general texts on the uses and functions of heritage, see: Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Laurajane Smith, The Uses of Heritage (New York: Routledge, 2006). 2 Ned Kaufman, Place, Race, and Story: Essays on the Past and Future of Historic Preservation (New York: Routledge, 2009), 8. 3 Denise D. Meringolo, “Social justice and public history: The networks, goals, and practices that shaped our noble dream.” In Denise D. Meringolo, ed., Radical Roots: Public History and a Tradition of Social Justice Activism (Amherst, MA: Amherst College Press, 2021), 1. 4 Ibid., 15. 5 Leisl Carr Childers, “Taking a public turn: Public history as public service in the American West.” In Gregory E. Smoak, ed., Western Lands, Western Voices: Essays on Public History in the American West (Salt Lake City, UT: The University of Utah Press, 2021), 39. 6 See Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 7 L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between (New York: New York Review Books, 2002), 17. Hartley’s famous phrase forms the foundation for David Lowenthal’s other major work, David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 8 David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 121. For an introduction to heritage studies, see Marie Louise Stig Sørensen and John Carman, eds., Heritage Studies: Methods and Approaches (London: Routledge, 2009). 9 Michael Frisch, review of Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History, by David Lowenthal, The American Historical Review 103.5 (December 1998), 1567. 10 David Glassberg, A Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 7. 11 For two excellent recent works on the “Lost Cause” and its enduring relevance in the present, see: Karen Cox, No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021); Adam H. Domby, The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory (Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 2020).

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Past, Present, and Heritage 1 2 Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade, xiii. 13 For more on the politics and importance of representation in the museum and heritage sectors, see: Moira G. Simpson, Making Representations: Museums in the Post-Colonial Era (London: Routledge, 2001). 14 For an introduction to heritage tourism, see: Dallen J. Timothy, Cultural Heritage and Tourism: An Introduction, 2nd edition (Bristol: Channel View Publications, 2020). 15 Jerome de Groot, “Ancestry.com and the evolving nature of historical information companies.” The Public Historian 42.1 (February 2020), 8–28. 16 “Who we are.” The National Council on Public History, accessed January 24, 2022, https://ncph.org/ about/who-we-are/. 17 The National Council on Public History, History@Work, accessed February 27, 2022, https://ncph. org/history-at-work/. 18 G. Wesley Johnson, “Editor’s preface.” The Public Historian 1.1 (Fall 1978), 4–10. 19 Robert Kelley, “Public history: Its origins, nature, and prospects.” The Public Historian 1.1 (Fall 1978), 16–28. 20 Cherstin M. Lyon, Elizabeth M. Nix and Rebecca K. Shrum, Introduction to Public History: Interpreting the Past, Engaging Audiences (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), 120–121. 21 For an introduction to the study of memory, see: Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy, eds., The Collective Memory Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 22 Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990), xx. 23 Ibid., xxii. 24 A related field, public archaeology, has had similar conversations in recent years. For some relatively current reflections on how civic engagement and similar principles can help archaeologists wrestle with issues of heritage, both tangible and intangible, see: Paul A. Shackel and David A. Gadsby, eds., “Archaeologies of engagement, representation, and identity.” Special issue, Historical Archaeology 45.1 (2011), 1–166. 25 Edward T. Linenthal, “The national park service and civic engagement.” The Public Historian 28.1 (Winter 2006), 123–129, here 123–124. 26 For an introduction to Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis see: John Mack Faragher, Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and Other Essays (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 27 For more on the relationship between museums, colonialism, and racial science see: Samuel J. Redman, Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016). 28 For a discussion of Charlottesville through the lens of heritage, see Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels, “Deliberate heritage: Difference and disagreement after Charlottesville.” The Public Historian 41.1 (February 2019), 121–132. 29 Kevin Levin, Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 4. 30 The Kearney Daily Hub, June 26, 1909. 31 Cynthia Culver Prescott, Pioneer Mother Monuments: Constructing Cultural Memory (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), 7. 32 For an introduction to the function of memory in the American West, see: Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998). 33 Flagstaff Sun-Democrat, October 7, 1897. 34 This concept of an “imagined heritage” is the focus of my own research, most notably in William F. Stoutamire, “Imagined heritage: A local history of Walnut Canyon.” The Public Historian 38.4 (November 2016), 17–37. 35 For more, see Joe E. Watkins, “The Antiquities Act at one hundred years: A Native American perspective.” In David Harmon et al., eds., The Antiquities Act: A Century of American Archaeology, Historic Preservation, and Nature Conservation (Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 2006), 187–198. 36 Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Revolution (London: Pluto Press, 2020), 3. 37 Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels, Mobilizing Heritage: Anthropological Practice and Transnational Prospects (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2018), 130.

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William F. Stoutamire 38 John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 77. 39 Ibid., 77. 40 Andrea Burns, From Storefront to Monument: Tracing the Public History of the Black Museum Movement (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), 6. 41 For a conversation regarding the impact of Black Power on historic preservation work, although with very different results, see: Amber N. Wiley, “The Dunbar High School dilemma: Architecture, power, and African American cultural heritage.” In Randall Mason and Max Page, eds., Giving Preservation a History: Histories of Historic Preservation in the United States, 2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 2020), 249–302. 42 “African American cultural heritage action fund: Tell the full American story.”The National Trust for Historic Preservation, accessed February 26, 2022, https://savingplaces.org/african-american-cultural-heritage. 43 For more on the passage of NAGPRA and the relationship to Indigenous activism, see: Kathleen Sue Fine-Dare, Grave Injustice: The American Indian Repatriation Movement and NAGPRA (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2002). See also: Douglass Cole, Captured Heritage: The Scramble for Northwest Coast Artifacts (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2014). For more on the challenges of implementing repatriation in consultation with Indigenous communities, see Chip Colwell, Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America’s Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017). 44 Rebeca Tsosie, “Indigenous rights and archaeology.” In Nina Swidler et al., eds., Native Americans and Archaeologists: Stepping Stones to Common Ground (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1997), 65. Not all anthropologists support this perspective; see Michael F. Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 45 Janet Marstine, “Introduction.” In Janet Marstine, ed., New Museum Theory and Practice: An Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 5–6. 46 Amy Lonetree, Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native American in National and Tribal Museums (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 173. 47 Liz Ševčenko, “Sites of conscience: New approaches to conflicted memory.” Museum International 62.1–2 (2010), 20–25. 48 For more on the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, see www.sitesofconscience.org/en/ who-we-are/about-us/. 49 Flagstaff Sun-Democrat, October  7, 1897 (first quotation); Coconino Weekly Sun (Flagstaff), December 26, 1895 (second quotation); Coconino Sun (Flagstaff), April 9, 1904 (third quotation). For my full study of the founding of Museum of Northern Arizona among debates over the dispossession of the region’s archaeological heritage, see: William F. Stoutamire, “ ‘Every yard boasted a metate’: Pothunting, archaeology, and the creation of the museum of Northern Arizona.” Journal of Arizona History 63.2 (Summer 2022), 153–186. 50 Coconino Sun (Flagstaff), November 16, 1901. 51 Denise D. Meringolo, Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Toward a New Genealogy of Public History (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), xxvii. 52 David R. Wilcox, “Seizing the moment: Collaboration and cooperation in the founding and growth of the Museum of Northern Arizona, 1928–2008.” Journal of the Southwest 52.4 (Winter 2010), 435–537. 53 “About MNA.” Museum of Northern Arizona, accessed June 6, 2022, https://musnaz.org/about/. 54 “NAGPRA compliance.” Museum of Northern Arizona, accessed June  6, 2022, https://musnaz.org/ collections/our-collections/anthropology-2/anthropology/nagpra/. 55 Katie Stringer Clary, Carolyn Dillian and Jesse Morgan, “Working for the community in tribal partnerships.” History News 76.4 (Autumn 2021), 19–23. 56 Jon Daehnke and Amy Lonetree, “Conversations in critical cultural heritage.” The Public Historian 41.1 (February 2019), 13. 57 For a model of this practice, see: Katie Stringer Clary, Carolyn Dillian and Jesse Morgan, “Working for the community in tribal partnerships.” History News 76.4 (Autumn 2021), 19–23. 58 James F. Brooks, “Heritage, refracted.” The Public Historian 41.1 (February 2019), 7–9.

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9 THE CONTINUUM BETWEEN PAST AND PRESENT An Art Historian’s View Gregory T. Clark What, for art historians, is the relationship between the past and the present? All would surely agree that the material past is the present’s material inheritance. Art historians would not agree, however, on how that heritage should be approached or evaluated. Some would choose to focus on the physical objects themselves, others on the milieus and circumstances that produced those objects, others on how those objects can serve as fodder for contemporary ideological or political debates, and others on how one or more of these and other approaches might fruitfully be combined. Whichever approach or approaches are favored, the works themselves raise a fundamental challenge for art historians: how can we convince viewers that our interpretations are worth entertaining? After all, as the old cliché has it, “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.” I will here employ both object-oriented and contextual approaches in an effort to demonstrate that learning as much as possible about the works themselves and their historical and cultural contexts can truly enrich the viewer’s experience. My larger purpose will be to show that understanding the material past as fully as possible enables us better to understand, not just the material present, but also ourselves, because we have gotten here thanks in no small part to who and what came before us. I will make my case, not as a Western late medieval art historian with a scholarly specialization in manuscript illumination in France and the Low Countries in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, but rather as a teacher of undergraduates for 30 years at a small liberal-arts college in Middle Tennessee.1 My course responsibilities included the two halves of Western Survey (prehistoric to contemporary art), upper-division courses on Western art and architecture up to 1600, art historiography, and American animation 1910–1960. In other words, I was a generalist who saw his job as convincing students, few of them with any previous exposure to art history, that studying Western art and architecture was worth their time and effort. *** In his novel Requiem for a Nun, published in 1951, William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”2 His celebrated aphorism came immediately to mind on 21 December 2020, when Donald Trump, the United States’ 45th president, issued an executive order at

DOI: 10.4324/9781003026570-11

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the start of his last month in office on federal-building architecture.3 In that document we are informed that President George Washington and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson consciously modeled the most important buildings in Washington, D.C., on the classical architecture of Athens and Rome. They sought to use classical architecture to visually connect our contemporary Republic with the antecedents of democracy in classical antiquity. . . . For approximately a century and a half following America’s founding, America’s Federal architecture continued to be characterized by beautiful and beloved buildings of largely, though not exclusively, classical design. By contrast, In the 1950s, the Federal Government largely replaced traditional designs for new construction with modernist ones. This practice became official policy after the Ad Hoc Committee on Federal Office Space proposed what became known as the Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture (Guiding Principles) in 1962. The Guiding Principles implicitly discouraged classical and other traditional designs known for their beauty, declaring instead that the Government should use “contemporary” designs. According to Trump’s executive order, the results “ranged from the undistinguished to designs [that] even the GSA [General Services Administration] now admits many in the public found unappealing.” Then, in 1994, GSA responded to this widespread criticism that the buildings it had been commissioning lacked distinction by establishing the Design Excellence Program. The GSA intended that program to advance the Guiding Principles’ mandate that Federal architecture “provide visual testimony to the dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability of the American Government.” Unfortunately, the program has not met this goal. Why not? “GSA has often selected designs by prominent architects with little regard for local input or regional aesthetic preferences. The resulting Federal architecture sometimes impresses the architectural elite, but not the American people who[m] the buildings are meant to serve.” The result? “With a limited number of exceptions, such as the Tuscaloosa Federal Building and Courthouse and the Corpus Christi Federal Courthouse, the Federal Government has largely stopped building beautiful buildings.” The solution? “It is time to update the policies guiding Federal architecture to address these problems and ensure that architects designing Federal buildings serve their clients, the American people.” How? New Federal building designs should, like America’s beloved landmark buildings, uplift and beautify public spaces, inspire the human spirit, ennoble the United States, command respect from the general public, and, as appropriate, respect the architectural heritage of the region. . . . Classical and other traditional architecture, as practiced both historically and by today’s architects, have proven their ability to meet these design criteria. A close look at the two structures implicitly described as “beautiful” in Trump’s executive order may be instructive. The more “classical” of the two is the Tuscaloosa Federal Building and Courthouse (Figure 9.1). Completed in 2011, it was designed by Hammond Beeby Rupert Ainge Architects of Chicago. Its footprint shaped like a letter E, the structure’s central arm terminates in a portico (porch) with columns in the Doric order that support an architrave, a frieze with a legend identifying the structure in Roman capital letters, and an undecorated pediment. That central arm recalls the east and west ends of the Parthenon (Figure 9.2). Erected on the Acropolis (temple mount) of Periclean Athens between 448 and 432 BCE, the temple to Athena, patroness of the city in her guise as Parthenos (Virgin Warrior), is the masterpiece of

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Figure 9.1

Hammond Beeby Rupert Ainge Architects, Tuscaloosa Federal Building and Courthouse. Completed 1981.

Source: Photo by Jerry Splichal.

Figure 9.2

Iktinos and Kallikrates, architects, Parthenon (view from northwest). Athens, Acropolis, between 448 and 432 BCE.

Source: Lucky-photographer/Alamy Stock Photo.

the Greek architects Iktinos and Kallikrates and on the UNESCO List of World Heritage sites.4 On the flanking arms of the Tuscaloosa structure, Doric pilasters (rectilinear vertical supports engaged to a wall) support an architrave, a fasciated (grooved) frieze, and a capping pediment. Acroteria (roof-ridge ornaments) are the only additional adornment on all three arms.5

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Figure 9.3 Hartman-Cox Architects, Corpus Christi Federal Courthouse. Completed 2001. Source: Photo by Paul O’Rear.

The less “classical” building cited in Trump’s executive order is the Corpus Christi Federal Courthouse (Figure  9.3),6 finished in 2001. The architectural firm responsible was Hartman-Cox of Washington, DC. Its footprint resembles a rectilinear letter C of three above-ground stories with shallow attics atop its two arms and a two-story entranceway projection between those arms behind a flight of steps of almost the same width. That projection comprises a central glazed exedra (semicircular architectural recess) behind two single Doric columns at its shallowest points and two pairs of Doric columns to either side of its deepest point. The six columns support an architrave with an identifying legend in Roman capitals beneath a beige-brick frieze that also demarcates the entire facade’s first and second stories from its third. Echoing the single and paired columns in the exedra are the like Doric columns on the set-back third story above the entranceway. There the columns support an architrave beneath a cornice (projecting roof support) punctuated by evenly spaced brackets that clearly mark the modules (units of architectural measurement defined by repeated structural or decorative elements) established by the single and paired columns on the two stories below. To either side of the two-story exedra are two fenestrated archways split by a fasciated horizontal molding that demarcates the ground and first stories and wraps like a narrow belt around the wings that bookend the facade’s central core. The wings’ attics raise their roofs, under which we find the same bracketed cornices we see above the building’s central core. That central core does not resemble classical monuments, but rather Baroque ones like the facade of San Marcello al Corso in Rome (Figure 9.4),7 erected between 1682 and 1683. That church’s architect, Carlo Fontana (1638–1714), chose the more florid Corinthian order rather than the more austere Doric, favored for both the Corpus Christi and Tuscaloosa structures. Even so, the similarities between the facades of the church in Rome and the courthouse in Corpus Christi remain striking. Both feature concave entrances with arched openings to either side and flights of steps as wide as their entryways. The two also position pairs of columns closer 120

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Figure 9.4

Carlo Fontana, architect, Façade of Church of San Marcello al Corso. Rome, 1682–83.

Source: Stoyanh/Alamy Stock Photo.

to their central vertical axes and single columns beyond those pairs, a device that is repeated on the structures’ second stories, albeit with pilasters on the San Marcello facade. Both of the structures held up as models for “beautiful” architecture in President Trump’s executive decree are in fact postmodern in style.8 A reaction that began in the 1960s to 121

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the decorative sterility and rigidity of modern architecture, postmodern architects brought premodern material, textures, colors, and reimagined architectural forms to their exteriors. The Tuscaloosa structure is a stripped-down, postmodern version of a classical Doric temple and the Corpus Christi courthouse a postmodern reinvention of one or more Baroque models. While Trump’s executive order mentions the 1309 constitution of the Italian city of Siena, which cites the importance of the “beauty of the City,” the order does not mention the fact that the buildings erected in fourteenth-century Siena were in the Gothic rather than classical or Baroque styles. Like those two styles, the Gothic, introduced in Europe in the mid-twelfth century and practiced there until the mid-sixteenth century, is still with us: a fine example is the skyscraper in downtown Atlanta designed by Johnson/Burgee Architects known as One Atlantic Center or the IBM Tower (Figure 9.5).9 Completed in 1987, it is a postmodern distillation of a late Gothic bell tower like the spire rising above the Heavenly Jerusalem in the Netherlandish van Eyck brothers’ Adoration of the Mystical Lamb, one of the 25 paintings on wooden panel that make up the celebrated Ghent Altarpiece of 1432 (Figure 9.6).10 These three postmodern structures (Figures 9.1, 9.3, 9.5) provide concrete proof that the Western architectural past is very much a part of our architectural present. The sculpture and painting of the past are still very much with us as well. To demonstrate this, I will cite four examples hiding in plain sight in the popular media. The first three, all of which appeared in the New York Times in just under two months in late 2020 and early 2021, I will present in publication order; for the fourth we will time-travel back to 1945. On 8 November 2020, the Sunday Review section of the New York Times depicted presidentelect Joe Biden standing on a rocky promontory and looking out over a craggy and foggy landscape above the caption “What Lies Ahead?”.11 Readers familiar with German Romantic painting of the nineteenth century would have recognized the image’s source immediately: it is Caspar David Friedrich’s oil on canvas of about 1818 known variously as Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, Wanderer Above the Mist, or Mountaineer in a Misty Landscape (Figure 9.7).12 The responsible party or parties at the New York Times substituted an image of Biden seen from behind for Friedrich’s figure, “warmed up” Friedrich’s canvas to make the breaking dawn on the horizon brighter, and replaced the lowered right arm and walking stick of Friedrich’s wanderer with a raised right arm and outstretched right hand. That alteration recalls the gesture of address (adlocutio) of ancient Roman sculpted figures like the celebrated equestrian bronze of Marcus Aurelius (reigned 161–180 CE) of about 175 CE in the Capitoline Museums in Rome (Figure 9.8).13 On 6 December 2020, Roberts Rurans turned to early medieval models for the seated evangelist in his Art Deco–style illustration for the front cover of the Holiday Books edition of the New York Times Book Review (Figure 9.9). Although Rurans has taken much greater liberties with his models than did the designer of the Sunday Review page of 8 November 2020, his (I could not afford to pay the outrageous sum the New York Times wanted for that Sunday Review page) primary model appears to have been the celebrated image of the Old Testament prophet Ezra proofreading sacred texts in the manuscript Latin Bible known as the Codex Amiatinus, made at the Benedictine monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow in Northumbria before 716 CE (Figure 9.10).14 The shared elements in the depiction of Ezra and Rurans’ illustration include the evangelists’ presentations in profile, the positions of their sandaled left feet, the footrests beneath their feet, and their rounded right buttocks. On the other hand, the more convincingly rendered sandals, voluminous torso, freestanding lectern, and haircut of Rurans’ evangelist recall elements in miniatures in manuscripts of the Carolingian era, and most especially the evangelist Matthew in the 122

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Figure 9.5 Johnson/Burgee Architects, One Atlanta Center (a.k.a. IBM Tower). Completed 1987. Source: Allen Creative/Steve Allen/Alamy Stock Photo.

renowned Vienna Coronation Gospels, which has most recently been dated to the first quarter of the ninth century (Figure 9.11).15 Just three weeks after the publication of Rurans’ illustration, on 3 January  2021, Nicolas Ortega turned to a late imperial Roman sculpture to illustrate Andrew Sullivan’s review of 123

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Figure 9.6 Hubert and Jan van Eyck, Adoration of the Mystical Lamb (detail), from the Ghent Altarpiece. Bruges and Ghent (?), 1432. Ghent, Cathedral of Saint Bavo. Source: www.artinflanders.be, photo by Dominique Provost.

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Figure 9.7

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. Dresden, ca. 1818.

Source: Hamburg, Kunsthalle, Inv.-Nr. HK-5161. SHK/Hamburger Kunsthalle/bpk, photo Elke Walford.

Edmund Fawcett’s book Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition in the New York Times Book Review (Figure 9.12). More specifically, Ortega began with an image of the upright right hand in marble of the famous colossal sculpture of the seated Roman emperor Constantine (d. 337 CE) (Figure  9.13). Made between 312 and 315 CE and originally set into the apse of the Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine on the Roman Forum, only fragments of the colossus survive; they are displayed in the courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori in Rome. Ortega 125

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Figure 9.8 Anonymous sculptor, Bronze Equestrian Portrait of Marcus Aurelius (detail). Probably Rome, ca. 175 CE Rome, Capitoline Museums. Source: Azoor Photo/Alamy Stock Photo.

inverted his image of Constantine’s hand, turned it to the viewer’s right, detached the tip of the index finger, and re-rendered the tip twice, one tip pointing upward, the other downward, the two tethered to the rest of the index finger by slender threads.16 Finally, let me turn to an image from twentieth-century American popular culture that hearkens back to a work of “fine” art from the late nineteenth century (Figure 9.14). On 24 March 1945, Warner Brothers released the cartoon Life with Feathers.17 Directed by Friz Freleng, its stars were a blue lovebird and the saliva-spraying tuxedo cat who later became known as Sylvester. Looking for delicacies in urban back-alley garbage cans with only modest success, the cat is unexpectedly whistled at by the bird, who stands trembling on the ground, sweating bullets, and with a blindfold over his eyes. Unable to believe his good fortune, the cat turns to the audience and exclaims “sufferin’ succotash – SQUAB!” But en route to pouncing on the lovebird, the cat realizes that the scenario makes absolutely no sense: why would the bird want to be eaten? Accordingly, the cat stops in midair just shy of the waiting bird, drops to the ground, paces and scratches his head, and finally brings his left knee to the ground, bends his left arm back, rests his bent right elbow on his bent right knee, and supports his head his with right hand as he ponders. The model for Freleng’s ruminating cat is surely Auguste Rodin’s celebrated sculpture The Thinker (Figure 9.15),18 originally conceived for the lintel of the Gates of Hell (1880–1917), an unrealized sculptural program inspired by Dante’s Inferno. Rodin (1840–1917) made the first small version of The Thinker in plaster in 1881; the first full-scale model was presented at the Salon des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1904. About 28 monumentally sized bronze castings of The Thinker can be seen in museums and public spaces around the world.

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Figure 9.9

Roberts Rurans, Holiday Books. New York Times Book Review, 6 December 2020, front cover.

Source: Roberts Rurans.

While the examples I have presented above have hopefully demonstrated that the Western material past is still a part of our material present, I have not yet sought to establish why a knowledge of the historical, cultural, and artistic contexts in which those works were made matters. Using those same examples in the order in which they were presented, I will now try to make my case. As the Tuscaloosa and Corpus Christi courthouses (Figures  9.1, 9.3) make clear, ancient Greek and Roman architecture has been a touchstone for Western architects for nearly two and a half millennia now. That the Enlightenment – and the United States’ Founding Fathers – drew inspiration from the “democracies” of Periclean Athens and Republican Rome there can also be

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Figure 9.10 Anonymous illuminator, Ezra Proofreading Sacred Texts. Monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow (Northumbria), before 716 CE. Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Ms. Amiatino 1 (Codex Amiatinus), fol. V recto. Source: Smith Archive/Alamy Stock Photo.

no doubt.19 It is true as well that much, if not most, late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century civic architecture in the United States owes its vocabulary to ancient Greek and Roman architecture. Whether classical architecture is a desirable model for early twenty-first-century American government buildings, as President Trump believed, is quite another matter. Only male 128

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Figure 9.11 Anonymous illuminator, Matthew Writing. Carolingian Empire, first quarter of the ninth century CE. Source: Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Weltliche Schatzkammer der Hofburg, Inv. XII 18 (Coronation Gospels), fol. 15 recto. KHM Museumsverband, Vienna.

citizens had the vote in Periclean Athens and Republican Rome; there was no universal suffrage in either polity. In addition, slavery was practiced freely and widely in both. Moreover, the classical architecture the Founding Fathers knew was overwhelmingly imperial Roman, and thus postdates both Periclean Athens and the Roman Republic. Finally, the repeated assertions in Trump’s executive order that classicizing government buildings are “beautiful” and “beloved” and modernist ones “ugly” and “unappealing” are not statements of fact, but rather value judgments informed by personal taste. All of this suggests that politicizing our material 129

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Figure 9.12 Nicolas Ortega, Which Way Right?, New York Times Book Review, 3 January 2021, front cover. Source: Nicolas Ortega.

heritage for contemporary ideological or partisan purposes disserves both that inheritance and our body politic.20 In the Western architectural tradition, the Gothic style was the yang to the classical style’s yin. The former is insistently vertical and the latter decidedly horizontal in orientation; the Gothic style deemphasizes mass while the classical style emphasizes it; and the former draws the eye upward while the latter keeps the eye grounded. As a consequence, it is hardly surprising that so many university buildings and Christian houses of worship in the United States are neo-Gothic in style, as Christianity seeks to draw the faithful’s attention heavenward by means of ritual, prayer, and contemplation, while universities seek to draw students’ minds and critical faculties to higher concepts, values, and truths by means of careful study and reasoned analysis. It is also no wonder that the Gothic style has recommended itself as a model to the designers of modern skyscrapers (Figure 9.5), as those structures pull spectators’ eyes upward to heights unimaginable in world architecture before the advent in the nineteenth century of modern concrete and the steel I-beam. Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (Figure 9.7) is often viewed as the quintessential German Romantic painting.21 A reaction to the Enlightenment, the Romantic movement favored the subjective over the objective, ambiguity over certainty, and the sublime over the sensible. In its widest sense, the sublime is a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation; for Friedrich, this specifically meant the presence of God in nature.22 Friedrich’s wanderer looks out at dawn from a rocky foreground promontory across a middleground abyss where outcrops and patches of verdure are visible between stretches of fog. Just beyond the middle ground, two green rises at 10- to 15-degree angles to the picture plane meet behind the wanderer’s upper torso; shrouded hillocks on the horizon meet a cloudy blue sky. 130

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Figure 9.13 Anonymous sculptor, Marble Right Hand of the Colossus of the Emperor Constantine. Probably Rome, ca. 312–15 CE. Rome, Palazzo dei Conservatori. Source: Archimago/Alamy Stock Photo.

The art historian Joseph Leo Koerner devotes an entire chapter to Friedrich’s canvas in his 2009 monograph on the artist.23 He observes that the wanderer’s torso is positioned at the exact center of the canvas.24 The two green rises just beyond the middle ground meet behind him just above that central point, and thus closer to the wanderer’s heart. For the Romantics, the heart and the subjective emotions associated with it trumped the mind and its cold, reason-based calculations. Dressed in the dark-green uniform of the German volunteer rangers (Jäger), the wanderer is thought to represent Colonel Friedrich Gotthard von Brincken of the Saxon infantry, who is believed to have been killed in action against Napoleon in 1813 or 1814. If this is right, 131

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Figure 9.14

Warner Brothers Pictures (Friz Freleng, director), Life with Feathers (screenshot). 1945.

Source: YouTube.

Figure 9.15 Auguste Rodin, The Thinker (bronze cast). Paris or Meudon, designed 1881, cast before 1915. San Francisco, Legion of Honor Museum. Source: GAUTIER Stephane/SAGAPHOTO.COM/Alamy Stock Photo.

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Friedrich’s work represents a posthumous memorial. In 2016, however, Julian Jason Haladyn asked, “If Friedrich’s painting is a patriotic epitaph . . . why position the wanderer facing away from us?” For Haladyn, “The simple answer is that by turning the figure away, Friedrich generalizes or universalizes the wanderer, thus enabling us to imaginatively occupy his presence.”25 Beyond this, though, there are nothing but questions. Where do we, the viewers, stand in relation to the wanderer? How deep is the abyss before and below him? While the wanderer has been able to climb to the peak in the foreground, can he or will he negotiate his way down into the abyss, forge on beneath the shroud of fog and between or over the middle-ground promontories, and finally reach the gently rolling rises in the background? Is that daunting trek an allusion to the challenges of the journey of life, both the wanderer’s and our own? If viewers of the New York Times image are meant “imaginatively to occupy Biden’s presence,” to rephrase Haladyn, what questions might suggest themselves? Does Biden’s climb to the peak in the foreground, for example, allude to his arduous path to victory in the Democratic presidential primary as well as his victory over Republican incumbent Donald Trump? Is the “warming up” of the breaking dawn on the horizon meant to suggest the new beginning many hoped for with Biden’s win? By outstretching his right arm and hand in the manner of the equestrian Marcus Aurelius (Figure  9.8), are we to understand that Biden is addressing the American people after winning the 2020 election? If yes, is the misty, craggy abyss below him an allusion to the daunting uncertainties and obstacles that he will face from the very beginning of his tenure? Whatever the answers to these questions, one thing is certain: by narrowing and elongating the Hamburg canvas and thereby making Biden taller than Friedrich’s wanderer, the exact center of the New York Times’ image is just above the 46th president’s buttocks. As I have already observed, Roberts Rurans took considerable liberties with his early medieval sources for the seated evangelist on the front cover of the New York Times Book Review (Figure 9.9). The choice of evangelists’ portraits as models is perfectly logical: three of the four evangelists (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) wrote of Jesus’ birth, which is celebrated at Christmas. What rather surprised this medievalist, though, was Rurans’ decision to clothe his evangelist in a saturated yellow toga rather than in a particolored green and purple one like Ezra’s in the Codex Amiatinus (Figure 9.10) or a linen-white one like Matthew’s in the Coronation Gospels (Figure 9.11). In his 2019 book Yellow: The History of a Color, Michel Pastoureau demonstrates that yellow had an ambivalent status in the Middle Ages, thanks to its associations with treachery, heresy, sickness (as in jaundice), and a raft of vices that included envy, anger, jealousy, lying, hypocrisy, cowardice, deceit, and dishonor.26 As the taunt “Are you yellow?” demonstrates, the association of the color with cowardice is still with us. While Rurans’ choice of yellow for his evangelist’s robe is visually stunning, it would have been seen as insulting, perhaps even sacrilegious, by the early medieval illuminators of the Codex Amiatinus and Coronation Gospels. Nicolas Ortega’s purpose in inverting an image of the right hand of the colossal sculpture of Constantine (Figure 9.13) was surely to position the imperial index finger above the middle, ring, and pinky fingers; his doubling of that finger’s detached tip, on the other hand, was most likely meant to allude to the central question posed by Edmund Fawcett’s book: “whither conservatism?” (Figure 9.12). But while most modern viewers would describe the hand in Ortega’s image as pointing rightward, ancient and medieval spectators would have seen it as pointing leftward, as it would if Constantine’s right hand had been turned toward the emperor’s left shoulder when the entire sculpture was still in situ in the Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine in Rome. Such a turning would have been deeply puzzling, if not disturbing, to ancient and medieval viewers and even some early modern ones. In Latin, the left hand is the “sinister hand” (manus 133

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sinistra) and the right the “dexter hand” (manus dextra). Dexter could also mean handy, skillful, opportune, suitable, of good omen, or favorable in Latin; in English, this positive sense carries over in words like “dexterous.” Sinister could also connote unlucky, unfavorable, inauspicious, wrong, perverse, improper, injurious, adverse, or bad in Latin; the English word “sinister” is still freighted with many of those negative meanings. Writing about the left-handed in 2015, Lily Rothman observed that “in the Middle Ages . . . the left-hander lived in danger of being accused of practicing witchcraft. The Devil himself was considered a southpaw, and he and other evil spirits were always conjured up by left-handed gestures.”27 In medieval images of the Last Judgment, Jesus always casts his sinister hand down to condemn the damned to hell (on the right side as seen by the viewer) and raises his dexter hand to elevate souls into heaven (on the left side as seen by the spectator). The persistence of these negative and positive associations with the left and right hands, respectively, explains why the teaching nuns at my Catholic primary school, St. Cyril’s in Encino, California, made every effort in the late 1950s and early 1960s to force the naturally left-handed to learn to write with their right hands. In “The Devil’s Right Hand,” recorded in 1983, American alt-country composer and musician Steve Earle inverted those associations with the wry but admonishing hook line “Mama says a pistol is the devil’s right hand.” Admittedly, knowing the distinction between the subject’s and the spectator’s sinister and dexter sides does not matter for viewers of Nicolas Ortega’s illustration for the New York Times Book Review. That distinction matters mightily, however, if one is more fully to understand and appreciate many premodern Western works of art. I will seek to demonstrate this using two early modern paintings on canvas.28 The earlier, by the Dutch master Johannes Vermeer (1632–75), is his Milkmaid of about 1658 (Figure 9.16). Our subject stands in the corner of an austere room with pockmarked, soiled, and thinly whitewashed walls and what appears to be an earthen floor. The space is illuminated by a lone window at the spectator’s left. A wicker basket hangs from a nail on the tiny stretch of wall behind the window and a brass vessel dangles from the basket; unfortunately, the sharp foreshortening of the wall precludes any reading of the small framed image hanging just above the basket. Just beneath the window in the foreground, a milkmaid or kitchen maid pours milk from a simple earthenware pitcher into a wide-mouthed earthenware vessel that sits on a table draped in light blue just before her. That table also supports a stoppered vessel of dark-blue prunted glass for one or another potable, small chunks of bread, a wicker basket filled with more bread, and a piece of dark blue cloth. A baseboard of Dutch ceramic tiles separates the unswept earthen floor from the rear wall. Only five of the tiles in the lower-right-hand corner of the canvas can be seen by the viewer beyond the table, maid, and a foot warmer just in front of the tiles. Of the five, three have figural decoration, and two of the subjects can be identified: a figure of Cupid to the left of the foot warmer and a male wanderer with a staff immediately to its right. The most recent detailed analysis of Vermeer’s canvas appears in the 2017 exhibition catalog Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting.29 There, 79 seventeenth-century Dutch paintings are grouped into 22 subject categories; Group 17, “Maids and Morals,” pairs Vermeer’s canvas (cat. 17.2) with The Kitchen Maid by Gerrit Dou of Leiden (1613–75) of circa 1645–53 (cat. 17.1; Figure 9.17). Blaise Ducos, the author of the entry for Group 17, notes that two broad, contradictory interpretations of the painting have dominated the art-historical literature to date: The first focuses on the monumental and classical character of the figure and highlights the virtues of the young servant girl absorbed in her task. According to this view, the young woman carries out a kind of secular rite. The act of pouring the 134

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Figure 9.16

Johannes Vermeer, The Milkmaid. Delft, ca. 1658.

Source: Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Inv. SK-A-2344. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

milk into the earthenware bowl has even been described as “almost sacramental”. . . . A second interpretation of Vermeer’s painting abandons all ideas of classicizing reverence and regards the maid as a discreet object of desire. Proponents of this view have drawn attention to a number of accessories in the painting: the Delftware tile depicting Cupid with his bow, the foot warmer, and the milk jug with its gaping black opening from which emanates a whitish trickle. A seventeenth-century play on words completes this analysis: the Dutch verb melken meant “to milk,” but also “to seduce.”30 Like Vermeer’s milkmaid, Dou’s kitchen maid pours liquid from an earthenware pitcher into a widemouthed earthenware vessel resting on a tabletop; the two figures also hold their pitchers in exactly the same way. Given this, Ducos is right to see Dou’s work as a forerunner to Vermeer’s. Distracted 135

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from her task by the come-hither glance she directs at the viewer, however, Dou’s kitchen maid messily spills part of the contents of her pitcher into a scalloped vessel next to the earthenware one. The kitchen maid’s inviting look, her opened blouse, her partly bare head, and the array of carrots suggestively splayed just before her gives Dou’s panel an unmistakable erotic charge. By contrast, the blouse of Vermeer’s milkmaid rises to her neck, her hair is fully covered, and she concentrates on the task at hand rather than look out at the spectator. Also, it is not at

Figure 9.17 Gerrit Dou, The Kitchen Maid. Leiden, ca. 1645–53. Paris, Musée du Louvre, Département des peintures, Inv. 1217. Source: Erich Lessing, Art Resource, New York.

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all clear that she is a milkmaid, that is, a woman who milks cows; she could just as easily be a kitchen maid pouring bought milk. It seems a stretch as well to see the pale skin of the upper halves of her lower arms exposed by her rolled-up sleeves as erotic, especially given the blurred tan lines on both arms. Finally, Vermeer’s figure turns her back on the allegedly pruriently suggestive foot warmer and Delft-tile figures of Cupid and the wandering man. More importantly, if we read Vermeer’s canvas from sinister to dexter from the vantage point of the milkmaid herself and with images of the Last Judgment in our mind’s eye, the painting can be understood as a veiled allegory of Christian salvation. The foot warmer on the littered earthen floor becomes an allusion to the Hell into which the condemned are cast down; the Delft tile images allusions to the deadly sin of lust; the bread and prunted-glass vessel allusions to the bread and wine of the Eucharist; the maid’s pouring gesture an allusion to the pouring of wine and water into the chalice during the Offertory of the Mass; and the window the luminous portal to the Heavenly Jerusalem for saved souls that was made possible by Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. The substitution of milk for wine makes the perfect genre disguise for what I believe to be a thinly veiled allusion to the core of the Christian mystery: from sinister to dexter, from low to high, and from damnation to salvation, with the body and blood of Jesus in between those extremes as the means to escape the former and realize the latter. An understanding of premodern sinister-dexter relationships also helps us more fully to read and appreciate the moralizing canvas The Broken Eggs (Figure 9.18).31 Painted by Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725–1805) in Rome in 1756 and exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1757, the depiction

Figure 9.18 Jean-Baptiste Greuze, The Broken Eggs. Rome, 1756. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Acc. 20.155.8. Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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is set in a rough-hewn peasant interior. A leaded-glass window admits light at the far left; at the far right, a dilapidated wooden half door gives access to a tenebrous room beyond the illuminated space. In the foreground, just to the left of the central vertical axis, sits a young girl. Her shawl is opened to reveal her low-cut bodice, her head is downcast in apparent shame, and her eyes are reddened from crying. The reason is evident if one follows her lowered eyes to the basket of eggs that sits in the foreground at her sinister side and directly on the central vertical axis: at least two eggs are cracked and leaking yolks and whites while a third is cracked wide open. A fourth broken egg further to the girl’s left is leaking its white, with the yolk threatening to follow. Behind the girl stand a young man and, to his left, an old woman. The woman grabs the youth’s left hand with her left hand and eyes him reproachfully as she points down in consternation at the shattered eggs with her right. He returns her gaze while removing his hat with his other hand as if a funeral cortège were passing by. A small boy to the older woman’s left, his bent left arm resting on the lid of a wooden barrel alongside an earthenware vessel and a child-sized play bow and two arrows, anxiously tries in vain to keep the contents of the fifth cracked egg in his hands from leaking. His facial expression is doleful and his cheeks are flushed, as are those of the young man and young girl. But why are all of Greuze’s figures so vexed? For early twenty-first-century viewers, there’s no more point crying over broken eggs than there is over spilt milk. But like broken pitchers, broken eggs were a well-established allusion to premarital lost virginity in the early modern and even modern periods.32 This explains the young girl’s expression of shame, the older woman’s angry dismay, and the ample phallic and scrotal shapes formed by the folds of the tucked-in front flap of the young man’s waist apron. (Whether the lovers’ reddened cheeks are the consequence of the afterglow of coitus, embarrassment at being discovered immediately after the act, or both, remains unclear.) The toy bow and arrow next to the young boy trying to make the fifth cracked egg whole again in the lower right-hand corner makes him into a Cupid figure.33 By propping one of the boy’s play arrows against the wide-mouthed earthenware bowl, Greuze provides yet another allusion to the illicit coupling that the ersatz Cupid spurred; are the boy’s abashed facial expression and flushed cheeks expressions of his regret after the fact? Sinister-dexter relationships further underscore the young girl’s fall from grace. She sits on the dirt floor, next to her basket of shame, rather than on the bench on her dexter side. The broken eggs have tumbled out on her sinister side and thus in the direction of the tenebrous sinister third of the rustic interior where the boy standing in for Cupid cowers. On the table behind the bench sit two earthenware vessels. The spout of the larger gray one projects over the open mouth of the smaller brown one right next to it; a glass vase rests in a wall niche just beyond the two earthenware vessels. The intact state of all three offers a reproachful contrast to the young girl’s broken one. Further to her right, well above her turned-away head, is the luminous window that allows for the only view onto the wider world, the celestial firmament above it, and the Kingdom of Heaven beyond that dome that her fall from grace may put forever beyond her reach. With the painted, sculpted, and graphic works of art considered thus far, I have sought to demonstrate that a greater familiarity with our material past allows us more fully to explore and appreciate its riches. By contrast, I cannot argue that there are layers of meaning in Friz Freleng’s repurposing of the pose of Rodin’s The Thinker (Figure 9.15) for Sylvester in the 1945 Warner Brothers cartoon Life with Feathers (Figure 9.14) that only a knowledge of the earlier narrative of Western art history can help us to illuminate. What I can establish, however, is the feature’s distinguished place in the history of American animation and popular culture in the middle of the last century. 138

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First, Life with Feathers is the cartoon that introduced the beloved tuxedo cat to cinema audiences in the United States and around the world.34 Second, the model for the whining, milquetoast lovebird in Life with Feathers was Wallace Wimple, a well-known character from the golden age of American radio. Voice-over artist, comedian, and actor Bill Thompson (1913–71) debuted the character in 1934 on America’s longest-running network entertainment show, Don McNeill’s morning-radio variety series The Breakfast Club (ABC, 1933–68).35 Mr. Wimple’s big break came in 1941, when Thompson brought his creation to the hugely popular Fibber McGee and Molly radio show (NBC, 1935–59).36 “Wimp,” as Fibber called him, was a timid birdwatcher who lived in constant fear of his “big, old, horrid wife,” Sweetie Face. Like Fang, the imaginary husband of comedian Phyllis Diller (1917–2012), Sweetie Face was frequently talked about but never heard from. The persona of Mr. Wimple first found its way into Warner Brothers cartoons in 1943, when director Bob Clampett set the one-off anthropomorphic character Mr. Meek opposite Daffy Duck in The Wise Quacking Duck. Although not voiced by Thompson, Mr. Meek was unmistakably modeled on Mr. Wimple: on his way to decapitate Daffy with an axe, Mr. Meek turns to the viewer and whines, “Oh, I hate to do this, folks, but my wife Sweetie Puss says if I don’t roast a duck for dinner she’ll cook my goose!” Although Sweetie Puss isn’t seen or heard in The Wise Quacking Duck, we see her lovebird counterpart throwing crockery at her unnamed, henpecked husband at the beginning of Life with Feathers and hear her voice and see her hurl a bowl at his head at the cartoon’s very end. (Not surprisingly, Mrs. Lovebird is taller and more formidable than Mr. Lovebird.) That Freleng recast Mr. Wimple, an avid birder on Fibber McGee and Molly, as a lovebird in Life with Feathers is an especially nice touch. Warner Brothers’ “man of a thousand voices,” Mel Blanc (1908–89), delivered Mr. Lovebird’s lines.37 In 1959, CBS Television introduced the sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis; the series ran for four seasons, until 1963. Set in a Midwestern town called Central City, the sitcom starred Dwayne Hickman as Dobie Gillis, a teenager with intellectual aspirations and a perpetually thwarted love life. As each episode opens, Gillis appears in front of a bronze cast of Rodin’s The Thinker in a Central City park and addresses the viewing audience as he lays out the problem of the week. In the earliest episodes, he even emulates the pose of Rodin’s sculpture (Figure 9.19). Were the show’s writers inspired by Rodin’s sculpture (figure 9.15), its witty recasting by Friz Freleng in Life with Feathers (figure 9.14), or both, for Dobie’s pondering pose? While Rodin’s famous bronze might seem to be the most likely model, it is worth noting that Life with Feathers attracted enough attention in 1945 to make it one of the seven nominees for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1946. Although it lost to Hanna and Barbera’s Tom and Jerry short Quiet Please!, the third of four wins from 1943 to 1946 for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s animated cat-and-mouse team, Sylvester did star in Warner Brothers’ first Academy Award winner. That cartoon was Tweetie Pie, the first of 39 pairings between 1947 and 1964 of Sylvester (called Thomas by his human owner in Tweetie Pie) and the tiny, childlike, but formidable canary created by Bob Clampett in 1942 and given his debut in A Tale of Two Kitties. As for Sylvester, he appears in a whopping 113 Warners Brothers shorts altogether, beginning with Life with Feathers and ending with A Taste of Catnip in 1966, putting him in the same premier league of Warner Brothers animation stars as Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, and Bugs Bunny. *** Let me conclude by returning to the question that I posed at the beginning of this essay: what, for art historians, is the relationship between the past and the present? In the first part of this study, I called to the stand individual works of art and architecture fashioned across almost two and a 139

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Figure 9.19 The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (CBS TV series), Dobie (Dwayne Hickman) Sitting before Cast of Rodin’s The Thinker. Between 1959 and 1963. Screenshot. Source: YouTube.

half millennia in an effort to demonstrate that the Western material past is still very much a part of our material present. I made no distinction between “high” and “low” works of art: thoughtful and imaginative artists have worked and work in every medium and for every kind of audience. In this chapter’s second part, I sought to show how a fuller understanding of our material inheritance can sharpen our appreciation for that heritage. Such an understanding is not a luxury or a bauble, in my view: if we do not have a deeper knowledge of where we come from historically and culturally, we are cut off from our past to a greater or lesser degree. Thereby unanchored, we can too easily fall prey to partisan ideologues on both the far left and far right who would seek to appropriate or misrepresent our inheritance for political purposes. The more contemporary visual artists know about their material heritage, moreover, the better they can reimagine and reinvent it, rather than just emptily recycle its forms. Over the course of my 30 years of teaching Western art history to college undergraduates, I drew quiet satisfaction whenever current or former students sent postcards or put up images on social media of monuments they remembered from their classes with me: it reassured me that I had sent at least some believers in the intrinsic value of the visual arts out into the world. Today’s global turn means that future Western generations will be able to draw on an even broader material patrimony if they choose to claim their inheritance and plumb its riches. That they will do so is this emeritus professor’s greatest hope. 140

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Notes 1 In this connection, see Mark Edmundson, “Teach what you love.” The American Scholar, Autumn 2020, accessed February 16, 2021, https://theamericanscholar.org/teach-what-you-love/, and his book Why Teach? In Defense of a Real Education (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2013). 2 William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, 1st edition (New York: Random House, 1951), 73. 3 https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-promoting-beautifulfederal-civic-architecture/, accessed February 16, 2021. President Biden rescinded Trump’s executive order in February of 2021 (www.nytimes.com/2021/02/26/arts/trump-biden-executive-orders-federalbuildings-architecture.html, accessed March 3, 2021). 4 http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/404 , accessed February16, 2021. 5 https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/buildings/tuscaloosa-federal-building-and-courthouse_o, accessed February 16, 2021. 6 For the architects, visit http://ie-services.com/portfolio/united-states-federal-courthouse-corpuschristi-texas/, accessed February 16, 2021; see also www.gsa.gov/about-us/regions/welcome-to-thegreater-southwest-region-7/buildings-and-facilities/texas/corpus-christi-federal-courthouse, accessed February 16, 2021. 7 Rudolf Wittkower, rev. Joseph Connors and Jennifer Montagu, Art and Architecture in Italy 1600–1750. III: Late Baroque and Rococo 1675–1750, 6th edition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 7–8, fig. 3. 8 For this still ongoing architectural movement, see Heinrich Klotz, History of Post-Modern Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). 9 https://skyscraperpage.com/cities/?buildingID=1875, accessed February 16, 2021. 10 For the Ghent Altarpiece, see most recently Maximiliaan Martens, Till-Holger Borchert, Jan Dumolyn, Johan De Smet and Frederica Van Dam, eds., Van Eyck (London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 2020), 236–257 et passim, and Bart Fransen and Cyriel Stroo, dirs., The Ghent Altarpiece: Research and Conservation of the Exterior (Contributions to the Study of the Flemish Primitives, 14) (Brussels: KIKIRPA, 2020). 11 Unfortunately, a reproduction of this New York Times page had to be foregone for reasons of cost. 12 The literature on Friedrich’s painting is immense. In English, the most recent study of the canvas is Julian Jason Haladyn, “Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer’: Paradox of the modern subject.” Canadian Art Review 41.1 (2016), 47–61. 13 For the equestrian Marcus Aurelius, see Donald Strong, Roman Art, 2nd ed. (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988), 214, fig. 150. 14 The Codex Amiatinus is included in Claire Breay and Joanna Story, eds., Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War, exh. cat. (London: British Library, 2018), cat. 34. 15 For the Coronation Gospels, see most recently Lawrence Nees, “Prolegomenon to a study of the Vienna coronation gospels: Common knowledge, scholarship, tradition, legend, myth,” 253–274 (Chapter 12) and pls. 3–10 in Valerie L. Garver and Owen M. Phelan, eds., Rome & Religion in the Medieval World: Studies in Honor of Thomas F.X. Noble (Church, Faith, and Culture in the Medieval West), (Farnham [Surrey, U.K.] and Burlington [VT]: Ashgate, 2014). Strong, Roman Art (as in note 13), 278–280, fig. 210. 16 For Life with Feathers, see Jerry Beck, “I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat”: Fifty Years of Sylvester and Tweety (New 17 York: Henry Holt, 1991), 17, 44–47, 87. 18 The most recent monograph in English is Jane Mayo Roos, Auguste Rodin (London and New York: Phaidon, 2010), 76–77, figs. 85, 88, 102–104. For the cast in San Francisco illustrated here as figure 15, consult Martin Chapman, The Sculptures of Auguste Rodin at the Legion of Honor, exh. cat. (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museum, 2017), 52–61. 19 Most recently, see Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country (New York: Harper/HarperCollins, 2020) (reviews: www.wsj.com/articles/first-principles-review-classically-constituted-11605282661, accessed February  18, 2021; https://nytimes.com/2020/11/10/books/review/first-principles-thomas-e-ricks.html, accessed February  18, 2021). On 16 August  2020, the conservative James Panero claimed in the Wall Street Journal that radical leftists were out to cancel the visual language – both architectural and sculptural – of the “classical liberal order” (https://wsj.com/articles/rioters-seek-to-destroy-aestheticorder-too-11597608096, accessed February 18, 2021). For a left-wing take on this issue, see https:// hyperallergic.com/614175/how-a-trump-executive-order-aims-to-set-white-supremacy-in-stone/, accessed February 18, 2021.

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Gregory T. Clark 20 The use or misuse of the classical inheritance for ideological or political ends is very much a hotbutton topic at the time of this writing. For a “woke” viewpoint, see www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/ magazine/classics-greece-rome-whiteness.html, accessed February  18, 2021; for a more centrist take, see www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dont-yield-ancient-history-and-literature-to-the-altright/2021/02/03/3632ad7a-6635–11eb-886d-5264d4ceb46d_story.html, accessed February 18, 2021. 21 For a list of 31 books, many on the topic of Romanticism, with Friedrich’s canvas on the cover, visit goodreads.com/list/show/76292.Wanderers_Above_The_Sea_Of_Fog, accessed February 19, 2021. 22 Haladyn, “Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer’”, 50. 23 Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, 2nd edition (London: Reaktion, 2009), 89, 134, 210–228 [Chapter 10: “Theomimesis”], and illus. 77. 24 Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich, 134. 25 Haladyn, “Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer’”, 55. 26 Michel Pastoureau, Yellow: The History of a Color (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 75–138. 27 https://time.com/3978951/lefties-history/, accessed February 19, 2021. 28 To the best of my knowledge, the interpretations that I  propose here for both paintings are novel, perhaps even unorthodox. That they are so is, I believe, a consequence of the tendency of many, if not most contemporary art historians to see early modern (and modern and contemporary) works of art through a determinedly secular lens and a concomitant disinclination to acknowledge the persistence of profound Christian religiosity in the post-medieval West. 29 Adriaan E. Waiboer, Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr. and Blaise Ducos, Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting: Inspiration and Rivalry, exh cat. (Dublin: National Gallery of Ireland; Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art; Paris: Musée du Louvre) (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017). 30 Waiboer, Wheelock, and Ducos, Vermeer, 204–207, at p. 204. 31 See most recently Colin B. Bailey, ed., The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 248–250, no. 64, and Emma Barker, Greuze and the Painting of Sentiment (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 116, 226. 32 Broken pitchers are the subjects of a canvas of 1771 ascribed to Greuze’s workshop in the Musée du Louvre in Paris (Département des peintures, Inv. 5036; Barker, Greuze, 222–223, fig. 84) as well as a more celebrated painting of 1891 by French academic painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905) in the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco (Acc. 53162; https://art.famsf.org/ william-adolphe-bouguereau/broken-pitcher-53162, accessed February 20, 2021). 33 Bailey, Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard, 248 and endnote 14, which cites page 14 in James Thompson, “Jean-Baptiste Greuze,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (Winter 1989–90), 4–52. 34 Sylvester received his name from his master Porky Pig in Scaredy Cat, directed by Chuck Jones and released in 1948. 35 For The Breakfast Club, see John Dunning, On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 114–117. The radio show probably inspired the name of John Hughes’ celebrated 1985 movie of the same name. 36 For Fibber McGee and Molly, see Dunning, On the Air, 245–252. 37 The most enduring animated character to be based on Bill Thompson’s Mr. Wimple, of course, is Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s laconic and near catatonic basset hound Droopy. Created by ex-Warners animator Tex Avery and voiced by Thompson himself, Droopy made his first appearance in DumbHounded in 1943; his last appearance, 24 features later, was in 1958. For the Droopy cartoons, see Joe Adamson, Tex Avery: King of Cartoons (New York: Da Capo, 1975), 73, 76–85.

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10 DIGGING INTO THE HUMAN PAST Archaeology, Time, and the Object Martin Porr Introduction: Time and Archaeology The development of archaeology as an academic endeavour was a key element in the great intellectual shifts of the 19th century. The focus of these was Europe, but the impact was felt in all parts of the world, which were linked to each other through political relationships, the flow of goods and materials, as well as the exchange of ideas, projections, and imaginations. Within this period of dramatic changes, archaeology was connected to other emerging fields in complex ways. Most important among these disciplines were the historical and geological sciences, which were undergoing dramatic developments of their own. Perhaps more than most other fields of inquiry, archaeology has influenced and shifted the public imagination in dramatic ways. It has changed the global understanding of the human past and even the understanding of humanity itself. The fascination with archaeology continues into the present and the practice of archaeology is continuously imagined and described with reference to a recurring set of metaphors. Archaeology is the science of excavation and discovery. The key tools associated with archaeology remain the spade and the trowel. Both objects encapsulate the view of archaeology as a practice that is intimately bound to the material and manual act of digging. The archaeologist is most often imagined as being in the process of removing soil, digging into the dirt. The archaeologist is a character who is busy removing layers of sediment, carefully peeling back one layer after the other to unravel what is hidden under the surface. These material acts are also intrinsically linked to the idea of the figurative uncovering of the past. The act of excavation is imagined as an act of movement through time. Fascination with archaeology is always a fascination with the past and the idea of being able to move back through time. The depth of the soil or the distance from the entrance to the tomb become metaphors for the temporal depth or distance from the present. The ultimate goal of archaeology becomes, therefore, further insight into a past lifeworld, insight that permits participation in past experiences and actions. The archaeological discoveries that have generated the most public and academic excitement are those that show the greatest degree of preservation inversely related to their absolute age. These are the discoveries that appear to be outside the flow of time, outside the seemingly inevitable processes of decay and deterioration. Prominent examples are Pompeii and Herculaneum, the tomb of Tutankhamun, or the Grotte Chauvet. In each case, the observer is drawn to the idea of a direct DOI: 10.4324/9781003026570-12

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and personal encounter with the deep past. At Pompeii, we are emotionally affected by the casts of the bodies that were covered by the hot ash, which allow us to witness the last moments of the lives of these unfortunate victims about 2,000 years ago. The excavated city itself seemingly allows a complete and unmediated immersion into a past lifeworld and the observation of individual acts of agency.1 In the case of the tomb of Tutankhamun, it is often stressed that not only the interior was completely preserved and unchanged. Similarly impressive was the observation that individual fingerprints were visible on the resin of the seal at the entrance to the tomb.2 At Grotte Chauvet, a painted cave that was inaccessible for over 26,000 years, researchers found undisturbed fireplaces and finger marks on the wall that allow the reconstruction of individual gestures of Ice Age artists.3 In the popular imagination, the fascination with archaeology is manifested in examples of archaeologists discovering places in which time was suspended or stood still. For example, in the classic Indiana Jones movies, it is an Egyptian tomb leading towards the discovery of the Ark of the Covenant (itself unaffected by processes of material deterioration), a hidden city in the Himalayas (in which archaic rituals are performed), and the resting place of the Holy Grail (which is protected by a knight who has not aged since the time of the Crusades). While these cinematic examples are fictitious, they draw attention to the problematic entanglement of archaeology with European imperialism and colonialism. These relationships have affected archaeology in multiple ways and this heritage is still implicit in many archeological interpretations.4 The previously mentioned examples reflect well-known motives of Orientalism that have fuelled the fascination with archaeology for a very long time.5 Overall, these cases are connected to a European colonial imagination of global historical development. Within this understanding, societies not only followed different historical trajectories. They also developed at different speeds within the overall framework of human history, characterised by progressively increasing technological and social complexity. As a result, some societies, usually non-European ones, were viewed as belonging to the past, even though they existed simultaneously. This famous ‘denial of coevalness’ created a global landscape in which time and space intersect in complex ways.6 In different regions, history was seen as progressing at different speeds. Historical progress was viewed as becoming slower with increasing distance from the perceived centre of Northwest Europe. The ‘uttermost ends of the earth’ – Australia, southern Africa, and Tierra del Fuego – were imagined to reflect and preserve the original condition of humanity.7 Archaeological reasoning is often faced with the challenge of drawing appropriate comparisons between ethnographically and archaeologically known societies. The previously mentioned issues draw attention to the fact that no easy answers can be expected in this respect.8 These debates took place after World War II, during a time when many researchers in the United Kingdom and the United States integrated natural science methods and quantitative analyses into their work. A key aspect of these developments was the adoption of radiometric dating techniques, beginning with the radiocarbon revolution during the 1950s. The proliferation and increasing sophistication of radiometric dating techniques is probably the most significant development for archaeology of the past seventy years and it has fundamentally changed the character of the discipline. It has altered not only the practice of archaeological research but also archaeologists’ attitudes towards time and, hence, their understanding of the relationship between the past and the present. This chapter provides some historical reflections on the development of the understanding of time in the field of archaeology, its dating techniques, and its engagement with different temporal scales. While technology has become more and more dominant within archaeology, the deep research history of archaeology still matters and requires ongoing critical attention. 144

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The Discovery of the Deep Human Past It is widely accepted that the 19th century was a time of fundamental changes in the relationship between humanity and the natural world. While this observation is generally correct, as a universalising statement it needs to be qualified with reference to the intellectual, political, and socioeconomic changes taking place at the time. The 19th century saw the culmination of the political, economic, and military dominance of Europe on a global scale. It witnessed the height of European imperialism and economic and political competition between European nation-states. It also saw the development of new forms of natural resource extraction and transport. These activities changed the perception of the natural and human history of the landscape in Europe and beyond.9 Late in the 18th century and during the early decades of the 19th, the science of geology began to reflect a growing recognition of the depth of the earth’s antiquity. It is neither necessary nor possible to discuss these developments in greater detail here.10 However, it is important to recognise that they provided the intellectual and practical foundations for the ongoing development of archaeology. The recognition of the antiquity of the earth and the deep human past were complementary processes. Discoveries in the field of geology provided key metaphors and methodologies for archaeological explorations and the possibility of a deep past for humans as well. During the first half of the 19th century, numerous explorations by enthusiastic amateurs and engineers established and expanded on the key principles of geological research and fieldwork. Many of these are still in use today, such as the mapping of landscape features and the principles of stratigraphy. The recognition of the deep human past consequently took place within the developing geological framework of knowledge. It similarly drew on observations and inferences such as principles of superpositioning and layering, which implied that older layers can be found at the base of a stratigraphic sequence and younger layers at the top. There was a growing recognition that these spatial relationships could be translated into past temporal processes, which operated a long time ago and over vast amounts of time. These inferences also included the recognition that findings within the same layer need to be regarded as contemporary. This ‘law of association’ became crucially important for the establishment of the antiquity of humanity, when clearly human-made artefacts were found in association with extinct animals in European sites. Excavations conducted during the first half of the 19th century at Kent’s Cavern, near Torquay, England, unearthed stone tools and bones of extinct animals together. Their association with each other as well as their antiquity remained, however, unclear for a long time. The prevailing understanding of the past, based on the account of the Bible, prevented a more systematic exploration and interpretation of the evidence.11 Perhaps most famously, in 1847, Jacques Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes published Antiquités celtiques et antédiluviennes, in which he claimed the existence of an Old Stone Age before the biblical Flood. His interpretation was based on the finds of clearly identifiable stone tools together with the bones of extinct animals in gravel sequences along the Somme River in north-western France. While Boucher’s work received some recognition, his main claims were not accepted by the important Learned Societies of Paris and London.12 The key year for the establishment of a deep human past turned out to be 1859 and it is only a historical accident that this was also the year in which Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Advised by the well-known geologist Hugh Falconer, John Evans and Joseph Prestwich travelled to the Somme region to visit Boucher and to conduct their own investigations.13 They were both experienced in geological methods and had already undertaken 145

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extensive fieldwork across the British Isles. Their central aims are still key elements of archaeological research designs today and are evident in the findings that they reported: 1. That the flint-implements are the work of man; 2. That they were found in undisturbed ground; 3. That they are associated with the remains of extinct Mammalia; 4. That the period was a late geological one, and anterior to the surface assuming its present outline, so far as some of its minor features are concerned.14 Their aims relate to the necessity to establish the exact character of the artefacts that are discovered in an archaeological excavation. In the case of early periods of human history, it is often difficult to make an unambiguous assessment and this challenge remains for analyses of the Pliocene and Pleistocene sites in Africa and Asia today. The authors have also recognised the importance of determining the original context of each artefact and making sure to understand its depositional history. The context of an artefact’s deposition and discovery remains as important as the artefact itself. This extends to the understanding of associated finds, which can inform about past natural environments or cultural assemblages. Finally, Evans and Prestwich recognised the importance of geological observations and the need to understand the sedimentological history of each site. Bringing these aspects together, they were able to establish a new understanding of human antiquity, and in so doing, employed a new technology: photography. The visit by Evans and Prestwich in France was significant not only because they documented stone tools in their original stratigraphic contexts. They also produced two photographs of their findings, the first to document artefacts in their original find position in prehistoric archaeology. One photo shows the whole section through the Somme River gravel sequence with a worker pointing towards an in situ artefact (Figure 10.1). The second photo shows the artefact in detail and confirms that it is an implement, interpreted today as an Acheulean biface (dated to between 500,000 and 200,000 years ago in Europe).15 The events of 1859 provided the catalyst for the discovery and interpretation of many further similar artefacts across Europe and elsewhere. It was also recognised that John Frere had already argued a similar case for a deep human past from finds in the Hoxne brick pit in Suffolk in the late 18th century. These episodes were, consequently, not only important because of the systematic demonstration of the considerable antiquity of humanity. They also provided the key archaeological tool kit for future fieldwork and analyses. While some of its most important aims and techniques were established at a surprisingly early stage, archaeology was fundamentally transformed during the 20th century through the development of absolute or radiometric dating techniques. However, these did not replace earlier methodologies. Rather, they allowed a new appreciation of the complexity of the temporal dimension in archaeology and today, it is recognised that reliable results can be achieved only through an appropriate combination of methods.

Relative and Absolute: Measuring Time in Archaeology Every undergraduate student in archaeology will be introduced in the first year of study to the distinction between relative and absolute dating techniques. In archaeology, these techniques refer to the ability to place objects or sites either in a relative sequence or in relation to an absolute temporal scale. Ultimately, the aim of archaeology is to bring these aspects together and develop an understanding of past events both in terms of their temporal relationship with each other and in relation to the present observer. The measurement of time in archaeology has developed into a very specialised field over the past several decades. It requires considerable 146

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Figure 10.1 A worker points at a stone artefact in a quarry near Saint-Acheul (France) in the afternoon of 27 April 1859. This is the first known photograph of an archaeological find in its original stratigraphic position. Source: Bycro via Wikimedia Commons: https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Carri%C3%A8re_de_SaintAcheul_(Amiens)_en_1859_1.jpg.

technical scientific expertise and often complex and expensive equipment. However, one should not forget that the determination of the age of objects itself is only a means to a rather specific end: the understanding of past human actions at different scales. As outlined in the previous section, the establishment of archaeology as an academic discipline during the 19th century was intimately connected to the simultaneous recognition of humanity’s antiquity. This significant shift was related to the previous development of a range of archaeological methods, which are still relevant for archaeology today.16 During the first half of the 19th century, C. J. Thomson developed the famous Three Age System that proposed a Stone Age – Bronze Age – Iron Age succession over time. This chronology was based on Thomson’s analysis of the collections of the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen, which continued to grow considerably during this time because of finds made during industrial and 147

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infrastructure projects and a growing interest in ancient artefacts among the wider population. While the system is regarded today as greatly simplifying past historical processes, it was based on crucial methodological developments. The Three Age System recognised that the integrity of associations of finds is important and ultimately allows the ordering of finds into a relative sequence. It provided the foundation for the archaeological techniques of typological ordering and seriation, which remain important methodological elements in the archaeological toolbox today.17 Typological approaches, firstly, acknowledge the fact that human artefacts that were made at a specific time and place tend to be similar in their physical attributes and, secondly, that these attributes tend to change slowly over time. Together, these characteristics allow the ordering of artefacts into typological or stylistic sequences. This method continues to be a powerful tool for the rapid assessment of the age of new finds in circumstances where robust and established chronological sequences are available. This situation applies, for example, to most regions in Europe and the Middle East, which often have a research history that is longer than one hundred years. The most well attested artefact category is pottery. It is often the most abundant element in sites that date from the Neolithic or later. Pottery (or pottery shards, at least) preserves very well in the archaeological record. Besides stone, it is one of the most durable materials. However, as unfired clay is highly malleable and can be prepared and decorated in many different ways, pottery can change relatively quickly over time. These features together make pottery the perfect subject for the development of typological-stylistic sequences and, hence, relative dating approaches. Archaeology remains, however, an empirical discipline that very much relies on observations in the field. As outlined earlier, during the 19th century, it was increasingly realised that contextual information is crucial for understanding the archaeological record and processes in the deep past. Over time, these insights did lead to the development of systematic excavation methods that today have reached a significant level of sophistication and are supported by a range of digital and surveying technologies. Excavation techniques allow the close observation and documentation of past sequences of events. They are the key techniques by which to understand the interplay of human and non-human factors that contribute to the preservation of an archaeological site. In this context, archaeology needs to engage closely with the fields of geology, sedimentology, and geomorphology. The archaeologist must not only develop an understanding of archaeological artefacts but also of the matrix in which these artefacts are embedded. The study of deposits and layers is called stratigraphy and it integrates many techniques and methods from the allied scientific disciplines already mentioned. Stratification in archaeology varies enormously, encompassing cases for the dozens of metres of wind-blown sediments that have accumulated over tens of thousands of years during the last Ice Age to the dust layers in contexts under wooden floorboards of a 17th-century building. While the buildup of sediments can potentially give an indication of the absolute age of an artefact, a site, or a structure, the methods outlined so far are in themselves not capable of providing absolute dates or showing how old evidence is. There can be little doubt that some of the most significant developments in archaeology over the last few decades are related to so-called chronometry. This term describes a wide range of techniques that allow age estimation of different types of materials. In some cases, these techniques are applied to artefacts directly and in others, they are used to date sediments or other forms of the contextual matrix. Most of these techniques rely on a physical process that has a statistical or probabilistic measurable regularity. One can distinguish between isotopic and radiogenic methods. The former makes use of the regularity and statistical predictability of the decay rate of different elemental isotopes. The latter utilises “the accumulation of changes due to the presence of natural radiation.”18 The most famous radiometric technique is radiocarbon 148

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dating. It is based on the fact that living organisms incorporate the rare and unstable isotope 14 C into their bodies during their lifetime through metabolic processes. This uptake ceases with the death of the organism. 14C decays into 12C at a stable rate: the amount of 14C will halve every 5,730 years. Hence, a measurement of the ratio between these two isotopes in organic remains provides an age estimate in absolute terms.19 Radiocarbon dating was introduced in 1949 and it initiated a real revolution in archaeology. Many models regarding key archaeological questions had to be fundamentally revised. These included previous understandings of the origins of farming in the Middle East and Egypt, and the origins and distribution of megalithic monuments across western and north-western Europe.20 Radiocarbon dating can be used only on organic materials that are less than ca. 55,000 years old. Beyond this age, the amount of the remaining 14C is too low to allow a meaningful absolute date estimate. Other methods use isotopes of uranium and thorium or argon and their respective decay rates. These methods have a range of up to 1.5 million years and can date volcanic or travertine deposits.21 In contrast to isotopic methods, radiogenic methods are based on the measurable and regular effects of naturally occurring radiation. The most widely known method is optically stimulated luminescence (OSL). It measures the light that is emitted by a sample of crystalline material when it is heated beyond a specific temperature threshold. At this point, the sample will emit photons captured in the crystal grid of the object during its time in the ground. Because of these physical processes, OSL is able to measure the time during which crystalline material was not exposed to light. While these outcomes might sound a bit specific, this technology is one of the most significant developments in archaeology over the past twenty years or so.22 OSL rarely allows the dating of archaeological objects directly. Instead, it makes it possible to date sediments themselves and establish the time period when they were accessible to human occupation and manipulation. OSL has enabled archaeologists to break through the so-called radiocarbon barrier and date human artefacts and relevant sediments of up to 500,000 years in age. OSL can also act as an important method to check the integrity of archaeological sites and their formation processes. A very different method of absolute dating is presented by the technique of dendrochronology, which is also based on a regularly occurring natural mechanism. In this case, however, it is not an atomic or subatomic process but a biological one. Most trees grow each year during a particular growth period, measured in their rings. As each year has slightly different growth periods or characteristics, tree rings reflect time-specific patterns. These patterns can be recorded over several thousand years. The development of dendrochronological schemes allows the determination of the time during which a particular tree grew in the past and, hence, when it was harvested and used. This technique is most commonly employed to date the timber elements of buildings in the northern hemisphere.23 This reveals some of the complexities involved in the temporal understanding of material structures and evidence. In applying dendrochronology, the archaeologist needs to consider that there might be a considerable time lag between the felling of a tree and its use. Wood can be stored for a long time before it is turned into construction material. Furthermore, buildings can incorporate materials over a very long time span. In some cases, these differences can amount to several hundred years. These effects can be observed in timber-framed structures in central Europe such as at the UNESCO World Heritage site of Quedlinburg, in Germany (Figure 10.2).24 Dendrochronological analyses allow an appreciation of the multitemporal character of old buildings. Their point of origin and their age cannot be clearly fixed in time. A building, like any archaeological site, is less a fixed structure and more a product of a multilayered process that encompasses acts of building, rebuilding, and repair, as well as the growth and production of the building materials. 149

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Figure 10.2 The UNESCO World Heritage site of Quedlinburg (Germany) has one of the richest collections of timber-framed architecture. Each house reflects a multitemporal assemblage of materials and processes that cannot be fixed to a single point in time. Source: Photo by the author.

Dendrochronology also plays an important role in the field of absolute dating techniques. Contrary to the popular imagination, radiometric dating techniques do not immediately produce dates in calendar years and age estimates that make sense in human terms. As outlined earlier, the machinery that is employed in each case measures a certain property of the material under investigation and this property (e.g., the ratio between 14C and 12C) needs to be contrasted with regular, naturally occurring processes. However, the latter process has proven to be less straightforward than originally assumed. In the case of 14C dating, for example, it was long assumed that the concentration of 14C in the earth’s atmosphere had remained constant in the past. Comparisons with precise dendrochronological data showed, however, that radiocarbon estimates increasingly diverged from the actual age of samples. For samples that are about 7,000 years old, radiocarbon age estimations tend to be about 900 years too young. This divergence increases to around 3,000 years for ages between 18,000 and 40,000 years. In addition, it was found that the concentration of 14C in marine contexts differs from that in terrestrial contexts, so that a distinction needs to be made in this case as well. Radiocarbon estimations, consequently, need to be calibrated. Calibration means in this case the dating of samples that have already been dated with another method. This approach allows the proper translation of radiometric dates into calendrical dates, i.e., years before the present. The calibration of radiocarbon dates has developed into a highly sophisticated field and today, general or master calibration curves are regularly published that integrate a whole range of different dating techniques.25 150

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All radiometric dating methods need to be calibrated in one way or another. They also need to be conducted very carefully. There are different methodological challenges at each step related to possible sampling, contamination, or processing errors. It is not possible to delve into all of these in detail here.26 However, it should be noted that all radiometric methods need to be understood in relation to the probabilistic nature of the physical processes they utilise. Any initial estimation of age obtained through radiometric methods is provided as a probability distribution. The final result will also always be a probability distribution. Thus, there is no absolute certainty in absolute dating. Although specialists in the field continue to increase the precision of their approaches, reliability is achieved only through the employment of multiple age determinations of a single method, the simultaneous use of different dating methods, and the application of sophisticated statistical procedures to bring it all together.27 Age determinations in archaeology will always come with standard errors and deviations. This should not be regarded as a weakness of the methods that have been developed, but instead as an irreducible reflection of the probabilistic nature of physical reality itself. Most of the issues discussed in this section are features of the field of chronometry, the area of absolute dating techniques and their methodologies.28 This is a highly sophisticated field, but it is only a means to an end. Ultimately, archaeologists are interested in using chronometry to establish chronologies, in order to develop an understanding of temporal sequences and relationships in relation to archaeological evidence. The next step in understanding time in archaeology is to contextualise the results of chronometric dating. For an archaeologist, it is not only important to know how old something is. It is also important to be aware of what is actually being dated and of the relationships between different results. These relationships are simultaneously spatial and temporal because archaeology is fundamentally an exercise in translating spatial relationships in the archaeological record into temporal ones. We thus ask ourselves how it is possible to translate the present static archaeological record into past processes and actions of past human or non-human actors. How can we give meaning to archaeological evidence?

The Archaeological Record and Scales of Temporality Two of the world’s most famous archaeological sites are the Roman cities of Pompeii (Figure 10.3) and Herculaneum. Both have been a source of endless fascination since their rediscovery in the early 18th century. The sites have been important catalysts in the development of the fields of classical studies, art history, and archaeology. As briefly mentioned above, their fame is based on their extraordinarily complete preservation and the snapshot they provide of life during a bygone era – specifically, a day in 79 CE when both cities were rapidly covered by volcanic ash following an eruption of Mount Etna. To a certain extent, all this is true. The level of preservation is extraordinary and work at the sites continues to unearth impressive insights into the life and death of Roman people at the time of the eruption. Among the most moving examples are cavities in the solidified volcanic ash, which have remained after the bodies of the victims of the eruption have long decomposed. After these cavities have been filled with plaster, they give haunting impressions of the last moments of individual people who died almost 2,000  years ago.29 They facilitate direct and emotional connection with an individual human being’s pain and suffering across thousands of years. While Pompeii and Herculaneum remain exceptional sites in this respect, the archaeological record is in fact full of similar examples. There are many cases in which individual expressions of human agency have been preserved. These include seemingly ephemeral traces such as footprints, which appear to be much more common than originally assumed, in both archaeological and paleontological contexts.30 151

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Figure 10.3 An exhibition space at Pompeii (Italy) with the shapes of victims of the famous volcano eruption in 79 CE. Source: Photo by the author.

While these examples remain impressive, their prominence in the public imagination is related to a misconception of the character of the archaeological record and, consequently, the nature of archaeological inquiry and interpretation. Over the course of the 20th century, it was increasingly demonstrated that archaeological evidence rarely reflects a single moment in time, as counterintuitive as it might seem. It is now clear that incomplete and unsophisticated understandings of the temporal character of archaeological sites caused significant damage during the formative years of the discipline of archaeology. Possibly the most famous examples in this respect are the excavations by Heinrich Schliemann at Troy and Mycenae during the late 19th century.31 Schliemann was an archeological pioneer and his work popularised the field enormously. However, he also caused an exceptional amount of irreparable damage to sites he connected with Homer’s Iliad. While it is now accepted that he was mostly correct in his basic identification of the sites of Mycenae and Troy, his understanding of the chronological complexities of these sites was seriously limited. Schliemann assumed that these sites did not have great temporal depth and that the time of the Trojan War could clearly be identified – and this was all that mattered to him.32 Subsequent analyses of remaining sections of the Homeric sites have revealed their complex chronological character. For example, the shaft graves that yielded the famous so-called mask of Agamemnon were not reflective of a group of Homeric heroes, all of whom went to fight the Trojan War together. Instead, these are burials spread over several generations.33 Treating the Homeric citadels as if they represent a single moment in time like Pompeii was a costly mistake and destroyed irreplaceable evidence. 152

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In the research history of prehistoric archaeology, the ‘Pompeii Premise’ is an established term.34 It refers to the idea that archaeological evidence is frozen in time and reflects events that can be related to human actions and experiences. However, the archaeological record with which we can engage in the present is the product of multiple processes. Some of these can be related to past human action but most are natural processes that altered the evidence after discard or deposition. Such considerations are the concerns of the field of taphonomy, which examines the impact of decay and preservation as well as any geological forces that affect artefacts and sites over time.35 All archaeological sites once contained items that have not survived. Stone is generally the most durable material and is virtually indestructible. It often presents the only category preserved from the oldest periods of deep human history. Ceramics are equally impervious to damage, but complete vessels rarely survive. Some types of metal preserve very well but others corrode quite rapidly. Organic materials – bone, wood, leather, textile, tissue – are least likely to survive. After discard, they are almost immediately acted upon by chemical and biological processes that lead to their decomposition. In each context, it is the interplay between the materials themselves and the relevant depositional conditions, such as the relative acidity of the soil and the presence of water, which determine the level of preservation. There is no general linear relationship between the degree of preservation and temporal depth. Under the right circumstances, even the most fragile organic materials can be preserved for astonishing lengths of time, as is demonstrated by the wooden artefacts from Schöningen (Germany), which were made between 300,000 and 400,000 years ago.36 The complex relationships between levels of preservation and contextual conditions also need to be viewed at larger temporal and spatial scales and considered in the assessment of regional and interregional settlement patterns.37 Again, different temporal processes are intertwined and interact with each other. These aspects can be scaled up and down temporally and spatially in relation to different research questions and aims. The integration of different scales of temporality remains one of the key challenges of archaeological research. Sites like Pompeii or the Tomb of Tutankhamun still need to be spatially and temporally contextualised. Features of the archaeological record in the present need to be translated into past processes, which can then be used to reconstruct past human actions as well as their contexts and changes through time. One of the key features of archaeology is that it enables us to trace historical developments in human opportunities over enormous spans of time. This feature is most pronounced in the archaeology of the Palaeolithic period.38 Here, changes in artefact forms or uses are sometimes followed and analysed over periods of hundreds of thousands of years. However, within this time frame, it is also possible to capture moments, such as a stone-knapping scatter that was produced within minutes and has preserved the outline of the person who once made the lithic scatter.39 The task of archaeological reasoning is to connect these temporal scales in a meaningful way and negotiate between individual events and material palimpsests that can be littered across vast stretches of time and space.40 Naturally, these interpretive approaches cannot be connected to human experiences and human motivations in a straightforward fashion. Consequently, explanations in archaeology remain a challenge in comparison to other historical disciplines. In the absence of written records, material, functional, and universal explanations are usually preferred over historically contingent ones. Archaeology tends to prioritise the collective over the individual.41 However, these tendencies are increasingly subject to critique and reassessment in reflexive ways and with reference to the intellectual history of archaeology itself.

Time in Archaeology: Critical Perspectives Archaeology remains a product of Western modernity. As mentioned, it is fundamentally connected to intellectual, practical, and technological changes birthed in Europe and accelerated 153

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from the 18th century onwards. Time was increasingly smoothed and universalised.42 Chakrabarti has argued that this process can be understood as an increasing naturalisation of time, during which time was given a geometric character independent of local contingencies and conditions.43 These shifts were, however, far from straightforward. Using India as a case study, Chakrabarti shows how they were worked out during the 19th century in complex negotiations between local mythological narratives, geological surveys, archaeological discoveries, and racial and ethnographic research into contemporary populations. The focus became the ordering of objects, people, and events within a single temporal framework. These developments were often pushed forward by engineers, who made observations while they were in charge of building roads, tunnels, or canals. These processes can be understood as an imposition of an abstract and geometric understanding of space onto the landscape and its many contingencies. They are the consequence of a Western worldview and, as such, a part of the European colonial system. They impacted the appropriation, modification, and transformation of landscapes, which in turn changed the perception of the global past. Within the disciplines concerned with the deepest human past, Palaeolithic archaeology and palaeoanthropology, these interdependencies remain largely unexplored. These disciplines largely rely on a naturalised understanding of time in the sense outlined previously. This orientation is understandable because of their enduring connections with the natural sciences (such as geology, biology, and palaeontology). Furthermore, the evidence they rely upon is often dispersed, leaving both human agency and temporal specifics unclear.44 Palaeolithic archaeology and palaeoanthropology still aspire to write human histories replete with human dimensions and perspectives. Being concerned with human origins, they also often make claims concerning universal human traits or human nature. Such an understanding of humanity is temporalised. Essential human characteristics, such as the capacity for symbolic language, are not only constructed with an origin point in deep time; they are imagined as unchanging throughout human history and have, consequently, a different temporality from the many other expressions of human behaviour.45 This essentialist grasp of humanity is also evident in assumptions about the experience and treatment of time by humans in the deep past. Explanatory frameworks for human evolution generally place great emphasis on efficient management of time in resource extraction and use. While such approaches are widespread in related fields outside of archaeology, they reflect modern capitalist values (time is money!), which of course themselves have complex social and intellectual histories, and must be subjected to critical assessment. The examples mentioned herein show that archaeologists approach time on a range of scales – from the very long-term to the momentary microdynamics of human decision-making. One element that continues to be important in all forms of archaeology is the practice of periodisation. Previously, I explored early attempts to understand the development of material culture items through their ordering into specific groups, associations, and periods. The Three Age System and similar approaches were not only fundamental to the development of archaeology as an academic discipline but have also proven to be of exceptional intellectual longevity. The respective terminology of Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age continue to have a grip on academic discussions and the public imagination. However, how realistic are these divisions and how reflective are they of past realities and social formations? The division of the human past into a sequence of periods is probably one of the best-known and well-established aspects of archaeological interpretation. We encounter it in countless figures, academic publications, and educational materials. Periods, however, are curious concepts. Past people and objects are always represented as if they existed in a period. It is rarely considered that it is the objects themselves that construct the respective period in the first place. Periods depend on objects and not the other way around. Archaeological artefacts did not exist within past periods. They established 154

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and defined them.46 This causal relationship is most obvious in the periodisation of the Three Age System, determined by the presence or use of particular materials. These demarcations, however, raise a number of questions. Did the Iron Age begin with the making of the first iron artefact? Did the whole world enter the Iron Age at this moment? Or did only those people enter the Iron Age who knew how to produce iron artefacts? How can we draw a boundary around the Iron Age or any other similar period in time or in space? What happened when people stopped making iron artefacts for a period of time? Did they fall back into a previous age or was the Iron Age paused for a while? While some of these questions sound fanciful, they relate to crucial issues in the treatment of time in archaeology. Periods seem to exist in a separate historical dimension from processes in the past; they are modern impositions and abstractions that do not have a historical reality in the past.47 When they are subjected to detailed analyses, they seem to dissolve amid different rhythms of the experience, disappearance, and reappearance of materials and artefacts, which can often hardly be separated spatially and even less temporally.48 In light of these considerations, it becomes clear that the treatment of time in archaeology depends entirely on decisions that are made in the present. As mentioned, it is often forgotten or not appreciated enough that the archaeological record does not belong to the past. It exists in the present. Its interpretation depends on contemporary definitions, orientations, and distinctions. The treatment of time in archaeology is part of the more extensive politics of the imagination of the past. As such, it is subjected to the social power dynamics of the present, or a ‘chronopolitics’, as it is described by Witmore.49 These processes continue to affect the most fundamental division in archaeology, which is the distinction between history and prehistory.50 Apart from epistemological issues related to this boundary, its political dimensions become particularly apparent in settler-colonial contexts in which this dichotomy is interpreted in hierarchical form and impacts the participation of Indigenous people in public discourses and decision-making processes, as well as their access to land rights.51 In such a progressive understanding of history, the written word, and hence literacy, is prioritised over the authority of material objects.

Conclusion Time is a key dimension of archaeological practice and interpretation. The ability to reconstruct human practices from material remains and the discovery of the depth of the human past remain the defining features of archaeology. The discipline has progressed enormously since the days of Joseph Prestwich and Heinrich Schliemann in the 19th century. The understanding of time in particular has improved considerably with the development of sophisticated radiometric dating and excavation techniques. Time continues to be omnipresent in archaeological reasoning, but the complexities of this dimension in relation to archaeological evidence are routinely underestimated. Often, the seemingly simple question ‘How old is this?’ cannot be answered unambiguously. As I have tried to show, this situation is not a consequence of the limitations of our methods. It is an irreducible feature of the archaeological record itself and a reflection of the multitemporality of the present, the very place where all archaeological evidence exists and all archaeological research is conducted.

Notes 1 Mary Beard, The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008). 2 Nicholas Reeves, The Complete Tutankhamun: The King, the Tomb, the Royal Treasure (London: Thames & Hudson, 1990).

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Martin Porr 3 Jean Clottes, ed., Return to Chauvet Cave: Excavating the Birthplace of Art. The First Full Report (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003). 4 Chris Gosden, “Post-colonial archaeology.” In Ian Hodder, ed., Archaeological Theory Today, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 251–266. 5 Jane Lydon and Uzma Z. Rizvi, eds., Handbook of Postcolonial Archaeology (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2012). 6 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other. How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 7 Clive Gamble, “Archaeology, history and the uttermost ends of the earth – Tasmania, Tierra del Fuego and the cape.” Antiquity 66.252 (1992), 712–720. 8 Alison Wylie, “The integrity of narratives: Deliberative practice, pluralism, and multivocality.” In J. Habu, Clare Fawcett and John M. Matsunaga, eds., Evaluating Multiple Narratives: Beyond Nationalist, Colonialist, and Imperialist Archaeologies (New York: Springer, 2008), 201–212. 9 Pratik Chakrabarti, Inscriptions of Nature. Geology and the Naturalization of Antiquity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020). 10 Steven Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle. Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). 11 Mark J. White and Paul B. Pettitt, “The demonstration of human antiquity: Three rediscovered illustrations from the 1825 and 1846 excavations in Kent’s Cavern (Torquay, England).” Antiquity 83.321 (2009), 758–768. 12 Clive Gamble and Robert Kruszynski, “John Evans, Joseph Prestwich and the stone that shattered the time barrier.” Antiquity 83.320 (2009), 461–475, here 464. 13 Clive Gamble, Making Deep History. Zeal, Perseverance, and the Time Revolution of 1859 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). 14 Quoted in Gamble and Kruszynski, “John Evans,” 465. 15 Gamble and Kruszynski, “John Evans.” 16 Bruce Trigger, A History of Archaeological Thought, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 17 Peter Rowley-Conway, From Genesis to Prehistory: The Archaeological Three Age System and Its Contested Reception in Denmark, Britain, and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 18 Simon Holdaway, “Absolute dating.” In Jane Balme and Alistair Paterson, eds., Archaeology in Practice. A Student Guide to Archaeological Analyses (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 85–117, here 92. 19 Royal Ervin Taylor and Ofer Bar-Yosef, Radiocarbon Dating: An Archaeological Perspective (London: Routledge, 2014). 20 Colin Renfrew, Before Civilization. The Radiocarbon Revolution and Prehistoric Europe (London: Vintage Books, 1976). 21 Simon Holdaway, “Absolute dating.” In Archaeology in Practice, 85–117, here 91–92. 22 Zenobia Jacobs, “Optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating,” In A.S. Gilbert, ed., Encyclopedia of Geoarchaeology (Dordrecht: Springer, 2017), 550–555. 23 M.G.L. Baillie, A Slice through Time: Dendrochronology and Precision Dating (London: Batsford, 1995). 24 Heike C. Alberts and Mark R. Brinda, “Changing approaches to historic preservation in Quedlinburg, Germany.” Urban Affairs Review 40.3 (2005), 390–401. 25 Paula J. Reimer et al., “The IntCal20 Northern Hemisphere radiocarbon age calibration curve (0–55 cal kBP).” Radiocarbon 62.4 (2020), 725–757, doi: 10.1017/RDC.2020.41; Timothy J. Heaton et al., “Marine20 – The marine radiocarbon age calibration curve (0–55,000 cal BP).” Radiocarbon 62.4 (2020), 779–820, doi: 10.1017/RDC.2020.68; Alan G. Hogg et al., “SHCal20 Southern hemisphere calibration, 0–55,000 Years cal BP.” Radiocarbon 62.4 (2020), 759–778, doi: 10.1017/RDC.2020.59. A constantly updated collection of radiocarbon calibration curves can be found here: https://c14.arch. ox.ac.uk/oxcalhelp/hlp_curves.html. 26 Holdaway, “Absolute dating.” 27 Derek W. Hamilton and Anthony M. Krus, “The myths and realities of Bayesian chronological modeling revealed.” American Antiquity 83.2 (2018), 187–203. 28 Holdaway, “Absolute dating.” 29 Beard, The Fires of Vesuvius. 30 Andreas Pastoors and Tilman Lenssen-Erz, eds., Reading Prehistoric Human Tracks. Methods & Material (Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland AG, 2021). 31 David A. Traill, Schliemann of Troy: Treasure and Deceit (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995).

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Digging Into the Human Past 3 2 Cathy Gere, The Tomb of Agamemnon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 33 Elizabeth French, Mycenae: Agamemnon’s Capital, the Site in Its Setting (Charleston, SC: Tempus, 2002). 34 Lewis R. Binford, “Behavioral archaeology and the ‘Pompeii premise’.” Journal of Anthropological Research 37.3 (1981), 195–208; Michael B. Schiffer, “Is there a ‘Pompeii premise’ in archaeology?” Journal of Anthropological Research 41.1 (1985), 18–41. 35 Peter A. Allison and David J. Bottjer, Taphonomy: Process and Bias through Time (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011). 36 Nicholas J. Conard et al., “Excavations at Schöningen and paradigm shifts in human evolution.” Journal of Human Evolution 89 (2015), 1–17, doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhevol.2015.10.003. 37 Bruno David and Julian Thomas, eds., Handbook of Landscape Archaeology (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2008). 38 Clive S. Gamble and Martin Porr, “From empty spaces to lived lives: Exploring the individual in the Palaeolithic.” In C.S. Gamble and M. Porr, eds., The Hominid Individual in Context: Archaeological Investigations of Lower and Middle Palaeolithic Landscapes, Locales and Artefacts (London: Routledge, 2005), 1–12. 39 Matthew Pope and Mark Roberts, “Observations on the relationship between Palaeolithic individuals and artefact scatters at the Middle Pleistocene site of Boxgrove, UK.” In The Hominid Individual, 81–97. 40 Geoff Bailey, “Time perspectives, palimpsests and the archaeology of time.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 26 (2007), 198–223. 41 Gamble and Porr, “From empty spaces to lived lives.” 42 Julian Thomas, Archaeology and Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2004); Alfredo González-Ruibal, ed., Reclaiming Archaeology. Beyond the Tropes of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2013). 43 Chakrabarti, Inscriptions of Nature. 44 Gamble and Porr, “From empty spaces to lived lives.” 45 Martin Porr, “The temporality of humanity and the colonial landscape of the deep human past.” In M. Porr and Jacqueline Maree Matthews, eds., Interrogating Human Origins: Decolonisation and the Deep Human Past (London: Routledge, 2020), 184–207. 46 Gavin Lucas, “Archaeology and contemporaneity.” Archaeological Dialogues 22.1 (2015), 1–15. 47 Gavin Lucas, The Archaeology of Time (London: Routledge, 2005). 48 Catherine Perlès, “Tempi of change: When soloists don’t play together. Arrhythmia in ‘continuous change’.” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 20.2 (2013), 281–299. 49 Christopher Witmore, “Chronopolitics and archaeology.” In Claire Smith, ed., The Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology (New York: Springer, 2014), 1471–1476. 50 Charles E. Orser, Jr., “The politics of periodization.” In Reclaiming Archaeology, 145–154; Daniel Lord Smail and Andrew Shryock, “History and the ‘Pre’.” American Historical Review 118.3 (2013), 709–757. 51 Gustavo Verdesio, “Indigeneity and time. Towards a decolonization of archaeological temporal categories and tools.” In Reclaiming Archaeology, 168–180.

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11 ARCHIVES Preserving the Documentary Past Randolph C. Head

In the Western history of knowledge, archives play the role of time machines in two directions. Archives and the records they contain were created, traditionally, for the purpose of passing knowledge to the future, and they are accessed in the present to engage with the past. As we will see, however, the knowledge that makers intended to pass on may be different from the knowledge historians and other users find today. What does connect past makers and today’s users of archives is the shared assumption that records – above all, written records – reflect the worlds that produce, keep, or organize them. Equally, the way that archives preserve and organize such records for later users reflects archivists’ convictions about how knowledge should travel through time. This chapter explores the processes by which archives have been formed and re-formed over time, and how these processes have shaped and reshaped the way archives have been used over the centuries, including several case studies that explore different kinds of ‘reflection’ between the past, the archives, and the present.

Images of Archives Images of vast hidden archives filled with esoteric knowledge from the past remain alluring, both among scholars and in popular culture. “The secrets here are deep, complex, and strange: they are not for everyone,” the archivist Jocasta Nu tells her heroic clients in the 2017 Marvel comic Darth Vader.1 Her words echo the historian Thomas Richards’ contention that colonial archives represented “the collectively imagined junction of all that was known or knowable, a fantastic representation of an epistemological master pattern.”2 Jocasta Nu further claimed that “if an item does not appear in our records, it doesn’t exist.” Here, a late twentieth-century fictional character repeats the old European legal adage that Quod non est in actis, non est in mundo (“What is not in the records, does not exist in the world”).3 How many of our cultural narratives hinge on finding lost records that can illuminate what is going on in the present? Historians, for their part, have long treated archives as the fundamental way – even as the only way – they should engage with the past. Building on an approach rooted in Leopold von Ranke’s ‘scientific’ historiography in the nineteenth century, the modern Western historical canon posited extensive archival research (often imagined as arduous and dusty) as the guarantor of historians’ knowledge. Only what was in archives, imagined most often as the official archives of states and institutions of power, could make its way into history – or so I learned in graduate school. 158

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Such maximal claims about archives are absurd, suggesting that more careful reflection is needed. Although we may dream of archives that encompass all possible information, these have never existed, nor can we count on dusty parchment to resolve the crises of our present. In fact, all sorts of things exist in the world that have left no trace in archives, and every trained archivist will remind an archive’s users that the surviving documents include a mere sliver of the human experience they touch on.4 Furthermore, while the traces of the past that documents transmit are valuable, their interpretation depends on the expectations and previous knowledge of each reader. Instead of indulging in moviegoers’ fantasies or in the ambitions of postmodernists, who “stretch the concept of ‘the archive’ so as to make it include virtually every ordering system, administrative procedure, and storage device used for wielding power and control over the world,”5 we can look more carefully at how archives have actually been made through the centuries, and at how their features shape the work of the historian and layperson alike in engaging with the past.

Archives and Records Records are a central concept for archives in the Western world and beyond. No one looks at the archive itself. Rather, hard-working administrators, canny litigants, and historians seek the revealing records they hope reside amid the dusty stacks. To understand how archives transmit human actions through time, we must therefore start by considering records. Defining records, however, turns out to be nearly as complicated as defining archives. Geoffrey Yeo recently proposed that records are persistent representations of activities, created by participants or observers.6 ‘Representations’ captures our sense that records, as a particular genre within the larger category of texts, are about something else, which gives them their significance.7 ‘Of activities’ conveys a key premise of modern Western archival science and its medieval roots: namely that the records that belong in archives are those that transmit consequential human actions ad perpetuam memoriam, “for perpetual remembrance,” as medieval authors put it. Finally, records’ value is enhanced when they are created by those who participated in or observed the actions in question, which lends them authenticity. These criteria help distinguish records worthy of archiving from other kinds of texts.8 Many records are ephemeral, and thus not (in traditional terms) archivable. A shopping list represents the action of planning a shopping trip (and thus inherently refers to its future), but will generally be discarded once the shopping is done. The prototypical archival records for medieval Europe and beyond, however, such as charters and contracts, were made to be kept. Traditional Western archives specialized in preserving records intended for future reference, and thus were understood as having value in some imagined future. Intentional creation and assumed forensic value became prototypical features of the records kept in archives – although, as we will see, neither intention nor value are stable through time, and actual archives contain all sorts of material that do not meet these expectations. Several key characteristics of archives, viewed as repositories of valued records, can help us understand how they shape the transmission of their content. First, the creation of archives inherently involves a material dimension: whether records are inscribed on clay tablets, inked on parchment, or recorded in digital bits, they require material substrates, which means that gathering them in an archive involves creating a system of material support, usually in dedicated spaces. Second, the creation and preservation of an archive depends on human actors and human institutions. Once created, a repository of records may outlive the persons and institutions that created it, but it will be accessible to later users only if some institution continues to sustain it. The European tradition also puts great weight on institutional continuity as a way 159

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to authenticate records from the past, specifically by guaranteeing their safe and (supposedly) unchanged transmission through time. Finally, the establishment of order within archives has played a key role in archival thinking since at least the seventeenth century, when Baldessare Bonifacio wrote, “We would rightly say that the soul of archives, too, is nothing else than order.”9 Only through the establishment of the right order, at least in classical archival theory, does a pile of papers become an archive – though this order may subsequently change, sometimes radically, as the world outside the archive changes. An archive, then, could be defined from the perspective of its creation as an ordered, intentional accumulation of records in a material framework, intended for future use, and sustained by a person or institution. Traditional archival science further insisted that true archives result from a records creator carrying out its business, and should remain in the arrangement the creator established (known as provenance), although most users pay less attention to this criterion of authenticity than archivists do.10 To explore the boundaries of what might rightly be considered an archive, it may help to imagine accumulations of documents that match some but not all of these criteria. For example, a pile of printed business reports, stacked up day by day but then deposited in a dumpster, is an ordered accumulation of records, but is not intended for future use, as its location in a dumpster reveals. But if the dumpster is not emptied – perhaps an earthquake buries it – and the material is recovered later, the records could become archival through cataloguing and preservation. This suggests that the value that makes documents archival depends as much on how they enter archives as on the intentions of their creators. What was not initially archival can become archival, and what was once archived can be appraised as worthless and discarded. The history of archives shows that such changes happen repeatedly, along with changes in ordering and arrangement. No archive is a fixed, closed, or unchanging entity over the long run. Another fascinating case exhibiting the limits of the archival is the genizah repositories, the most famous of which was the Cairo genizah.11 A genizah is a Jewish institution in which worn-out Hebrew-language papers, particularly on religious themes, are placed for safe storage until they can be respectfully buried. Jewish law requires such treatment because any document might contain shemot, names of the divine, and therefore require respectful disposal. The genizah in Cairo accumulated documents from the ninth to the nineteenth century in a closed room of the Ben Ezar Synagogue, into which the synagogue’s staff placed worn records of all sorts over the centuries. While some genizah records were ultimately interred, the genizah in Cairo accumulated for centuries until local and European scholars began exploring it in the nineteenth century. A large part was eventually purchased and moved to Cambridge University in England and to other Western institutions. Such a genizah does not seem to qualify as an archive, nor the material within it as records: their purpose was not to represent actions for future use, nor did the genizah have any intentional order, since material was simply thrown in willy-nilly. Nevertheless, the Cairo genizah has now become a priceless archive for understanding life in the medieval Mediterranean. Did its constituent papers become records – or become records again – once they were preserved, collated, and catalogued as historical documents in Cambridge?12 When considering how a record allows us to access the past, we must separate each record’s moment of creation, the moment (or moments) when it entered or left an archival context, and the moments when it is accessed in the present. Each of these moments changes how we interpret each record in its archival context.

Engaging With Archives: From Archivage to Activation Two reciprocal processes, identified by archival theorists over the past generation, can help structure our analysis of the shifting shape of archives as they evolve. The first, known as archivage, 160

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comprises the steps by which a specific record becomes a knowable part of an archive, including record production, accession to an archival corpus, arrangement, description, and preservation.13 The second process is activation, in which a record from an archive becomes accessible to a particular user. Activation depends on the interests of that user and equally on the resources that archive managers have in the form of inventories, indexes, or other finding aids – and on the willingness of the archive manager to provide access, which is far from certain. Most textual and material traces of the past never experience either archivage or activation. Archivage and activation both shape and limit what counts as an archive. Archivage implies, among other things, that archives, like records, are intentional products through which actors seek to pass on specific knowledge from their present to possible futures. Understanding the futures they imagined provides one critical context for the records we find in an archive. Activation, for its part, implies that the meaning of any archival record (including the meaning that is lost if a record is silenced) depends on how users receive the material: the present is an essential context for archival engagement with the past. In between moments of entry and access, other ongoing processes shape archives internally. Canonical archival theory identifies appraisal, arrangement, description, and preservation as the key internal aspects of archival management. Let us consider these features individually. Appraisal describes the archival processes during which some records that reach the door of an archive do not experience archivage but are instead discarded based on an archivist’s conclusion that they lack archival value. Appraisal is only one form of silencing the past, along with records that are not created in the first place, those that are destroyed before reaching an archivist, and those that are archived but then hidden (actively, to prevent their dissemination, or passively, by failure to include them in archival finding aids).14 Arrangement and description, as the words suggest, cover the organization of material and the creation of tools for finding specific documents. Preservation seeks to prevent losses resulting from entropy – historically, through fire, water, pests, and theft, and more recently through data loss or technological obsolescence of hardware or software – but may also change records in the process. All these processes are profoundly affected by the cultural assumptions and intentions of those carrying them out. Engaging with the past through archives, in short, means confronting layered and complex human products created by many actors throughout the lifespan of the records involved. The archives discussed in the rest of this chapter, which took shape in Europe beginning in the Middle Ages, evolved continuously; they are moving targets, even though – seemingly paradoxically – the material objects that they contain, the charters and accounts and letters, have remained remarkably stable. As archives’ political and social meaning changed, moreover, so did the concepts and theories that rulers, secretaries, and later professional archivists used to create, manage, and describe them. Archival time machines depend, at one end, on the forward-looking processes that created them, and, on the other, on the backward-looking users in the present. In between, ongoing cycles of internal transformation further enable, but also limit, archives’ capacity to connect the past to the future. One red thread of continuity among all this instability is that archives in the European tradition had their origins and established their key practices in the service of people possessing power and authority, who wanted to secure these possessions into the future. This orientation has left a deep mark on the collections that survive from earlier eras, which are full of silences, but also on the concepts and vocabulary that archival science worked with until very recently.

Working in Archives: Archival Models in Political Worlds The case studies that follow, resting on research I have conducted over the years in Switzerland, illustrate some of the listed points. They consider how archives come to be, how they have been 161

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reshaped (often radically) over generations, and how the various archival theories that prevailed from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century related to the way users engaged with various pasts of interest to them.15 Looking at one major branch of archive formation in Zurich after the late Middle Ages, namely the archivage of charters and especially of administrative records, my first case study will introduce two key archival terms, pertinence and provenance, while also showing how the preservation of records reflected the late medieval European political economy and the epistemology of political knowledge upon which it rested. A second case study will follow a different genre of documents, namely the letters written by religious reformers in Zurich during the Protestant Reformation of the early sixteenth century. By tracing the pathways of archivage, arrangement, and activation of these records, the dynamic nature of archival materials as their historical context changes will appear more concretely. Throughout the history of European archives, changes in the political architecture of power in Europe found reflection in both the transformation of archival practices and the expression of new archival theories. In earlier periods, an intimate connection between archives and the architecture of power (political or ecclesiastical) stood in the forefront. The fragmented, complex political landscape of late medieval Europe found reflection in a rich landscape of archives, in which every actor claiming legitimate authority – from emperors and kings to towns and monasteries – sought to bolster their claims with boxes of charters that represented the acts of past rulers in their favor. Archives were understood as treasuries, and were often physically connected to treasuries containing coin, jewels, or relics. The rise of European nation-states reoriented the old archives of privilege, connecting them explicitly to national states and their history, as seen in the establishment of many European ‘national archives’ in the nineteenth century. The vast expansion of administrative bureaucracies encouraged new realms of record-keeping oriented to the political economy of fiscal-military states which sought to tax, conscript, and control their populations. These changes were accompanied by a revolution in archival theory that viewed stored records as tools for the everyday exercise of power. Such records were to be preserved and organized in relation to the state that created them, under the monikers of provenance and respect des fonds. The ongoing development of bureaucratic states in the twentieth century further elevated records management over the custodial and probative priorities that had prevailed in earlier archives, and also separated the disciplines of archival science and historiography.16 In the twenty-first century, revolutions in both information technology and cultural expectations uprooted the nineteenth-century archival canon, initiating profound new developments in archival theory and practice that are still unfolding today. Previously intimate connections between state institutions and archive formation have ruptured in the face of multiple modes of archivage enabled by new digital technologies. Simultaneously, the demands for recognition and justice from marginalized communities silenced in or excluded from traditional European-style archives have made the need for new theories manifest, while also widening the scope of older archives as they recover evidence about the subaltern, the silenced, and the oppressed among the testimonies of the powerful and privileged.17 Systemic analysis of record-keeping in other cultures and traditions, meanwhile, suggests that many of the characteristics of Western archives are profoundly contingent, reflecting trajectories of law, political economy and epistemology that are anything but universal. The word ‘archive’ itself carries a package of assumptions resting on Roman law and national states that do not necessarily apply outside of European traditions. The purpose of the archive stories that follow is twofold: to illuminate the pathways that shaped archives in the European tradition, culminating in the emergence of both formal archival institutions and systematic archival theory in Europe over the course of the nineteenth century; and to highlight how our use of those archives today continues to be shaped by those pathways and their traces in the surviving record. 162

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What Are Records About?: The Tension Between Pertinence and Provenance Our first case deals with a prototypical European public archive, namely the central chancellery archive of the city-state of Zurich from the fifteenth to nineteenth century. The processes of archivage that brought material into this repository were straightforward: the city council and chancellor created many records themselves and received others from various actors inside and outside the city. In addition to a small treasury of foundational charters, records in book form began to accumulate in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, recording the actions of the council. The flow of heterogeneous paper documents accelerated rapidly after 1500. The way the material was arranged and (significantly) rearranged across this long period is highly revealing, since it reflects how this typical European polity created, gathered, and arranged its records, which rested on the political and cultural assumptions of those involved. Through the eighteenth century, only city officials had access to the archive and could activate records from its contents. The opening of this archive to more users in the nineteenth century happened in synchrony with another major round of rearrangement. The following discussion will focus on the administrative records in the city’s archive and how their arrangement reflected a changing political world. As the flow of papers produced or received by the city’s chancellery expanded rapidly around 1500, a key question for the secretaries charged with keeping such papers was where to put new material. The entry of new records into books, such as the registers of city council decisions, generally happened in chronological order. Loose papers required more thought since they varied widely in both genre and content, ranging from formal charters regulating ownership and privileges to administrative documents such as reports, agreements, instructions, and so forth. The documents valued within this system involved authority, property, and orthodoxy; information about people outside the city’s political elite appears only indirectly or is absent altogether, silenced as documents were created and never entering the city’s archives. Starting in the sixteenth century, the city’s secretaries gathered many documents together in bundles or boxes according to the domain or possession with which the papers were connected – what archivists call “according to pertinence”. This choice rested on the assumption that these records were about these domains and that their arrangement should reflect the place of each domain within the larger political system, which Swiss political actors understood as a hierarchical world in which authority moved downwards through grants of privilege. A charter granting the city privileges over a particular village was about that village, just as negotiations with a foreign ruler, say the king of France, were about the French crown – and both villages and crowns had their place in the larger system under the reign of the Holy Roman Emperors. Zurich’s archive thus mirrored the political structures of privilege and territorial dominion within which Zurich’s state operated.18 In Zurich, this approach to diplomatic and administrative documents was highly developed by the mid-seventeenth century, when city secretary Johann Heinrich Waser undertook a systematic reorganization of the city’s paperwork across multiple offices and their repositories. To systematize document arrangement, he created a series of 485 boxes that corresponded to the various actors and places about which the city’s rulers needed knowledge. A  first series of boxes provided spaces for the political hierarchy of Europe as Waser understood it, starting at the top: the first box contained documents from or about the Holy Roman Emperor, the highest worldly authority for the city, followed by boxes for European kings, nobles, and other city-states like Zurich. Another series had boxes for each of the rural territories that Zurich ruled over as lords, while a third series had boxes for each of the city’s fellow cantons in the 163

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Swiss Confederation. In short, Waser and his predecessors assumed that their archive and the records it contained corresponded to and reflected the world outside the archive, and did their best to mirror that world in the arrangement of their records and in the inventories they created to access those records. While this assumption might seem self-evident, both internal developments in European archives as well as later archival theory bring it into question. An initial problem in practice was that many documents were about more than one thing. As Waser put it, “In many cases, a single document contains various points about diverse matters . . . for example, when something pertains to the city of Mulhouse and to the Valtellina, no one interested in the latter matter would look under the heading for Mulhouse.”19 Simply placing documents into boxes corresponding to territorial referents did not make them all accessible in the future. A second issue was that the accumulation of documents was often driven by conflicts with other members of the Swiss Confederation or with foreign powers. Over the course of such conflicts, dossiers took shape that might contain diverse records (often as copies) relating to multiple places. The course of the dispute could be followed in such a dossier, but if it were broken up according to the pertinence of the individual papers, the events would be obscured. This last issue points towards a second way of thinking about records and the world, one with roots just as old as pertinence. According to this alternate view, which later came to be known as provenance, what documents and archives reflected was not the world outside the chancellery but the actions of rulers and their agents, such as scribes and secretaries, in relation to that world. A single trial before a judge might refer to multiple people and places in the world, but the record of the trial ultimately represented the actions of the judge, parties, and witnesses, rather than representing those people and places for their own sake. Such an ensemble of records (a fonds in French, leading to the term respect des fonds) should therefore stay together in archival space, so that future readers could recover the actions of the state that had created the records involved. Long before it was enshrined in nineteenth-century archival theory, arrangement by provenance could emerge, alongside pertinence, out of everyday practice. In Zurich, the multiplication of separate offices to handle different matters meant that most records were grouped according to the office that created and preserved them, even if pertinence guided their internal arrangement. As European politics moved towards a system of bureaucratic sovereign states, moreover, the political world that archivists still sought to mirror was changing. Archivists (very slowly) began replacing the tapestry of hierarchy and privilege mirrored in older archives and their inventories, and increasingly privileged state action as the most important phenomena that should be visible in the arrangement of their records and archives. For example, in a reorganization of the city archive in Luzern in 1698, a generation after Waser’s work in Zurich, Johann Kaspar Balthasar organized the future retention of the city’s papers into categories for commerce, war, religion, and civil administration, rather than around domains and lordships. The material thus reflected actions the city could take, while the world outside the city administration remained important. The nineteenth-century triumph of provenance as the only correct way to arrange political archives was the end point of this long transition, setting archival science on a new path. Later developments in the Zurich archive help us see the tension between the two approaches of pertinence and provenance. Early in the nineteenth century, the city administration decided to create a historical archive to contain its earlier records and moved a great deal of paper out of the city secretaries’ offices into the custody of an archivist, Gerold Meyer von Knonau.20 Meyer von Knonau and his successor Johannes Strickler abandoned territories secured by privileges as the defining feature of their archival architecture, though they struggled to find a better way 164

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to arrange material. Confronted with hundreds of boxes divided by specific domain or topic and filled with bundled dossiers that had been generated by specific conflicts, they gathered vast masses of paper under a new, smaller set of categories, some very general and others quite specific, while systematically separating many previously existing bundles and dossiers. No matter the origin of the documents, each new grouping was organized chronologically.21 If a dossier about a border dispute that took place in the 1700s contained a copy of a medieval charter from 1450, the copy was filed under the year 1450, not under 1700. Thus, all of the contextual connections that had previously existed in the arrangement of documents into groups were erased, significantly changing the meanings that readers could derive from the documents involved. Meyer von Knonau’s decisions, which destroyed prior order, provide a textbook example of why the new theories emerging in the nineteenth century demanded that material stay in the order that state offices had established while accumulating them. After all, an archive user encountering the 1450 charter copy in its original dossier from 1700 would know why it had been copied, and could see how it had been used in 1700. When filed chronologically, however, this connection was lost, while no new information about the charter’s original context of 1450 was added. Many European political archives experienced similar struggles over reorganization in this period. As older material came to be seen as evidence about national history rather than as tools for managing subjects and domains, enormous shifts in organization transformed the archival landscape, a process that continued well into the twentieth century.

Changing Arrangements, Changing Histories: Reformation Letters in Zurich Our second case examines the letters written by various individuals during the Zurich Reformation, from its earliest beginnings around 1519 until the late sixteenth century. The activists who launched the Reformation movement corresponded frequently with magistrates, lay supporters, and the general public as well as one another, making the surviving letters a vital source for understanding how the Reformation emerged and developed over time.22 The initial archivage of these letters was heterogeneous and uneven, however. Heinrich Bullinger (1504–1574) in Zurich, for example, kept copies of his outgoing letters and energetically requested letters back from correspondents or their heirs later on.23 Other letters remained in the hands of individual recipients or their heirs, and some migrated into the collections of the new Protestant churches or of the domains and cities that supported them around Europe. Letters were also edited and printed for wider audiences as part of early Reformation polemics. Some early letters between Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531), the first leader of the Swiss Reformed Church, and the Basel-based reformer Johannes Oecolampadius (1482–1531) appeared in print in 1536, serving as weapons in the heated theological and political debates of the Reformation’s first generation.24 A key characteristic of letters when they were written was their immediacy. Each letter reflected the current situation as its author understood it and the author’s expectations about the intended recipient. By the late sixteenth century, though, large collections of letters became accessible to readers far removed from the original moment of composition and contention. Still later, readers had to seek out the letters in archives, or they could read them in print in a volume of correspondence dedicated to a single figure such as Zwingli or Bullinger. Today, the letters may be found in databases and used to track correspondence networks. The passage of time and the way they have been collected has transformed these letters, born out of passionate struggles, into sources that have been eagerly collected as components of diverse archives. 165

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A first effort to catalog systematically the Zurich Reformers’ letters was undertaken in the early seventeenth century by the head of the Zurich church, Johann Jakob Breitinger, starting after 1614.25 This initial archivage and its arrangement reveals Breitinger’s perspective on what these letters meant to him, which was already quite different from the perspective of the letters’ authors. Breitinger ordered the creation of registers which list letters by many authors about a wide range of subjects, arranged by date alone, not by author or subject. Listing the letters chronologically provided an easy method to arrange them, to be sure, but also revealed how the church leadership saw these letters in relation to the Reformation as a whole. For them, the entire corpus of letters provided testimony about a single ongoing event, “the Reformation,” unfolding from the sixteenth century without interruption into the cataloguer’s present. If these registers had been organized around a few leading figures, like modern published editions, in contrast, these figures, rather than a broader religious movement, would have become the first point of reference for readers. As the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries unfolded, other early modern collections by church historians committed to the evolving Reformation gathered and archived more letters, building on the work commenced by Breitinger and adding new search tools. Increasingly, their ordering and indexing did concentrate on certain figures, thus contributing to an emerging understanding of the Reformation movement as the work of a few heroic leaders.26 During the nineteenth century, profound changes in political culture and intellectual life affected both the preservation of Reformation records and the way these records were used to write history. Of particular importance was the transformation of the institutions that held most of the documents surviving from the Zurich Reformation. As with the city’s administrative records, the 1830s represented a critical turning point. Among the first acquisitions that Meyer von Knonau made for the city’s historical archive were the records of the Zurich church, including the large collections of Reformation letters it contained. Moving the letters to a public archive had significant effects on who could gain access to which letters, and on how the letters were arranged and cataloged, thus creating new paths for making Reformation history known. The most important new practice involved compiling, transcribing, and publishing historical sources, including letters, in book form for new audiences of historians and interested laypeople. Developments in Switzerland mirrored approaches that were becoming predominant around Europe. Starting in the late eighteenth century, both Protestant states and book buyers supported the production of large letter collections dedicated to a single Reformer, with Martin Luther playing a model role. Such collections typically included the letters the individual at its center had either sent or received.27 Finding the letters for these volumes required access to multiple archives across Europe, which only became possible with the emergence of public regional and central archives all around Europe after the Revolutionary period. Whatever their scope, such editions heightened the perceived importance of single actors even more than the earlier archives. The production of large editions of documents and letters in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries took place in parallel with changes in how the history of that Reformation was written. In place of a confessional history of redemption, new approaches emerged. For example, a narrative biography of Zwingli’s life in politics and the church appeared in 1890, in parallel with the beginning of the systematic publication of his works and letters. The impact of published letters is even more evident in the emergence of Heinrich Bullinger as a subject of scholarly research in the 1970s, once Bullinger’s complete correspondence began appearing in print after 1973. By reading Bullinger’s letters in one convenient volume in chronological order, a scholar could approach the entire Reformation through Bullinger’s interactions with other (mostly 166

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educated, male, and evangelical) letter writers – something that previously required consulting manuscripts located in archives across the continent. The sheer extent and richness of Bullinger’s correspondence, with over 14,000 surviving letters, also makes it useful for a wide variety of questions beyond the Reformation. For example, when letters to Bullinger from Graubünden, the mountainous canton in southeastern Switzerland, were published in the early twentieth century, the resulting volume became a key source for Graubünden’s political and social history, even though Bullinger himself never visited the region.28 Archivage through publication meant that editors’ decisions shaped historical thinking. In the published Bullinger correspondence, the editors included letters but not the accompanying news reports and other attachments, now known as Zeitungen, which still lie next to many letters in the archives. Leaving the news out of the published volumes changes the context of the letters, since readers who rely on the published letters miss the rich information found in news reports, which can shed light on a wide variety of historical questions.29 Today, digital asset management tools have again transformed the context in which one reads each reformer’s letter, even as digital images change the representation of letters’ material form. Applying “big data” tools to digitized letters or transcriptions can reveal patterns among letters and authors in ways that manual techniques cannot.30 Such technologies offer truly new insights into the networks of correspondence and communication in which the Zurich reformers participated – but equally, they frame the letters in ways that are fundamentally different both from the ways their authors and initial recipients read them, and also from the ways that four centuries of evolving research has regarded them. As is the case for printed editions, moreover, digitization protocols have favored letters and printed books over the vast amount of other source material about the Zurich Reformation, most of which remains unprinted and offline. It is thus not surprising that individual actors such as Zwingli and Bullinger, whose letters and writings have been disseminated through multiple channels, are still at the center of scholarship and public history about the Zurich Reformation.

From Archivage to Pluralization: New Theories, Technologies, and User Communities The two examples discussed here show that while archivage, arrangement, and activation remain essential for analyzing archives’ ability to connect diverse pasts to the present, each of these processes can take place repeatedly over the life of records and the archives that contain them, rather than representing one-time events. Ongoing work by archival theorists on the ‘records continuum’ seeks to capture this reality, in contrast to traditional archival theory with its concentration on provenance, custody, and legal authenticity. Historians, however, have not yet taken up this approach.31 Efforts to transcend traditional archival theory have also coincided with and are closely connected to two other crucial developments in the understanding of archives in our society, which I will outline now. The first development is the digital revolution, which fundamentally changes how archives transmit ordered records through time. Although the concepts of archivage, order, and activation, as well as the associated processes of salience and silencing, remain relevant for digital archives, digital media have wide-ranging consequences for archival practice. The second shift is the heightened engagement of knowledge communities long excluded from the traditional Western conception of archives as authorized sites for state-oriented knowledge, who are now demanding access to archives and forcing archivists to rethink what archives are and what they do.32 In our pluralist present, these communities and their archival advocates are calling for new modes of archiving that serve not just power centers, but a full range of social actors, including 167

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those previously marginalized and oppressed. Rethinking archives in order to gain access to a broader range of the knowledge they potentially contain has also affected the work of the most recent generation of historians, who have learned to look for silences and read archival material ‘against the grain.’33 The scope of counter-hegemonic archiving is much broader than this, though, and is taking shape today both through activism from those previously silenced and through the thinking of committed archival scientists. In the words of Joanne Evans, Sue McKemmish, and Greg Rolan, archive makers and users need to “address the systemic failure of extant archiving and recordkeeping infrastructures to meet individual and community identity, memory, and accountability requirements.”34 The structural and systemic features that these authors point out exist at both ends of the transtemporal connection that archives provide. We must consider the intentions and actions of archive creators as they make and include records (or not) in archives through the processes of archivage. Social and cultural assumptions about value continually shape what becomes and stays archival. As we have seen, archives are dynamic spaces whose architecture is subject to repeated transformations, each of which creates new impositions of value in parallel with new exclusions or silencings. In reassessing the value of Zurich’s administrative records after the 1830s, for example, Meyer von Knonau and his successors generated a new layer of systemic order that foregrounded some knowledge while silencing other aspects of the city’s collection. This work, however, took place in a collection that had already been shaped by the assumptions of prior archivists in prior centuries. By separating dossiers and arranging documents chronologically within broad pertinences, Meyer von Knonau’s arrangements and inventories implied that Zurich’s past governance had consisted of continuous administration, unlike earlier arrangements that had placed Zurich within a stable hierarchical order of powers and highlighted the conflicts, each with its own bundle of records, that had taken place within that framework. Equally, the process of archival activation in the present is critical for addressing systemic omissions in how archives represent diverse users and their communities. To become valuable for such users, archives as they exist today need to respond to a “pluralism of evidentiary texts (records in multiple forms and cultural contexts), memory-keeping practices and institutions, bureaucratic and personal motivations, community perspectives and needs, and cultural and legal constructs.”35 On first thought, it may seem that European archives from the more distant past, in which dominant political and cultural assumptions led to highly selective preservation of records oriented to the needs and cultural premises of each era’s power elites, cannot rise to the demands of such pluralism. Recent efforts to rethink historical questions, however, show that understanding past trajectories of archivage and arrangement, with their practices of inclusion and exclusion, of salience and silencing, can help recuperate material representing values that the original archive makers did not share. The Cairo genizah documents discussed above turned out to contain abundant material about labor contracts, housing, and other issues irrelevant to those who deposited papers into the sealed room in Cairo centuries ago. Similarly, administrative records about Zurich’s subject territories can provide considerable material about the region’s marginalized Anabaptist community, even though older filing practices and finding aids did nothing to make this material visible.36 Archival material comes to us in the present structured by multiple layers of past assumptions about value, truth, and memorability, but today’s users can transcend those assumptions by attending to the archive’s own history, revaluing what is present while understanding more clearly what was never included, and what has been actively or passively silenced over the centuries. The relentless course of documentary entropy means that no methodology can recover what was never archived and what has decayed or has been removed or destroyed, to be sure. Equally, the relentless expansion of record production over the past eight centuries, which has escalated 168

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once again with the onset of the digital age, means that the exclusion and silencing of many potential archival records is inevitable moving forward, always shaped by our own priorities and assessments of value. Archives, as bridges between the past and present, are always shaped both by the past’s imagination of its future and the present’s projection into the past. They can never achieve Thomas Richards’ “junction of all that was known or knowable,” yet they remain the most comprehensive time machine we have for understanding ourselves by engaging with our mutable pasts.

Notes 1 https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Jedi_Archives, accessed July 6, 2022. 2 Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Phantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993), 11, cited in Pieter Huistra et al., “Historians in the archive: An introduction.” History of the Human Sciences 26.4 (2013), 4. See also Michele Caswell and Ann Gilliland, “Records and their imaginaries: Imagining the impossible, making possible the imagined.” Archival Science 16.1 (2016), 53–75. 3 The phrase is a late medieval legal commonplace or brocard, but its origin is obscure. The attribution to Cicero, Epistulae ad familiares, II, 15, 5, by Kudla and others does not persuade me, and it did not appear in text searches I made in early modern editions of High Medieval authorities such as Gratian and Baldus, to which it is also attributed. See Hubertus Kudla, Lexicon der lateinischen Zitate (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2016), No. 10. Thanks to Michele Salzman and Anthony Grafton for their suggestions. 4 Verne Harris, “The archival sliver: Power, memory and archives in South Africa.” Archival Science 2.1 (2002), 63–86. 5 Huistra et al., “Historians in the archive,” 4. 6 Geoffrey Yeo, “Concepts of record (I): Evidence, information and persistent representations.” American Archivist 70.2 (2007), 315–343, here 342. It should be noted that the English noun “record” does not map well onto other European languages, suggesting just how fragile such efforts at definition are. 7 Whether records operate as documentary acts, in parallel with the speech acts explored by John Austin, is analyzed by Geoffrey Yeo in Records, Information, Data: Exploring the Role of Record-Keeping in an Information Culture (London: Facet, 2018), Ch. 6. 8 Yeo’s definition reaches back to the medieval charter, the quintessential genre for recording authorized acts by a person of power. The importance of action for record-keeping is reflected in the modern legal terminology that calls certain records “deeds” or “acts.” 9 Balthasar Bonifacius, ed. and trans. Lester Born, “Baldessare Bonifacio and his essay De Archivis.” American Archivist 4.4 (1941), 221–237, here 235. 10 Compare the definition on the homepage of the International Council on Archives: Archives are the documentary by-product of human activity retained for their long-term value. They are contemporary records created by individuals and organisations as they go about their business and therefore provide a direct window on past events. They can come in a wide range of formats including written, photographic, moving image, sound, digital and analogue. Archives are held by public and private institutions and individuals around the world. www.ica.org/en/what-archive, accessed September 1, 2021. 11 Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (New York: Shocken, 2011). 12 Care is needed in thinking about whose intentions gave meaning to the Cairo genizah over time. It was never an ‘abandoned heap of trash’ until ‘rescued’ by the intervention of French, German, and English scholars who ‘recovered’ it. Such a view would reproduce the colonial assumptions of British administrators and European Egyptologists. 13 I use the French term archivage, which emerged from French archival practice. Eric Ketelaar suggested “archivalisation” as a more comprehensive version of the same process in “Archivalisation and archiving.” Archives and Manuscripts 27 (1999), 54–61, and explored terminology further in “Tacit narratives: The meanings of archives.” Archival Science 1 (2001), 131–141. Accession, appraisal, arrangement, description, and preservation are key terms in contemporary archival science. For an introduction, see e.g., Laura A. Millar, Archives: Principles and Practices, 2nd edition (Chicago: ALA Neal-Schuman, 2017). For a critical approach, Terry Eastwood and Heather MacNeil, eds., Currents of Archival Thinking, 2nd edition (Santa Barbara: Libraries Unlimited, 2017).

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Randolph C. Head 14 Archival silencing of various kinds is explored in Michel-Rolf Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). 15 More on the first case in my own Making Archives in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), esp. Ch. 10; on the second in my “Archival practices and the interpretation of the Zurich Reformation, 1519–2019.” In Arlene Albisser and Peter Opitz, eds., Die Zürcher Reformation in Europa (Zurich: TVZ Verlag, 2021), 385–403. General information from Paul Schweizer, “Geschichte des Zürcher Staatsarchivs.” Neujahrsblatt zum Besten des Waisenhauses in Zürich 116 (1894), 2–40. 16 John Ridener, From Polders to Postmodernism: A Concise History of Archival Theory (Duluth: Litwin, 2009). Thinking outside of Eurocentric approaches, see Heather Ferguson, “Unseating ‘state’ and ‘archive’: Mobility and manipulation in past environments and present praxis.” Itinerario 44.3 (2021), 591–608. 17 A paradigmatic study is Jeanette Bastian, Owning Memory: How a Caribbean Community Lost Its Archives and Found Its History (Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2003). 18 Mirroring between political worlds, documents, and inventories was dubbed ideal-topographical by Peter Rück, “Die Ordnung der herzöglich savoyischen archive under Amadeus VIII.” Archivalische Zeitschrift 67 (1971), 11–101. 19 Staatsarchiv Zürich, Kataloge 11, fol. [vi]. 20 Schweizer, “Geschichte.” Meyer von Knonau published his plan, Plan des Zürcherischen Staatsarchivs, Entworfen in 1839 (Zurich: Orell, Füssli und Comp., n.d.). 21 Staatsarchiv Zürich A 260 – A 353, as still catalogued today. Some large dossiers or place-oriented series survived this reorganization but were rearranged chronologically; many old boxes and dossiers were dismembered. 22 Mark Greengrass, “An ‘epistolary reformation.’ The role and significance of letters in the first century of the Protestant Reformation.” In Ulinka Rublack, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the Protestant Reformations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 431–458. 23 Traugott Schiess, “Der Briefwechsel Heinrich Bullingers.” Zwingliana 5 (1933), 396–408; Fritz Büsser, “Die Überlieferung von Heinrich Bullingers Briefwechsel.” In Ulrich Gabler und Endre Zsindely, eds., Heinrich Bullinger. Briefwechsel, Vol. 1: Briefe der Jahre 1524–1531 (Zürich: TVZ Verlag, 1973), 7–22. 24 Ioannis Oecolampadii et Huldrichi Zvingli Epistolarum Libri Quatuor . . . (Basel: n.p., 1536). 25 Register at Staatsarchiv Zürich KAT 245. 26 Johann Heinrich Hottinger, a Zurich professor, gathered original letters, drafts, and copies in the Thesaurus Hottingeriana. A century later, Johann Jakob Simmler, a pastor and officer of the Zurich grammar school, created a vast collection of copied records. Fritz Büsser, “Johann Heinrich Hottinger und der ‘Thesaurus Hottingeranus’.” Zwingliana 22 (1985), 85–108; Ernst Gagliardi and Ludwig Forrer, eds., Katalog der Handschriften der Zentralbibliothek Zürich, Vol. 2: Neuere Handschriften Seit 1500 (Zürich: Berichthaus, 1982), Cols. 515–530; for the Simmler-Sammlung, see Ibid., Cols. 1255–1276. 27 The Bullinger letters collected in Zürich consist of over 10,000 incoming letters, but only 2,000 letters that Bullinger sent out. Alexandra Kess, “Heinrich Bullinger’s correspondence: A brief insight into a long story.” In Erika Rummel and Milton Kooistra, eds., Reformation Sources: The Letters of Wolfgang Capito and His Fellow Reformers in Alsace and Switzerland (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2007), 131–145. 28 Traugott Schiess, ed., Bullingers Korrespondenz mit den Graubündnern (Basel: Verlag der Basler Buch- und Antiquariats handlung, 1904–1906), 3 vols. 29 Kess, “Heinrich Bullinger’s correspondence,” 136–138. 30 A project at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Lehrstuhl für Systems Design, applies network analysis to the letters of Bullinger and others, www.sg.ethz.ch/team/people/rroller/, accessed November 2020. 31 Frank Upward, “The records continuum.” In Sue McKemmish et al., eds., Archives: Recordkeeping in Society (Wagga Wagga, NSW: Center for Information Studies, Charles Sturt University, 2005), 197–222. 32 See the special issue of Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies on “Critical Archival Studies” edited by Michelle Caswell, Ricardo Punzalan, and T-Kay Sangwand, doi: 10.24242/jclis.v1i2.50. 33 Ann Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 34 Joanne Evans, Sue McKemmish, and Greg Rolan, “Critical approaches to archiving and recordkeeping in the continuum.” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 1, 2 (2017), doi: 10.24242/jclis. v1i2.35 (no pagination). 35 Ibid. 36 See David Y. Neufeld, “Narrating Anabaptist conversion in early modern Switzerland.” Mennonite Quarterly Review 94.4 (2021), 459–494.

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PART THREE

The Past, Present, and Natural History

12 IMAGINING EARTH TIME Hilairy Hartnett

Our Earth is old by any standard: 4.543 billion years, give or take a few million years.1 We ‘know’ that age to within +/-50 million years. These numbers are patently ridiculous: 4,543,000,000 ± 50,000,000 years! Geologists have an unfair advantage in conversations about this deep time – as a discipline we are trained to speak about billions of years as if we were discussing something that happened just last week. We talk about ‘a few million years ago’ as if it happened before breakfast. Even those of us who study comparatively ‘young’ processes in geochemistry or geobiology have a profound connection with deep time. We do not flinch when we talk about things that happened an extraordinarily long time ago. As an example, some of the earliest known fossil evidence for life is found in rocks that are at least 3.7 billion years old and possibly as much as 4.28 billion years old.2 I write that rather blithely, as if I know what ‘3.7 billion years old’ genuinely means. I likely do not. It is hard to imagine that anybody does. The numbers are so large that our minds cannot really encompass such profound lengths of time. A year is familiar, with its regular cycle of days and months, birthdays and holidays. We experience 10 years, 60 years, perhaps, if we are lucky, 100 years. We learn about human history in timespans of hundreds or thousands of years. A single year is rendered essentially meaningless in the face of a billion, or even a million, years. Short of the academic exercise of pondering the immense antiquity of our planet, why should we care about any of this? Certainly, the purely academic knowledge is valuable. I like to think that awareness of the immense age of the Earth, and of the profoundly alien planet that early Earth must have been, forces us to imagine our world in new ways. Our knowledge of the earliest Earth relies on imagination as much as it does scientific inquiry. Just as we must build predictive models for the Earth’s future, we must also ‘retrodict’ our past, because there are virtually no rocks extant from that far back in time from which to derive data. Knowing the very earliest history of the Earth helps us to understand where planets came from, how Earth evolved, the pacing and sequence of very long-term climate changes; in short, how Earth became the planet it is today. What we can piece together about the Earth in the deep past enables us to imagine both the future Earth, as well as earths other than our own. This chapter will summarize what we know about the first 4 billion years or so of the Earth’s geological story, and suggest what this awareness can do to further our understanding of the Earth of the current day and of exoplanets elsewhere in our galaxy. It will also point to the cognitive and conceptual challenges of working in a realm of inquiry where the depths of time involved are practically beyond the capacity of the human mind to grasp. DOI: 10.4324/9781003026570-15

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Geology as a field of study tends to embrace change that is exceedingly slow. Charles Lyell’s seminal Principles of Geology (1830) established the foundations of uniformitarianism, the concept that geological events occur gradually, at a slow pace, continuously, throughout Earth history. It is easy to believe that if things happen slowly and continuously, they must be well known. And yet, many of the most important, planetary-scale events in Earth history are very poorly understood. Our history of the early Earth is frustratingly incomplete because the rocks themselves do not survive across these extraordinarily long passages of time. The very plate tectonic processes that create continents are also destroying them – the rock cycle is erasing the oldest rocks at the same time that it generates new ones. Thus, it is something of a leap of faith to assume geology proceeds in a familiar, orderly fashion when the corresponding geological record in not there to tell us what happened. We humans are hard-wired to perceive long periods of time with no apparent change as dull and boring, analogous to an hour in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles. It is therefore also all too easy to assume that if processes took place slowly, over multiple billions of years, and there is no rock record (and therefore no data) to account for them, that nothing meaningful happened. In actuality, nothing could be further from the truth. Dull and boring? Far from it. This is where imagination, seasoned with a little chemistry, comes to our aid. We know that profound changes occurred during the early history of the Earth. They may not have happened all at once, and could have transpired over millions and millions of years, but these are events that transformed our planet irreversibly. And they can inform us as to how our planet might change in the future.

Past Earths For the most part, the very earliest Earth is a complete unknown. At the moment when Earth condensed from the clouds of gas and dust swirling about the proto–solar system, our planet was not the planet as we know it today. That Earth did not emerge for at least a few hundred million years: geologically speaking comparatively quickly, but not exactly fast. A familiar Earth did not exist until iron separated from the other elements to form the Earth’s core; after the rocks of the mantle cooled and crystalized; and after the formation of a crust and continents. Even then, the planet was hardly recognizable as Earth. For the first 50 million years of its history, our planet was a hellish magma ocean, a morass of hot molten rock surrounded by an ‘atmosphere’ of rock vapor. Heat from radioactive decay and constant bombardment from other planetesimals made the surface of the Earth unimaginably violent and strange. We would have to wait for the planet to cool and form a crust before we even have a planet we can imagine living on. This hellish period of Earth’s very earliest history we call, rather appropriately, the Hadean Eon (from the Greek name for the underworld, Hades).

Hadean Earth Geologists define the Hadean Eon as the period from 4.543 billion years ago to 4.0 billion years ago (see Figure 12.1). Even for an early Earth geologist such as myself, it is hard to think with any clarity about this relatively short period (if anything, 500 million years long can be considered short) at the very start of Earth’s existence. Not only is it a very long time ago but none of us have ever seen a planet made entirely of molten rock. I think the closest one might get to understanding how alien the Hadean Eon must have been is to peer into a lava lake inside a volcanic crater. There are currently fewer than 10 volcanoes on Earth with stable lakes of lava in their craters. I’ve never seen one, but videos and photographs looking down into the crater of 174

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Figure 12.1 Simplified geologic timeline with Earth’s four Eons. Ma = mega annum; i.e., millions of years ago. Source: Author’s creation.

an active lava lake show us hot, liquid, churning, molten rock. Perhaps this is what the surface of the Hadean Earth was like, a bubbling swimming pool at more than 1200 degrees Celsius. Once you get past the idea that this is a volcano and if you fell in you would promptly be burned to a crisp, you might realize, “I’m looking into the interior of the Earth!” In this manner, looking deeper into the interior of the Earth is akin to looking backwards in time. Looking downward to look backward in time is a classic concept of the geological sciences. A visit to the Grand Canyon in the state of Arizona demonstrates very clearly that older rocks are deposited before younger rocks and so appear below the younger rocks. Of course, there are cases where rocks get turned over, uplifted, or twisted in such a way that sequences of superimposed rock do not transport us backwards in time, but in general, as you look downwards in a rock core or into a canyon you are looking backwards in time. If we had examples of all the rocks back to 4.543  billion years ago, early Earth geology would be considerably easier. Unfortunately, over time, most rocks are completely lost through erosion and plate tectonics. The Earth systematically destroys its oldest rocks through the process of subduction and the movement of tectonic plates. Slowly but inexorably, the surface of the Earth is recycled and replaced by new crust. All of this means that we have essentially no access to the rock record of the Hadean Eon. A very tiny amount of a very tough mineral called zircon has been discovered and revealed to be over 4.4 billion years old.3 These rare single crystals have offered evidence that Earth’s oceans may have formed by the end of the Hadean, about 4 billion years ago, and that, tantalizingly, life may have evolved as early as the Hadean.4

Archean Earth After 500 million years, the planet started to settle down. Rocks had cooled, the atmosphere was no longer composed of vaporized rock but of ordinary gases, the oceans had formed, and continents were growing. This marked the beginning of the Archean Eon (from the Greek arche, meaning ‘origin’). The Archean Eon stretched from 4.0 billion to 2.5 billion years ago; that is, nearly half of the entirety of Earth’s history. Our very earliest Archean rocks are found in the stable centers of continents, the cratons of northern Canada, Siberia, and parts of Australia and South Africa. We have substantially more information about the Archean than we do for the Hadean. Even though it is still a very long time ago, 2.5 billion years old is a lot younger than four billion and thus we have considerably more evidence in the rocks. The record of Archean rock, however, remains incomplete. We have examples of rocks that we can date at 3.8 billion years old, but these might be followed by gaps of millions of years. We are compelled to extrapolate and employ our imagination for these gaps in the rock record. One of the key things to know about the Archean is that it is the period for which we have the earliest clear evidence for life on Earth. Lively debate about the details continues in the scientific literature, but there is a broad consensus that life in the Archean, while exclusively 175

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single-celled, was diverse and complex by 3 billion years ago.5 In a mere one and one half billion years, complex microbial ecology had developed on Earth. I like to imagine that teeming life in the oceans, mainly because I’m trained as an oceanographer, but also because we don’t really know exactly when the continents first formed. Some studies suggest continents formed very early, around 4  billion years ago, while other studies indicate continents only began to grow considerably later in the game, around 2.5 billion years ago.6 It remains an open question whether Earth had continents very early or not until halfway through history. This massive time difference speaks to the uncertainty of our knowledge about the early Earth. Our Earth is the only inhabited planet in the known universe. We don’t know how life got started and we have not yet found life anywhere else. Evidence from the Archean Earth provides clues to the conditions that were present when life evolved with its myriad complex metabolic pathways.7 Over the course of the Archean, life emerged, became established, and evolved. Slowly, over hundreds of millions of years, an enormous diversity of microbial life flourished in the Archean. Organisms evolved that could process and use hydrogen, others that could employ sulfur, nitrogen, and carbon. By 2.5 billion years ago, microorganisms had even made the evolutionary leap to using light from the sun for energy through photosynthesis. The origin and evolution of photosynthesis is still not completely understood, but one thing is certain: this new metabolism profoundly and permanently changed the chemistry of the entire planet.8 The end of the Archean is marked by a profound change in Earth chemistry – the episode known as the Great Oxidation Event. It set the stage for the evolution of complex multi-cellular life, from plants to dinosaurs and ultimately, to humans. Specifically, the chemistry of the atmosphere changed, sometime around 2.4 billion years ago. Oxygen, O2, the molecule we breathe, began to build up in our atmosphere. That oxygen was formed by microorganisms (bacteria) that developed the capacity to use light from the sun and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to create biomass, in the process generating oxygen as a waste product. This is photosynthesis. At least a billion years went by between the beginning of life and the evolution of photosynthesis. It thus took roughly half of Earth’s history to create the life pathways that would one day support complex life. Today, photosynthesis is literally a garden-variety metabolism, as every green plant on earth conducts photosynthesis. Although it might be difficult for us to conceive of on our green Earth, photosynthesis was a genuinely revolutionary departure. Oxygen is a nasty, powerful, and super-reactive element, and the first organisms that created oxygen did so with some attendant jeopardy. Oxygen is toxic in large quantities; it is capable of destroying (incinerating, in fact) the very biomass that organisms create through the photosynthetic process. This profound transition that enabled the transformation of the planet was, simultaneously, potentially highly destructive to the organisms that produced it. For many species the Great Oxidation Event was catastrophic and they did not survive, but those that did paved the way for the evolution of multicellular life, eventually including us. In reality, the Great Oxidation Event was less an ‘event’ than it was a process that transpired over a considerable length of time. Strong evidence suggests small amounts of oxygen were present 100  million years before the great oxidation event (around 2.5 billion years ago).9 The capacity to generate oxygen through photosynthesis took many millions of years to develop and it took many more millions of years to change meaningfully the chemistry of the atmosphere. But relative to the extraordinary age of the Earth, something that takes 100 million years to unfold can still be construed as an event. The first 2.5 billion years of Earth time were thus far from dull; indeed, they were quite busy. During the Hadean Eon a planet condensed from dust and gas, formed a magma ocean, which then cooled down, forming the first rocks and condensed liquid water. For the next billion years, during the Archean, life emerged, evolved, and transformed our planet into an oxygenated world. What happened next? 176

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Proterozoic Earth The Proterozoic Eon spans nearly two billion years from the end of the Archean at 2.5 billion years ago to the beginning of Phanerozoic time, beginning 538.8 million years ago. The Proterozoic Earth is still ancient, but given the vast stretches of time we have just considered, it feels positively modern. This period in geologic history is often maligned by an unfortunate moniker: the boring billions. Geology textbooks often have comparatively little information about this stretch of two billion years. It is increasingly clear, however, that, largely because of the limited evidence available, we have mistaken slow change for no change.10 The Proterozoic is regularly depicted as prosaic and yet it was a period of considerable tectonic activity, with a changing climate, and slow but significant changes in the nature of life. Supercontinents formed and broke up multiple times in this period. The well-known Pangea, which existed from 335 to 250 million years ago, is only the most recent of a series of supercontinents that have graced the Earth. The current consensus is that at least two and perhaps as many as four different supercontinents formed and broke up during the Proterozoic.11 These periods of immense mountain building and subsequent erosion are tied to massive changes in Earth’s climate. The weathering of massive amounts of rock that accompanies the breakup of a supercontinent also draws down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That same weathering process releases nutrients from the rock and delivers them to the oceans, fueling photosynthesis and the generation of more oxygen. Drawdown of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere serves to cool the planet. The Proterozoic was punctuated by periods of complete or very nearly complete glaciation known as “snowball Earth.”12 Our understanding of what triggers these periods of continent building and glaciation is limited. Even more limited is our understanding of how Earth managed to escape the phases of snowball climate and returns to more clement conditions. The interplay of tectonics and climate is thought to have influenced key biological advances in this period, such as symbiosis, multicellularity, and sexual (as opposed to asexual) reproduction, all of which could have been adaptations to stress caused by periods of scarcity or surfeit of certain critical elements.13 In a short few hundred million years, all of complex life would evolve and radiate across the Earth.

Future Earths and Other Earths Understanding the conditions and development of the early Earth can help us imagine both other earths and the future of our own. We live on a changing planet. Slow changes transpiring over billions of years might be invisible to us in the moment, but we are able to perceive rapid change and hopefully can adapt to it. Our modern epoch has been labeled the Anthropocene, a geologic period in which human activity has had measurable and recorded effects on the Earth. The indelible human signature is evident in land use changes, in the changing chemistry of the atmosphere, particularly in increasing levels of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, and in the retreat of glaciers and ice sheets due to warming temperatures. From a geological perspective, these things have happened very, very quickly, but an awareness of changes across the vast stretches of time of early Earth history can still aid us in understanding the present and future of the Earth. As we become ever more aware of the effects of global industrialization, most notably the rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, inexorably warming temperatures, rising sea levels, and acidifying oceans, the ancient Earth is there for us as silent testimony. 177

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We have seen episodes of rapid change in the past, such as the warming of the snowball Earth and the deglaciation of the last glacial period (a mere 10,000  years ago). We can study changes in history of the Earth’s climate, changes in its atmospheric chemistry, and the pace at which the Earth adjusts to new realities by looking at records preserved in rock and ice cores. Our models that predict climate futures are built on an understanding of how the Earth’s climate changed in the past. What we need is the imagination to envision more favorable future Earths and sustainable climate futures in which human populations will thrive. Every Earth over the last 4  billion years has been inhabited by life. In its many different forms, it has always been a living planet. The oxygen-free Archean Earth was home to life, just as the Proterozoic Earth and modern Earth have been. Humans have pondered the possibility of the existence of life elsewhere in the universe for a long time. We now live in the age where the study of planets beyond Earth is a reality. Over 5,000 confirmed planets are orbiting stars in our galaxy, and more are being discovered every month.14 Space telescopes now measure the atmospheric chemistry of planets orbiting other stars! There will soon be much more data about other planets – potentially more data than we have for the ancient history of our own planet. It is tantalizing to consider that we might be able to answer the question ‘Are we alone in the universe?’ Thus far, Earth is the only planet known to harbor life. Admittedly, the odds of us finding another planet inhabited by technologically advanced life-forms are long. But we likely will soon locate and describe Earth-like planets orbiting sun-like stars. Those planets might resemble any one of the early Earths that I have described in this chapter: Hadean Earth, Archean Earth, or Proterozoic Earth. With a knowledge of the early Earth’s history, we will be better positioned to recognize those Earths. In turn, knowledge of those planets might help us better envision the young Earth. In this way, the recesses of a scarcely comprehensible deep time will reveal truths about the present.

Notes 1 G.B. Dalrymple, The Age of the Earth (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991). 2 M. Dodd, D. Papineau, T. Grenne, J.F. Slack, M., Rittner, F. Piranjo, J. O’Neil and C.T.S. Litte, “Evidence for early life in Earth’s oldest hydrothermal vent precipitates.” Nature 543 (2017), 60–64. 3 T.M. Harrison, “The Hadean crust: Evidence from >4 Ga zircons.” Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 37.1 (2009), 479–505. 4 S.J. Mojzsis, T.M. Harrison and R.T. Pidgeon, “Oxygen-isotope evidence from ancient zircons for liquid water at the Earth’s surface 4,300 Myr ago.” Nature 409 (2001), 178–181; F.U. Battistuzzi, A. Feijao and S.B. Hedges, “A genomic timescale of prokaryote evolution: Insights into the origin of methanogenesis, phototrophy, and the colonization of land.” BMC Evolutionary Biology 4 (2004), 44. 5 E. Moore, B. Jelen, D. Giovannelli, H. Raanan, and P.G. Falkowski, “Metal availability and the expanding network of microbial metabolisms in the Archaean eon.” Nature Geoscience 10 (2017), 629–636. 6 C. Hawkesworth, P.A. Cawood and B. Dhuime, “Rates of generation and growth of the continental crust.” Geoscience Frontiers 10.1 (2019), 165–173. 7 Battistuzzi et al., “A genomic timescale of prokaryote evolution”; C.M. Johnson, B.L. Beard and E.E. Roden, “The iron isotope fingerprints of redox and biogeochemical cycling in modern and ancient earth.” Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 36 (2008), 457–493. 8 T. Cardona, “Thinking twice about the evolution of photosynthesis.” Open Biology 9 (2009), 180246. 9 A.D. Anbar, Y. Duan, T.W. Lyons, G.L. Arnold, B. Kendall, R.A. Creaser, A.J. Kaufman, G.W. Gordon, C. Scott, J. Garvin and R. Buick, “A whiff of oxygen before the great oxidation event?” Science 317 (2007), 1903–1906. 10 T. Lenton and A. Watson, Revolutions That Made the Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); I. Mukherjee, R.R. Large, R. Corkrey and L.V. Danyushevsky, “The boring billion, a slingshot for complex life on earth.” Scientific Reports 8.1 (2018), 4432.

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Imagining Earth Time 11 R.D. Nance, J.B. Murphy and M. Santosh, “The supercontinent cycle: A retrospective essay.” Gondwana Research 25.1 (2014), 4–29. 12 P.F. Hoffman, A.J. Kaufman, G.P. Halverson and D.P. Schrag, “A  neoproterozoic snowball earth.” Science 28.5381 (1998), 1342–1346; R.E. Kopp, J.L. Kirschvink, I.A. Hilburn and C.Z. Nash, “The paleoproterozoic snowball earth: A  climate disaster triggered by the evolution of oxygenic photosynthesis.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102.32 (2005), 11131–11136. 13 I. Mukherjee, R.R. Large, R. Corkrey, and L.V. Danyushevsky, “The Boring Billion, a slingshot for Complex Life on Earth.” Scientific Reports 8.1 (2018), 4432. 14 https://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu.

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13 THE PAST AND PRESENT IN ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE Ellen Wohl

Environmental science deals with Earth’s near-surface environments – from the lower atmosphere to the depths that groundwater penetrates – and the organisms that inhabit these environments. These overlapping spheres of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere are known as the ‘critical zone’ because the processes that occur here are critical to the maintenance of life.1 The more scientists study the critical zone, the more we become aware of the intricate, largely invisible interactions that create the environment in which we live. Recent decades have seen major revelations. Trees, for example, are not self-contained entities producing everything they need to grow and prosper through photosynthesis. Instead, trees rely on a ‘wood-wide web’ of fungi that inhabit their roots and create fungal mats and bridges throughout the soil that allow trees both to assimilate critical nutrients and to send nutrients from healthy trees to those that are stressed.2 One of the critical nutrients for living organisms is nitrogen, but nitrogen in the form of nitrate is now a major pollutant that creates dead zones in many nearshore areas such as the Gulf of Mexico.3 The excess nitrogen largely comes from fertilizer runoff and fossil-fuel combustion, but the high levels in nearshore areas also reflect an ongoing loss of biological uptake of nitrate in rivers. Microbial communities living in floodplain soils and beneath the streambed in rivers large and small can effectively detoxify excess nitrate, but decades of simplifying and homogenizing channels and floodplains have seriously compromised the ability of rivers to process nitrogen.4 In both of these examples, environmental science focuses on the present: how do soil fungi influence tree health and how do trees and fungi shunt nutrients between individual plants? Where in a river corridor are the microbial communities that remove nitrate and what are the biogeochemical processes that alter nitrogen levels? In each example, the relevant questions for environmental science are also tied to the past. The research that led to mapping the wood-wide web of soil fungi during the early 21st century began in old-growth forests during the 1970s and 1980s, when these forests had nearly vanished after centuries or, in some parts of the world, millennia of timber harvest.5 This recognition quickly gave rise to questions: what ecosystem services were being lost along with old-growth forest? How long might it take the plant-fungi interactions to develop fully? How had forest health changed as a result of the replacement of old-growth forests by much younger forests that are repeatedly disturbed by tree cutting? The 180

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role of rivers in reducing nitrates was recognized only after that role was seriously diminished by human manipulation and alarm grew over nitrate pollution.6

Disturbance In these examples, human alterations of the environment create a form of disturbance. A disturbance is a change in environmental conditions that causes a pronounced change in an ecosystem.7 In a forest, disturbance can be a stand-killing wildfire, a widespread blowdown, or insect infestation. In a river, disturbance can be a major flood, a prolonged drought, a toxic chemical spill, or flow regulation by a dam or diversion. A pulse disturbance is an abrupt, short-lived event such as a flood. A press disturbance is a prolonged change, such as flow regulation associated with a dam. Either type of disturbance can be caused by human activities or result from non-human causes. Considerations of the past in environmental science largely revolve around response to disturbances. How did the plant and animal communities, or atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns, respond to the disturbance of continental-scale ice sheets advancing and retreating during the past two million years? How did the large animals of North and South America respond to human migration onto these continents? How are soil and plant communities continuing to respond to European introduction of honeybees and exotic species of earthworms to the Americas?8 Understanding responses to past disturbances can also help to inform understanding of future changes. How will migratory monarch butterflies respond to ongoing loss of habitat? How will Arctic plants and animals respond to warming climate? Disturbances take center stage in environmental science because the critical zone is not static. This simple statement represents an enormous challenge. Perhaps it is a fundamental human trait to wish that everything was simpler than it commonly turns out to be. We seek order in existence, constructing models to explain the seeming disorder and relegating extreme events to the margins of consideration: a large flood, a volcanic eruption, an earthquake and tsunami, an intense wildfire – each of these is commonly regarded as extraordinary, unprecedented, anomalous, not as events that recur and shape the environment through time. Evidence of this attitude appears in conceptual models developed in different fields of environmental science. Until 1960, ecologists emphasized primary forest succession on a newly exposed site. Forest succession describes four basic phases after disturbance ceases. During stand initiation, seedlings and saplings take over bare ground. This is followed by a period when the young trees become so crowded that new germination is limited and some saplings die (stem exclusion), then development of a tall canopy that shades much of the ground and favors shadeloving understory plants (understory reinitiation), and finally a stable, mature forest (steady state). The final stage in this succession is sometimes referred to as a climax community and the assumption was that this plant community could persist indefinitely. In mountains of the western United States, for example, sun-loving pioneer species such as aspen might colonize a site first, their growth providing the shade that would allow pines and then spruce and fir eventually to take over the site and dominate forest composition for centuries. In this conceptualization, succession was highly predictable and converged on a climatically determined community regardless of starting conditions. Contemporary models of forest dynamics are more likely to emphasize repeated disturbances that create secondary succession, with historical contingency and alternate pathways prominent rather than a highly predictable climax community.9 An analogous example comes from changes in vegetation communities over millennia during the Pleistocene Ice Ages of the past two million years. Paleoecologists first assumed that contemporary vegetation communities had shifted southward and to lower elevations during 181

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periods of ice-sheet advance, returning northward and upward in elevation when the ice retreated. Painstaking reconstructions of plant communities through time using fossil pollen subsequently indicated that past communities had very different compositions because individual species migrated at different rates and over different distances.10 In other words, there is no Pleistocene-age equivalent to some of the forest communities that we are tempted to regard as timeless because the particular associations of tree species present today were not necessarily present in the recent geological past. Another example of oversimplifying the complexity of the past comes from studies of Earth’s surface configuration. For more than two centuries, geologists interpreted landforms in the context of uniformitarianism, first proposed by 18th-century Scottish geologist James Hutton (1726–1797). Hutton inferred events through geologic time by assuming that contemporary processes had always operated, slowly and steadily, over vast spans of time. Commonly summarized as ‘the present is the key to the past,’ Hutton’s version of uniformitarianism was a reaction to earlier proposals that Earth’s topography had been created during a spasm of cosmic change marked by numerous catastrophes early in the planet’s history and had been largely static ever since. Under Hutton’s influence, the pendulum of thinking about catastrophes swung back to the point that no extreme events were necessary to explain landforms.11 This continued well into the 20th century, bolstered by studies such as a classic 1960 paper on river discharge and sediment transport which demonstrated that most of the sediment carried by a river moves during the annual high flow rather than the occasional extreme flood.12 Accumulating case studies of exceptions eventually made it clear that infrequent, very large floods actually carry most of the sediment and dominantly shape the channel and floodplain in some rivers, whereas other rivers mostly reflect the actions of smaller floods. This changing perception of the role of high magnitude, infrequent events in shaping landforms through time is strongly influenced by the ability of scientists to quantify the persistence of changes created by past events. Another iteration of this tension between general rules such as forest succession to a climax community or strict uniformitarianism comes from 19th-century conceptualizations of landform development. William Morris Davis (1850–1934), a highly influential Harvard professor who published the widely used 1902 textbook Elementary Physical Geography, promoted the Cycle of Erosion. Despite the title, this conceptual model emphasized linear change in landforms, from high-energy, steep, youthful landscapes through mature to relatively flat old landscapes. Davis’ ideas, originally published in 1889, were clearly influenced by contemporary understanding of biological evolution and posited an analogous evolution of landforms through time. His conceptual model of landforms emphasizes progressive change through time toward a predictable, stable configuration, analogous to succession to a climax community in a forest.13 Although enormously influential until about World War II, Davis’ conceptualizations of landforms have subsequently been eclipsed by the work of his contemporary Grove Karl Gilbert (1843–1918). In contrast to Davis, Gilbert envisioned landforms as reflecting an ongoing balance between forces driving erosion and those resisting erosion. As with forest succession, Gilbert’s ideas reflect the potential for continuing disturbances, historical contingency, alternate pathways, and periods of relative steady-state in which sediment may be continually transferred from higher elevations to lower elevations without resulting in net lowering of elevation because of compensating uplift in Earth’s crust as overlying mass is removed.14 As geologists sought to weigh the relative merits of these competing conceptual models of landform change through time, the ability to infer rates of landform change and past configurations – the ability to infer the past – was crucial. 182

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The Mysterious Past The debate over the importance of extreme disturbances in shaping landscapes and biotic communities is very much alive and well today. A key question in this debate is: just what did the landscape or biota – the environment – look like at any point in time and through time? This is an enormously difficult question to answer for at least four reasons. First, the past was no more static than is the present. This realization underlies the concept of natural range of variability.15 This range describes the fluctuations in any specific characteristic through time. A river, for example, has varying inputs of water and sediment and the configuration of the channel and floodplain respond to these. The channel might widen and the floodplain might erode during a flood, but then both might accumulate sediment during succeeding lower flows. Over decades to centuries, the configuration of the channel and floodplain might fluctuate around a consistent mean or exhibit progressive change through time, but the range of fluctuations in water and sediment discharge, flow velocity, channel cross-sectional shape, and other characteristics would define the natural range of variability. “Natural” in this context usually refers to the environment in the absence of intensive human manipulation. If human influences are considered, the analogous concept is the historical range of variability (with the time period that constitutes history varying widely between individual studies and geographic locations).16 Second, inferring past conditions is challenging because environmental records of the past are fragmentary. Only a small percentage of dead plants and animals are fossilized – scientists must search carefully and be lucky to find even partial records of past biotic communities. Many such records from different geographic areas and different episodes in Earth history are needed to infer how the distribution of plants and animals changed through time. Physical processes are no better. A tsunami erodes the coastline and leaves distinctive signatures in the accumulation of sediment and the shape of topography, but then gradual, continual downslope movement of sediment on coastal cliffs and the reworking of dune sand during moderate storms completely removes the erosional signature of the tsunami. Third, legacies abound. Legacy is now most commonly used to describe human-induced environmental changes, but a legacy can result from change not caused by humans.17 The challenge of a legacy effect is that, although the original disturbance has long since ceased, its effects continue to ripple through the environment. Recognizing these effects can be difficult if the scientific community or society is unaware of the original disturbance. A now-famous 2008 paper in the journal Science pointed out that rivers in the mid-Atlantic Piedmont region of the United States contained tens of thousands of mill dams during the 17th through 19th centuries. In addition to powering water mills, these dams ponded sediment coming off adjacent uplands newly cleared for agriculture. When coal replaced water mills as a dominant power source, the mills and dams were abandoned and largely forgotten by society and river scientists alike.18 Only in the 2008 paper did river scientists point out that the sediment contained behind the rotting and collapsing dams today forms the major source of fine sediment and nutrients causing problems in estuaries such as the Chesapeake Bay. This realization shifted the focus of river management from emphasizing methods of reducing upland soil erosion to methods of stabilizing or removing eroding stream banks. How do you remove an eroding stream bank? Excavate all of the legacy sediment from the floodplain and re-create the shallow, marshy channels present prior to construction of mill dams. This approach is now being used at sites in Pennsylvania.19 Another example of a human-induced environmental legacy involves accidentally introduced exotic invasives – species not native to a particular region that, once introduced, reproduce so successfully that they thoroughly change native plant and animal communities. From 183

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southern Maine to northern Alabama and northeastern Arkansas, the American chestnut once reigned in the deciduous forests of the eastern United States.20 A tall, majestic tree, the chestnut was revered by Native Americans and European settlers for its many benefits: nuts that fed wildlife, free-ranging livestock, and people; home remedies for a range of ills; and light wood that was easy to split yet strong. A blight accidentally imported with chestnut trees from Asia was first detected in the U.S. in 1904. By 1951 an estimated 3 to 4 billion American chestnut trees had died and the chestnut was essentially gone from the United States. This loss reverberated through forest ecosystems in ways that ecologists still work to understand, even as other native trees – elm, ash, hemlock – fall to the invasive diseases and insects of the 20th and 21st centuries. The 1938 hurricane, one of the most catastrophic windstorms in U.S. history, provides an example of the legacies resulting from a natural disturbance.21 The storm uprooted trees in a patchy damage pattern across a swath 60 miles (100 km) wide and nearly 200 miles (300 km) long from Long Island into northern Vermont. Conifers were much more susceptible to damage than hardwoods and the extent of damage varied with tree size and age, but the hurricane restructured the forest in a matter of hours. Numerous subsequent studies document legacy effects that persist today, including a patchwork of forest age and height structure.22 Landslides associated with tree uprooting and intense precipitation reconfigured the topography of hillslopes and valley bottoms. Uprooted trees created pits and mounds that changed small-scale hillslope topography, soil structure, infiltration of precipitation, and downslope movement of sediment. More snags (standing dead trees) were present after the storm, creating habitat for cavity-nesting birds and a wide variety of invertebrates, fungi, and microbes that inhabit dead wood. An increase in downed, dead wood and more ephemeral forest litter (leaves, branches) altered nutrient availability on the forest floor, as well as creating habitat for the many species of invertebrates, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and small mammals that live on the forest floor. Changes in habitat abundance and type, as well as nutrient availability, led to changes in the plant and animal communities inhabiting the forests affected by the hurricane. On the opposite side of the continent, rivers of the Pacific Northwest used to be full of logjams and downed wood that caused the channel to split into secondary channels that wound through forested floodplains, creating a floodplain mosaic of differently aged patches of forest rich in diverse habitats. Extensive timber harvest and wood removal during the 19th and 20th centuries changed these rivers to relatively straight, single-thread channels flowing past a more uniformly aged forest. Although timber harvest and wood removal have ceased in some of these rivers, the rivers retain their simplified form, a legacy of historical human activities.23 If scientists and the greater society do not know of the existence of the historic disturbance, whether the disturbance was human-caused or other, we may fail to recognize that the environment continues to be shaped by the legacy of that disturbance. The final challenge in understanding past conditions in an environment involves the question of what is natural.24 A  compelling argument can be made for separating humans when considering environmental change and distinguishing human-caused from other forms of disturbance. An equally compelling argument can be made that humans are an animal, subject to evolution and natural selection like other species, and therefore natural. In general, however, environmental scientists strive to distinguish human-induced disturbances from other types of disturbances. This leads to the concept of reference conditions.25 Reference conditions, like the natural range of variability, refer to the environment in the absence of human manipulation, and prompt a further set of questions: how much human manipulation? There is a lively debate, for example, as to how much people shaped the environment in the Americas prior to European contact.26 Evidence of extensive, deliberate use of fire to shape plant and animal communities; 184

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high population density and intensively agricultural societies; and targeted hunting to extinction of very large animals are all cited to support the contention that humans intensively altered the environment in portions of North and South America prior to European contact. On the other hand, even the most intensive level of manipulation pales in comparison to changes following European settlement and parts of the Americas have no evidence of intensive human alteration prior to European settlement. Consequently, environmental science in the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand typically uses reference conditions to indicate the period prior to European settlement. Once the time frame is agreed upon, however, the other problems still exist – the environment is not static and environmental records are fragmentary. The challenges of characterizing reference conditions remain significant.

Obscuring the Human Footprint: Case Studies A slogan designed to encourage people engaged in backcountry recreation to reduce their effects on the environment states ‘take only photographs, leave only footprints.’ The slogan is being questioned as increasing human traffic leaves far too many footprints and associated soil compaction, trampling of plants, erosion, and other problems. Today, there is no question that humanity has left footprints or fingerprints on every part of the planet via human-induced climate change. This creates distinctive challenges for environmental scientists trying to characterize the natural range of variability or reference conditions, but one can ask why it is important to distinguish human effects in natural science and to worry about natural range of variability and reference conditions. I think part of the emphasis stems from a desire to understand how environments function in the absence of human manipulation. Much of the interest, however, stems from the idea that if humans have manipulated the environment in a manner that causes undesirable side effects – extinction of other species, depletion of soil fertility, water pollution, air pollution, increased natural hazards – then humans can potentially mitigate or reverse these undesirable side effects. We must first recognize that we have caused the problem before we can begin to correct it. This attitude drives much of the basic research in environmental science as well as the applied aspects of environmental management and restoration. Current efforts to mitigate past environmental changes caused by humans can be illustrated by the relatively recent reintroduction of beavers and use of controlled burns.

Beavers Beavers – Castor canadensis in North America and Castor fiber in Eurasia – are ecosystem engineers.27 An ecosystem engineer is an organism that creates, significantly modifies, maintains, or destroys a habitat: the organism significantly modifies the environment for itself and in so doing affects many other organisms. Beavers receive this designation for their ability to modify water channels and floodplains by building dams and digging canals (Figures 13.1 and 13.2). A beaver dam is more than a simple barrier across a channel. The animals dam secondary channels and even springs on hillsides, creating ponds that are eventually abandoned and allowed to fill with sediment. Where a dam on the main channel enhances overbank flow, secondary channels can form across the floodplain and the beavers typically dam these channels as well, creating a complex network in which multiple channels branch from and rejoin one another downstream. A  river corridor – the channel and adjacent floodplain – occupied by beavers becomes a mosaic of active dams, abandoned dams covered in sediment and vegetation, 185

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Figures 13.1 and 13.2  Examples of beaver-modified river corridors. Source: 13.1 Map data ©2019 Google and Image Landsat/Copernicus; 13.2 map data © 2017 Google.

channels, ponded water, and filled ponds. The whole complex is known as a beaver meadow. These diverse habitats support a wealth of plants and animals and the complexity of the river corridor attenuates downstream fluxes of water, sediment, solutes, and particles of organic matter. Water is stored temporarily – peak flows can infiltrate the thick sediments that accumulate in beaver-engineered river corridors and linger in the beaver ponds – to be gradually released downstream during drier periods of the year. Sediment and organic matter can remain in the beaver meadow for millennia, and solutes such as nitrate can be taken up by microbial communities and converted to a form useful to plants.28 Prior to European contact, an estimated 400 million beavers lived in North America.29 The first Europeans to reach North America brought with them an insatiable demand for beaver 186

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furs and by the mid-19th century beavers were nearly extinct in the continental United States. The loss of beavers and their dams caused enormous changes in small to moderately sized rivers and in the floodplain of larger rivers. As the dams fell into disrepair, peak flows became more erosive, widening and deepening channels. The downcutting channels, combined with less overbank flow, caused floodplains to become drier. Many of the plants and animals that depend on marshy or swampy conditions disappeared from rivers and beaver meadows transitioned to elk grasslands – a dry, grassy floodplain with a deeply cut single channel running through it (the name ‘elk grasslands’ comes from Yellowstone National Park, where wolves were hunted to extinction, elk populations increased, elk competed with beaver for woody riverside vegetation such as willows, and beaver largely disappeared from the park). Sediment eroding from the channel created problems downstream and nutrients and organic matter were flushed through, rather than being retained and taken up by organisms.30 It is difficult to overstate the magnitude of these changes. If we could magically travel back in time to 1700 CE, many of the river corridors in the United States would look fundamentally different, with multiple beaver dams and ponds, swampy or marshy floodplains, and abundant quantities of downed, dead wood. Even channels in the Arizona desert or the steppe environments of the Great Plains supported beaver colonies. The first Europeans to explore U.S. rivers consistently complained of how difficult it was to move up- or downstream in a boat because of all the obstructions from logjams and beaver dams, as well as uncertainty about which of the many channels was the primary one.31 Recognition of the former ubiquity of river ecosystem engineering by beavers comes from multiple sources: commercial records of the number of furs traded; written descriptions by Europeans traveling through different parts of the United States; sedimentary records of saturated floodplain soils and abandoned beaver dams and ponds; and fossil pollen and other vegetation indicating wetlands. Plant fossils and buried beaver dams indicate that beavers colonized the North American landscape as the glaciers retreated. Beavers then remained in large numbers in river corridors until the commercial fur trade began in the 17th century. A similar scenario existed in Europe, with beavers present from England to Scandinavia, Siberia to northern Spain, and into China and Mongolia, although the animals were hunted to near or complete extinction for the fur trade much earlier than in North America. At the start of the 20th century, only about 1,200 Eurasian beavers survived in eight isolated populations in Europe and Asia.32 Beaver population densities began to recover when silk hats replaced beaver hats in European men’s fashion, but the recovery has been minimal. Loss of habitat to agriculture and urbanization, along with continued local removal of beavers considered to be nuisances because of the backflooding caused by their ponds, has suppressed beaver numbers in the United States at an estimated twelve million today. Until the second half of the 20th century, many fish biologists advocated removing beaver dams as an impediment to fish passage up- and downstream (which raises the question of how the fish biologists reconciled the idea of 400  million beavers and thriving inland fish populations prior to European contact). Efforts to actively reintroduce beavers in the contiguous United States date to the 1930s, when the Soil Conservation Service and others concerned about soil loss and channel erosion viewed beavers as part of the solution to environmental degradation. Sporadic efforts during the 1950s and 1980s demonstrated that beavers could significantly enhance desired aspects of river corridors, such as attenuating floods, improving base flow, reducing channel erosion, and enhancing habitat for a wide variety of other species.33 At present, another beaver revival is occurring across the United States and Europe, with active reintroduction programs in most U.S. states and in 25 European countries. Habitat loss has been too extensive to allow a full return of beaver populations in the northern hemisphere, 187

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but the efforts to reintroduce this species in order to mitigate the loss of ecosystem services caused by human trapping of beavers provide an example of using understanding of past environmental conditions to guide present environmental management.

Controlled Burns If you have ever seen the fire episode in the 1942 Disney movie Bambi or seen the U.S. Forest Service’s Smokey Bear advertisements (a stern-looking Smokey admonishing, ‘Only you can prevent forest fires’), then you have some appreciation for how forest fires were regarded during much of the 20th century: as a disaster for humans and forests. Stephen Pyne has artfully traced the history of wildfire and fire-suppression policies in the United States.34 Fires were essentially viewed as unmitigated disasters. They killed valuable timber as well as other plants and animals in the forest. They left denuded hillslopes subject to erosion that filled stream channels with sediment or, more dramatically, led to debris flows, landslides, and flash floods. They polluted the air with smoke. When they burned beyond the forest, they destroyed human lives and property. Part of this attitude grew out of the older forest succession concepts: fire disrupted the progression of forest ecosystems toward an equilibrium climax community. More fundamentally, fire disrupted the harmony of nature. This attitude, shared by scientists and society, began to change slowly during the 1930s among scientists working in the southern United States. These forest researchers realized that some plant species rely on fire for their reproduction and growth. Fire creates an open seedbed, generates the heat necessary to release some types of seeds for germination, returns nutrients to the soil, and opens the forest canopy for plants that need more sunlight. Fires that burn portions of a forested ecosystem enhance habitat diversity and therefore the diversity of plant and animals present in that ecosystem. The recognition that fire could create desirable environmental effects was a tough sell. Following national disasters such as Wisconsin’s 1871 Peshtigo Fire, which killed more than 1,500 people, or the 1910 Great Fire in Montana and Idaho, which burned three million acres (12,100 km2) and killed 86 people, fire became the enemy. The U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service, and other federal government agencies emphasized wildfire suppression, everywhere and at all times. By 1935, the Forest Service expected all wildfires to be suppressed by 10 a.m. the morning after they were first spotted. Elite smokejumpers parachuted from airplanes to extinguish fires in remote areas, fire lookout towers sprang up across national forest lands, and Smokey Bear came onto the scene in 1944. All of this worked. The area burned by wildfires declined from an average 30 million acres (120,000 km2) every year during the 1930s to between 2 and 5 million acres (8100–20,000 km2) each year by the 1960s. But suppressing fires changed forest environments. Fuels such as downed or diseased trees and thick layers of duff (decaying organic matter on the forest floor) built up, so that when lightning struck – literally – fires burned so intensely that they could not be controlled. Some species of native plants that had previously adapted to fire ceased to germinate and gradually disappeared. When people realized in the 1960s that no new giant sequoia had grown in California forests because of the absence of fire, concern grew beyond the scientific community. The 1963 Leopold Report, commissioned by the U.S. Secretary of the Interior, emphasized that national parks should be managed as ecosystems. Along with the 1964 Wilderness Act, which encouraged the tolerance of natural processes such as fire, the changing attitudes caused the National Park Service to change its fire policy in 1968 to recognize fire as an ecological process that should be allowed to proceed unless infrastructure or human life were threatened. The Forest Service adopted a similar policy in 1974. 188

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These policies were tested by the 1978 Ouzel fire in Rocky Mountain National Park, the Yellowstone fires of 1988, and the 1988 Canyon Creek fire in Montana’s Bob Marshall Wilderness. In each case, a monitored fire burned until it threatened developed areas, despite public pressure to extinguish the fire much more quickly. The Yellowstone fire, in particular, was a watershed in changing public attitudes toward fire, with the National Park Service conducting a successful campaign to emphasize regeneration and rejuvenation of forest ecosystems following the fire. At the same time that fire suppression policies were changing, environmental scientists were also experimenting with controlled burns – deliberately set fires designed to burn at lower intensity than a stand-killing fire – in order to create some of the beneficial effects of fire.35 Although now widely used on public and private lands, controlled burns remain controversial with some parts of the public because of the chance that the fire will get out of control and destroy private property. And, as a warming and drying climate in the interior western United States facilitates more frequent, intense, and widespread wildfires that burn millions of acres and even destroy small cities, the difficulties in reconciling the scientific recognition of the ecological importance of wildfire with widespread anxiety over the danger and destruction of wildfires are only increasing. The examples of reintroducing beavers and allowing wildfires to burn or setting controlled wildfires, which represent significant changes in environmental policy, reflect a changing understanding of the environmental past. In the first case, the activities of beavers were recognized as being critical to sustaining the health of river ecosystems. In the second case, wildfires were acknowledged as critical to sustaining the health of forest ecosystems. In both cases, a disturbance (whether related to beaver engineering or fire) that people initially viewed as completely detrimental to human interests subsequently came to be viewed as beneficial to the environment and, indirectly at least, to humans. These shifting attitudes reflect both observed changes in the environment as a result of loss of beavers and fire, and a different understanding of past environmental conditions.

The Challenges of the Anthropocene Environmental scientists have known for decades that humans can significantly alter the environment. Particularly influential early writings include George Perkins Marsh’s 1864 book Man and Nature and Enos Mills’ 1913 book In Beaver World.36 Recognition of the correlation between removing native vegetation and destabilizing hillslopes and altering water and sediment yields from uplands goes back centuries. A Japanese imperial decree of 806 CE prohibited cutting of trees along streambanks in an effort to control channel erosion, and the first Japanese sabo (sediment retention) dams were constructed on mountain streams around the same time to limit sediment coming from deforested hillslopes.37 Concerns for the detrimental environmental effects of human activities accelerated substantially during the latter half of the 20th century, leading to national environmental legislation such as the 1970 U.S. Clean Air Act, the 1972 U.S. Clean Water Act, and the designation of the first Earth Day in 1970. Such concerns have only become sharper with time, as environmental scientists document massive loss of biodiversity, ubiquitous nitrate pollution, water and air pollution, groundwater depletion, loss of forest cover, ozone depletion, overfishing and pollution of the oceans, and human-induced climate change. Since 2000, a consensus has developed that human alteration of global environments is sufficiently ubiquitous and intensive to warrant designation of a new epoch of geologic time, the Anthropocene.38 Although the word is now widely used, such an epoch has not yet been 189

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officially designated and it is not clear when the period would be deemed to start. Should it be dated from several thousand years ago, to recognize removal of native vegetation as part of the development of agriculture? Should it start with the change in atmospheric chemistry caused by the Industrial Revolution? Should it start in the mid-20th century with the dramatic acceleration of human population density, changes in global land cover, and the use of atomic power? Regardless of the eventual choice of starting date, clearly humans now strongly influence global environments and have done so to varying degrees for millennia. The challenges of the Anthropocene include the challenges of any aspect of the past in environmental science: what types of evidence can we use to characterize past environments? How accurately can we quantify the past in the absence of human alteration (natural range of variability, reference conditions, natural legacies)? Then there are the challenges unique to the Anthropocene: how does our understanding of the past inform decisions we make about environmental management in the present and the future? Ultimately, our ability to characterize past environmental conditions and our interpretations of those conditions govern the choices we make as environmental scientists prioritizing specific research topics. My research as a river scientist has increasingly emphasized the influence of logjams and beavers on channels and floodplains, as I have become aware of how differently rivers functioned prior to widespread commercial timber harvest and removal of beavers. Reading historical accounts of the United States by early European explorers has fostered this awareness, as have the contrasts that I observe between the landscapes in which I live and work and those in which I sometimes play, including remote areas of Alaska and northern Canada where logjams and beavers remain largely unaltered by humans. The overriding change we have created in rivers is to make them carry water, sediment, and dissolved chemicals downstream faster, apart from the portions where river water languishes in reservoirs upstream from dams. As though parodying Robert Frost’s line ‘I have been often too anxious for rivers,’ we have hurried our rivers along. We have made the winding courses of rivers more efficient by reengineering them into a single wide, straight, deep channel.39 We have shortened the delays created by water spilling over the channel banks across floodplains and into side channels, instead restricting the river’s flow between human-built levees.40 And we have relentlessly pulled millions of downed logs from rivers large and small across the contiguous United States, losing along the way some of the eddies, backwaters, and side channels that formed around this wood.41 Forbidding our rivers, in the name of flood control, waste disposal, and navigation, to tarry, we have reduced the abundance and diversity of habitat for many aquatic organisms. Among these are the microbes that can reduce nitrate concentrations in river water. The world has a severe case of nitrate pollution in part because the eddies, backwaters, marshes, swamps, side channels, and floodplain ponds that are so congenial to the microbes that allay this pollution have nearly disappeared from our overly engineered riverscapes. I learned about the physics of hydraulics, sediment transport, and channel morphology as a university student, but it was not until much later that I learned of the recent history of river alterations by people and of the enormous consequences of these alterations for hydraulics, sediment transport, and channel morphology. Learning about the recent past (in a geological sense) has given me a much richer understanding of rivers. Analogously, our understanding of past environmental conditions governs the choices that society makes with respect to managing the environment and human behavior. Twentiethcentury river restoration has largely created single, regularly meandering channels in park-like environments that reflect the aesthetic preferences of western Europe and widespread expectations of the appearance of a healthy, natural river. (See Figure 13.3.) River scientists have traced these preferences and expectations back to 18th-century landscape architecture as practiced 190

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Figure 13.3 Google Earth image of the Danube at Mitterkirchen, Austria, showing overall channelized form, but with a remnant of historical diversity in the central portion of the image. Source: Map data © 2019 Google and Image Landsat/Copernicus.

by Lancelot “Capability” Brown and others.42 Increasing recognition of the diversity of river forms prior to intensive human alterations of land cover, however, suggests that many rivers once branched among multiple, subparallel channels and moved rapidly back and forth across the floodplain, leaving in their wake marshes and swamps. Greater awareness of the historical diversity of river form is now informing river restoration that seeks to re-create these multichanneled rivers.43 In some of the pioneering river restoration projects undertaken within the past decade, initial public concern and reluctance to accept restoration of braided or anastomosing rivers has given way to pride in the results when the restored river corridor becomes a place rich in birds and wildlife. At the Mareit River in northern Italy, for example, ignorance of the past existence of a braided channel form informed public reluctance to endorse restoration of braiding. Once the project was completed, however, it received a European Union prize for river restoration and the positive attention and recreational and wildlife-watching opportunities associated with the restored river corridor became a source of pride to local communities. Changing attitudes made it easier for local residents to accept braided rivers as an appropriate river form in an alpine valley.44 Whether we think about rivers or forests, fungi, wildfire, excess sediment, or nitrates, our understanding of the natural world and our place within it relies heavily on our understanding of a past that runs from deep geologic time to recent decades. Clearly, our present is inextricably bound to our past.

Notes 1 S.L. Brantley, M.B. Goldhaber and K.V. Ragnarsdottir, “Crossing disciplines and scales to understand the critical zone.” Elements 3 (2007), 307–314. 2 R. Datta and S. Paul, “Wood wide web.” Science Reporter (2016), 42–43; C.J. Rhodes, “The whispering world of plants: ‘The Wood Wide Web’.” Science Progress 100 (2017), 331–337.

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Ellen Wohl 3 T.S. Bianchi, S.F. DiMarco, J.H. Cowan, R.D. Hetland, P. Chapman, J.W. Day and M.A. Allison, “The science of hypoxia in the Northern Gulf of Mexico: A review.” Science of the Total Environment 408 (2010), 1471–1484. 4 D.L. Breitburg, D.W. Hondorp, L.A. Davias and R.J. Diaz, “Hypoxia, nitrogen, and fisheries: Integrating effects across local and global landscapes.” Annual Review of Marine Science 1 (2009), 329–349; P.J. Mulholland, A.M. Helton, G.C. Poole, R.O. Hall, S.K. Hamilton, B.J. Peterson et al., “Stream denitrification across biomes and its response to anthropogenic nitrate loading.” Nature 452 (2008), 202–205. 5 G.M. Jones, J.J. Keane, R.J. Gutierrez and M.Z. Peery, “Declining old-forest species as a legacy of large trees lost.” Diversity and Distributions 24 (2018), 341–351; J. Woodbridge, R.M. Fyfe, N. Roberts, S. Downey, K. Edinborough and S. Shennan, “The impact of the Neolithic agricultural transition in Britain: A comparison of pollen-based land-cover and archaeological 14C date-inferred population change.” Journal of Archaeological Science 51 (2014), 216–224. 6 J. Rockstrӧm, W. Steffen, K. Noone, A. Persson, F.S. Chapin, E. Lambin, T.M. Lenton et al., “Planetary boundaries: Exploring the safe operating space for humanity.” Ecology and Society 14 (2009), 32. 7 C. Battisti, G. Poeta and G. Fanelli, An Introduction to Disturbance Ecology: A Road Map for Wildlife Management and Conservation (Cham: Springer, 2016). 8 V.M. Butz Huryn, “Ecological impacts of introduced honey bees.” The Quarterly Review of Biology 72 (1997), 275–297; S.W. James and P.F. Hendrix, “Invasion of exotic earthworms into North America and other regions.” In C.A. Edwards, ed., Earthworm Ecology, 2nd edition (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2004), 75–88. 9 D.R. Foster, D.H. Knight and J.F. Franklin, “Landscape patterns and legacies resulting from large, infrequent forest disturbances.” Ecosystems 1 (1998), 497–510. 10 J.L. Gill, J.W. Williams, S.T. Jackson, K.B. Lininger and G.S. Robinson, “Pleistocene megafaunal collapse, novel plant communities, and enhanced fire regimes in North America.” Science 326 (2009), 1100–1103. 11 V.R. Baker, “Catastrophism and uniformitarianism: Logical roots and current relevance in geology.” In D.J. Blundell and A.C. Scott, eds., Lyell: The Past Is the Key to the Present (London: Geological Society of London Special Publications, 1998), 171–182. 12 M.G. Wolman and J.P. Miller, “Magnitude and frequency of forces in geomorphic processes.” The Journal of Geology 68 (1960), 54–74. 13 W.M. Davis, Elementary Physical Geography (Boston: Ginn and Co., 1902). 14 S.J. Pyne, Grove Karl Gilbert: A Great Engine of Research (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1980). 15 P.B. Landres, P. Morgan and F.J. Swanson, “Overview of the use of natural variability concepts in managing ecological systems.” Ecological Applications 9 (1999), 1179–1188. 16 R.E. Keane, P.F. Hessburg, P.B. Landres and F.J. Swanson, “The use of historical range and variability (HRV) in landscape management.” Forest Ecology and Management 258 (2009), 1025–1037. 17 L.A. James, “Legacy sediment: Definitions and processes of episodically produced anthropogenic sediment.” Anthropocene 2 (2013), 16–26; E. Wohl, “Legacy effects on sediments in river corridors.” EarthScience Reviews 147 (2015), 30–53. 18 R.C. Walter and D.J. Merritts, “Natural streams and the legacy of water-powered mills.” Science 319 (2008), 299–304. 19 R.F. Smith, E.C. Neideigh, A.M. Rittle and J.R. Wallace, “Assessing macroinvertebrate community response to restoration of big spring run: Expanded analysis of before-after-control-impact sampling designs.” River Research and Applications 36 (2020), 79–90. 20 S. Freinkel, American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 21 D.M. Ludlum, “The great hurricane of 1938.” Weatherwise 41 (1988), 214–216. 22 D.R. Foster, J.D. Aber, J.M. Melillo, R.D. Bowden and F.A. Bazzaz, “Forest response to disturbance and anthropogenic stress.” BioScience 47 (1997), 437–445. 23 B.D. Collins, D.R. Montgomery and A.D. Haas, “Historical changes in the distribution and functions of large wood in Puget Lowland rivers.” Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 59 (2002), 66–76. 24 E. Wohl and D.J. Merritts, “What is a natural river?” Geography Compass 1 (2007), 871–900. 25 P. Gibbons, S.V. Briggs, D.A. Ayers, S. Doyle, J. Seddon, C. McElhinny, N. Jones, R. Sims and J.S. Doody, “Rapidly quantifying reference conditions in modified landscapes.” Biological Conservation 141 (2008), 2483–2493.

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The Past and Present in Environmental Science 26 W.M. Denevan, “The pristine myth: The landscape of the Americas in 1492.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82 (1992), 369–385; T.R. Vale, “The pre-European landscape of the United States: Pristine or humanized?” In T.R. Vale, ed., Fire, Native Peoples, and The Natural Landscape (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002), 1–40. 27 J.P. Wright, C.G. Jones and A.S. Flecker, “An ecosystem engineer, the beaver, increases species richness at the landscape scale.” Oecologia 132 (2002), 96–101. 28 R.L. Klotz, “Reduction of high nitrate concentrations in a central New York State stream impounded by beaver.” Northeastern Naturalist 17 (2010), 349–356; D. Laurel and E. Wohl, “The persistence of beaver-induced geomorphic heterogeneity and organic carbon stock in river corridors.” Earth Surface Processes and Landforms 44 (2019), 342–353; L.E. Polvi and E. Wohl, “The beaver meadow complex revisited – the role of beavers in post-glacial floodplain development.” Earth Surface Processes and Landforms 37 (2012), 332–346; P. Wegener, T. Covino and E. Wohl, “Beaver-mediated lateral hydrologic connectivity, fluvial carbon and nutrient flux, and aquatic ecosystem metabolism.” Water Resources Research 53 (2017), 4606–4623. 29 R.J. Naiman, C.A. Johnston and J.C. Kelley, “Alteration of North American streams by beaver.” BioScience 38 (1988), 753–762. 30 E.C. Wolf, D.J. Cooper and N.T. Hobbs, “Hydrologic regime and herbivory stabilize an alternative state in Yellowstone National Park.” Ecological Applications 17 (2007), 1572–1587. 31 E. Wohl, “Legacy effects of loss of beavers in the continental United States.” Environmental Research Letters 16 (2021), 025010. 32 B.A. Nolet and F. Rosell, “Comeback of the beaver Castor fiber: An overview of old and new conservation problems.” Biological Conservation 83 (1998), 165–173. 33 S. Albert and T. Trimble, “Beavers are partners in riparian restoration on the Zuni Indian Reservation.” Ecological Restoration 18 (2000), 87–92. 34 S.J. Pyne, Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982). 35 R. Miller, “Prescribed burns in California: A  historical case study of the integration of scientific research and policy.” Fire 3 (2020), 44. 36 G.P. Marsh, Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (London: S. Low, Son and Marston, 1865); E.A. Mills, In Beaver World (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1913). 37 Japanese Ministry of Construction, Sabo (Kobe: Ministry of Construction, 1993), 1–36. 38 S.L. Lewis and M.A. Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene.” Nature 519 (2015), 171–180. 39 K.J. Gregory, ed., “The impact of river channelization.” Special issue of The Geographical Journal 151 (1985), 53–74. 40 S.E. Gergel, M.D. Dixon and M.G. Turner, “Consequences of human-altered floods: Levees, floods, and floodplain forests along the Wisconsin River.” Ecological Applications 12 (2002), 1755–1770. 41 E. Wohl, “A legacy of absence: Wood removal in US rivers.” Progress in Physical Geography 38 (2014), 637–663. 42 G.M. Kondolf, “River restoration and meanders.” Ecology and Society 11 (2006), 42; K.N. Wilson, S.L. Baker and G.M. Kondolf, “The ideal meander: Exploring freshwater scientist drawings of river restoration.” Freshwater Science 39 (2020), 349–355. 43 A.G. Brown, L. Lespez, D.A. Sear, J.J. Macaire, P. Houben, K. Klimek, R.E. Brazier, K. Van Oost and B. Pears, “Natural vs anthropogenic streams in Europe: History, ecology and implications for restoration, river-rewilding and riverine ecosystem services.” Earth-Science Reviews 180 (2018), 185–205. 44 Y.F. Le Lay, H. Piegay and A. Riviere-Honegger, “Perception of braided river landscapes: Implications for public participation and sustainable management.” Journal of Environmental Management 119 (2013), 1–12; V. Scorpio, A. Andreoli, M. Zaramella, S. Moritsch, J. Theule, A. Dell’Agnese, S. Muhar, M. Borga, W. Bertoldi and F. Comiti, “Restoring a glacier-fed river: Past and present morphodynamics of a degraded channel in the Italian Alps.” Earth Surface Processes and Landforms 45 (2020), 2804–2823.

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14 THE PAST AND PRESENT OF THE COSMOS David Garofalo

The relationship between the past and present at first sight appears straightforward. One cannot understand the present without understanding the past because the past connects to, shapes, and is responsible for the present. This direct causal connection between past and present rests at the foundation of disciplines within and beyond the physical sciences and informs everything we understand about the cosmos in astronomy and guides us in pushing the boundaries of knowledge in that discipline. Astronomers are confident that our future understanding of the universe will emerge within this causal framework. This chapter is divided into two sections. In the first section, on astronomy, we will explore the basic tools of the subject that fit within this causal framework which over the past century have led to our current picture of the universe: the Doppler effect and the luminosity-distance relation. These patterns, or laws of nature, have allowed astronomers to determine how fast things move and how far away they are, key aspects to uncovering the structure of the universe and the modern picture of the cosmos. In the second section, on cosmology, we examine this cause-and-effect relationship between past and present at a deeper level, and find that it begins to fall apart. Observing the patterns we call the laws of physics, we will find ourselves confronting the unresolved problem of time. While we will fail to understand time fundamentally, constraints on time will emerge to create a picture of past and present that is radically removed from notions of cause and effect. Present events, historical events, any occurrence in some place and at some time, which from the historian’s or astronomer’s perspective appears connected in a causal nexus, are instead discrete entities. Because cause and effect are intimately linked to notions of intention, we end up in a place where volition disappears, which in turn has repercussions for all endeavors that anchor their understanding of the present in the past.1

Astronomy The cause-and-effect framework in astronomy, the idea that cosmic events are related to each other in specific ways and are not isolated entities, has led to a picture of the universe that is rich and exotic in character. Aristotle’s point that with knowledge comes a better sense of ignorance is appropriate here. In the age of “precision cosmology,” we have quantitatively established the true extent of our ignorance. If we make a tally of all forms of energy in the universe, we understand only 4 percent of it. Less than a generation ago, astronomers discovered that most 194

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of the universe is made of something that pushes it apart, and called it dark energy. It appears to make up more than 70 percent of the stuff of the universe. Beginning in the 1930s, observations by Fritz Zwicky on the motions of clusters of galaxies revealed that such systems failed to obey Newton’s law of universal gravitation. In the 1960s, Vera Rubin began observing individual galaxies and the motions of stars within them and found that, as with clusters of galaxies, stellar motions in galaxies were similarly incompatible with Newton’s law of universal gravitation. To ensure compatibility with Newton’s law, astronomers soon realized they had to assume the existence of something invisible that is present inside and between galaxies that exerts gravitational pull. By the 1970s, astronomers called it dark matter. It has yet to be detected directly, but if there, it makes up about one-quarter of the stuff of the universe. Although we don’t know what this dark sector amounts to, we can infer that it must exist, otherwise the cause-and-effect connection between past and present, as directed by the laws of physics, falls apart. The rest of the stuff in the universe is no less exotic, with strange regions of highly curved space-time directly observed by the Event Horizon Telescope (launched in 2009). Black holes are now well-established features of the universe, yet they contribute to the large-scale structure of the universe in ways not yet understood. By interpreting their mathematical expressions as solutions to the equations of general relativity theory, we find them to be places where space flows and time stops, notions that push our commonsense ideas of motion as something occurring through space as time passes to the breaking point.

The Doppler Shift The first key analytical tool of modern astronomy, the Doppler effect, dates to the mid-nineteenth century. It is usually illustrated via sound waves and the changing pitch of sound emanating from a moving vehicle as it moves toward or away from the hearer. Because electromagnetic radiation is also a wave, the same idea applies to its motion. Depending on the speed of an object towards or away from you, light is observed to be a little bluer or a little redder, hence “blueshift” and “redshift.” The amount of the shift is proportional to the speed of the emitting source and the quantitative character of this electromagnetic Doppler shift is one of the most powerful tools in astronomy. It allows us to observe objects in the near and distant universe and determine their speeds along our line of sight. With this tool, astronomers have been able to make a series of groundbreaking discoveries.

The Expansion of the Universe In the latter half of the 1920s, astronomers accessed technology that allowed them to observe objects that at the time were referred to as nebulae, bright but cloudy or smeared light-emitting entities. A  debate about whether such things resided within our galaxy had left the question of relative distance unresolved. We will discuss the second fundamental tool of astronomy which allowed astronomers to determine distances to objects in the next section. There we will see how astronomers came to understand that these so-called nebulae were at great distances from the stars in our galaxy. That insight, coupled with Doppler shift measurements of these external nebulae, or galaxies, as they are now understood to be, revealed an astonishing new picture of the universe, so radical that many astronomers hesitated in accepting it. Astronomers identified galaxies at various large-scale distances and in different locations in the sky. They found that the further away a galaxy is, the greater its Doppler redshift, indicating motion away from us. Think of two galaxies identified in two separate locations of the sky, one perhaps in the southern hemisphere and the other in the northern hemisphere. They are both at the same 195

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distance from us and they both have the same Doppler redshift. Somehow, it seems, these two galaxies have a common origin of sorts and “know about each other,” in that they are causally connected. How can two objects so far apart achieve this? Could it have been an explosion of some kind that propelled the galaxies away from us in this way? Explosions, however, are messy and do not generate a high degree of spherical symmetry. On top of that, explosions do not produce speeds that increase the farther one gets from the original epicenter. A picture that explained this data, however, was readily available. Within the theory of general relativity, it was possible to understand this spherical symmetry in the Doppler shift measurements not as motion through space but from the result of the expansion of space itself. If you observe dots drawn on a balloon that you then inflate, the distance between them increases as the balloon expands. This highly abstract picture remains poorly understood, even by professional astronomers. The light from distant galaxies arrives to us in the present but it carries information about a deep past, and from our causal framework, astronomers infer that space was smaller in the past compared to the present.

The Existence of Monster Black Holes in Galaxy Centers If we look back increasingly deeply into the past, we see the familiar structures we call galaxies disappear. At first, they are replaced by galaxies that are less well organized into clear spiral or elliptical shapes as our closest galactic neighbors are. If we look back further, we see galaxies vanish altogether, which is evidence that they emerged at some point in the deep past from a more uniform distribution of matter and evolved over billions of years into the objects we see around us today. The search for the forces responsible for galactic evolution was transformed in the mid 1990s, due in large part to the data provided by the Hubble Space Telescope. What the data revealed was anomalous motion of gas and stars close to galaxy centers, orbiting at phenomenal speeds around extremely massive but unseen objects. From Doppler measurements, the speeds of gas and dust revealed the presence of gravitational forces compatible with objects as massive as tens of millions to billions of times the mass of our star, the Sun. In every galaxy where it was possible to view the motion of gas and or stars near the center, astronomers discovered evidence for massive dark objects. As the evidence grew and the explanations evolved, astronomers eventually settled on the most conservative scenario: every galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center. A number of correlations between central supermassive black holes in galaxies and the properties of their host galaxies have been established that should provide us with a road map for understanding black holes. Yet, after more than two decades, they remain mostly unexplained. One such correlation involves the mass of the central black hole and the speeds of stars outside the black hole gravitational sphere of influence. Again, the Doppler shift gives astronomers insight into this new problem. If we think of the US as the size of the galaxy and place a massive black hole in Kansas, this black hole would occupy a region about as large as a fingernail. Clearly, black holes are spatially irrelevant to galaxies. But are they gravitationally irrelevant? We can calculate how far from this fingernail-sized black hole one would have to travel before reaching a point where the gravitational force of objects other than the black hole, such as gas, dust, and stars, becomes dominant. The answer on this same US-sized scale is about 15 centimeters. Hence, these monster black holes are both spatially and gravitationally irrelevant to galaxies as a whole. How can something that does not meaningfully influence galaxies produce correlations with matter at the edge of the galaxy? Astronomers are trying to resolve these black hole–galaxy correlations within a causal framework. Did black holes form first and then somehow contribute to the formation of the galaxy around them, 196

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or did galaxies form first, which then somehow led to the formation of black holes in their centers? The answer awaits.

The Missing Gravity Problem and the Idea of Dark Matter When Vera Rubin began looking at the motions of stars in galaxies in the 1960s, little did she know that she was about to uncover something fundamental. The most basic law of nature tells us that force is equal to mass times acceleration. If you know the force and the mass, you can find the acceleration, which in turn is connected to the velocity. The cause-and-effect loop works with forces causing acceleration, which amounts to a change in velocity. By looking at galaxies, it is possible to estimate the mass of gas, dust, and stars present, because they emit or scatter light. What Rubin found is that velocities obtained by using Newton’s second law, which stipulates that mass times acceleration equals force, were much too small in magnitude compared to what she observed. Rubin’s calculations were based upon her study of the behavior of every galaxy for which she could make the appropriate measurements. In short, Rubin uncovered a simple yet largely unrecognized fact: the basic laws of physics do not work on the scale of the universe as a whole. Because ideas that had worked so well in explaining how nature functioned cannot be casually dismissed, Rubin’s observations forced a reckoning about the existence of extra gravity caused by unseen matter that amounts to more than 80 percent of the matter in galaxies. The current prevailing idea is that this so-called dark matter consists of so far undiscovered particles that interact weakly with baryonic matter but nonetheless add gravitational force.

The Speeds of Distant Supernovae and Their Connection to Dark Energy From the recognition of an expanding universe in the late 1920s until the end of the twentieth century, those who thought about its evolution in time imagined that gravity would gradually slow the expansion of space and possibly bring it to a halt. Given the basic assumption that gravity dominated the evolution of the universe on the largest scales, cosmologists began exploring whether there was enough gravity in the universe to sufficiently slow the expansion and even contract it, or whether the matter present was insufficient, allowing space to expand ever more slowly into an infinite future. By using standard candles (defined in the next section) like supernovae, astronomers were able to measure the rate of expansion in the past compared to the current rate of expansion. Again, the observed Doppler shifts were crucial. To their surprise, they found the rate of expansion was not slowing down but speeding up. Hence, the possible scenarios that had been envisioned for eight decades had to be dismissed. A bold new idea took hold. The universe’s expansion was accelerating due to the presence of something unseen, something that made up much of the cosmos. As with dark matter, here too was a need for presupposing the existence of something undetected, a kind of repulsive force that permeated all of space and caused it to expand more rapidly. Somehow space itself needed to be endowed with this repulsive character. Empty space, apparently, has the ability to push space apart, something that Einstein had included in his equations, and which, for other reasons, he initially considered his “greatest blunder.” In large part, however, he would be vindicated. But what dark energy is, exactly, remains unknown. The progress that astronomers and cosmologists made in the twentieth century means that we can be quantitatively precise about the degree of our ignorance. The universe appears to be made of 73 percent dark energy, 23 percent of 197

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Figure 14.1 Light emitted by the central source travels outward. Because any sphere centered on the source experiences the same total amount of light through it, the flux through any fixed area on each sphere is smaller for larger spheres. Source: Author’s creation.

dark matter, and 4 percent atoms. In short, we currently understand 4 percent of it, albeit an important part.

The Flux-Luminosity Relation The second key tool of astronomy for understanding the universe is the relation between the amount of light emitted by a source and the amount of light received by the observer. In Figure 14.1 we illustrate this with a central source generating light that travels radially outward, as indicated by the arrows. Consider two spheres, both centered on the source, but with different radii, as shown. Because the number of arrows piercing through both spheres is the same, the total amount of light through each sphere is the same. It is equal to the luminosity of the source L. For a fixed small region on each sphere, the constancy of L through each sphere implies that less total light pierces that fixed small region on the larger purple sphere. Hence, the further away your eye or telescope is from the source of light, the less light will be observed. That observed light is called the flux (f). The relation between L and f as displayed in the figure can be represented mathematically as L = 4πr2f. If one knows the luminosity of the source L, and one observes the source to obtain the flux f, then it is possible to infer the distance of the source by rearranging the equation in terms of distance as r = [L/(4πf)]1/2. A key component of this project to determine distance was identifying so-called standard candles, objects with known luminosity. Henrietta Leavitt discovered the first standard candle, known as a Cepheid variable, a type of star that pulsates at a rate related to its luminosity. It was this type of object that allowed Edwin Hubble to determine the distance from Earth of the Andromeda galaxy at about 3 million light-years. Given that our Milky Way galaxy has a radius of about 50 thousand light-years, the distance of Andromeda was clear evidence that it was a separate galaxy and not a collection of stars within the Milky Way. Shortly thereafter, Hubble identified many additional distant Cepheid variables, the host galaxies of which he placed on his now well-known Hubble diagram, which in 1929 provided evidence for cosmic expansion. Interestingly, the key tool for measuring distance in astronomy allowed us not only to transition away from the idea that ours is the only galaxy in the universe but also to detect the expansion of space. 198

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A second standard cosmological candle is the supernova, an exploding star, which can be viewed from enormous distances. These were theorized by Fritz Zwicky and were eventually discovered to have luminosities that vary in predictable ways, much like Cepheid variables. As we saw in the preceding section, these objects allowed astronomers at the end of the twentieth century to measure distances of galaxies on the largest scales, which then led to evidence of cosmic acceleration and the current notion of dark energy.

Cosmology In the second part of this section, our focus is on the rules, or laws, of Nature more fundamentally, which are needed to tackle the question of the origin and evolution of the universe as a whole. Here we will find that our intuitions fail. The cause-and-effect notion that underlies the connection between past and present in astronomy implies a time sequence to events; namely, that events described as causes reside in the past while effects reside in the future. A  closer examination of nature, however, causes this reasonably straightforward dualism to crumble. The laws of Nature all share a peculiar property. For simplicity’s sake, let us use a pendulum bob as a physical system that is representative of all physical systems (Figure  14.2). Imagine releasing the sphere attached to the string at an angle θ with respect to the vertical, from rest. The bob swings clockwise and speeds up to its fastest at the lowest point, after which it slows down and comes to a momentary stop as it reaches its highest point on the left. Then it comes down and speeds up in a mirror version of the past phase. This back-and-forth motion is not very exciting, but it holds the key to a deeper understanding of time in the laws of physics, so you decide to make a movie to demonstrate these laws. Then you decide to show the movie to a friend. Whether you choose to play the movie forwards or backwards in time, your friend is still bored. Why? Because nothing particularly interesting happens in the movie, regardless of which way you play it. Depicting the pendulum’s movement in mathematical equations, we make a fundamental observation: the laws of physics (in this case the laws governing the motion of the pendulum) are time-reversal invariant. In other words, the laws of physics do not favor one direction of time over the other. Following the movement of the pendulum as described by the math, a reversal of the direction of time does not produce a sequence of events that is unfamiliar to us. But are the laws of physics not expected to explain our world more generally? If we make a movie of the macroscopic world of people walking, of cars and buses on the move, and play that movie backwards in time, a clear difference appears and your friend with whom you are watching the movie is no longer bored. If we make a movie of a truck that collides with a stop sign (Figure 14.3), we immediately recognize the direction of time and declare the backwardsplayed move incompatible with the laws of Nature. We declare, in short, that the bus moving backwards away from a sign that reassembles itself from the ground up is in violation of the laws

Figure 14.2  A pendulum bob released from rest at an angle θ with respect to the vertical. Source: Author’s creation.

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Figure 14.3  A movie of a truck crashing into a stop sign looks very different when played backwards in time. Source: Author’s creation.

of Nature. But it is not. The laws of Nature do not recognize the direction of time; backwards and forwards in time are equivalent. We have understood this for two hundred years now, in large part due to the work of nineteenth-century Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who defined entropy as we understand it today. Science perceives that the reconstitution of the stop sign as the truck moves backwards away from it requires a very fine-tuned assemblage of matter and energy, but is not in violation of any of the laws of physics. It is, in short, not an impossible process but rather merely a very unlikely one. And this likelihood argument leads us to understand why there is an arrow of time at the macroscopic level. The sharp arrow of time that characterizes the macroscopic world is not a mystery but a consequence of a low-entropy cosmos that relentlessly marches toward a chaotic future. But there is a mystery lurking at the heart of this picture. Why is this entropy so much lower than one would expect? In fact, given our understanding of physical laws, we would predict to be living in a mostly messy, chaotic, high-entropy universe, with only small pockets of low entropy. Strangely, the universe we would expect to be in is one in which the desire to eat a cake would more easily be met by just waiting for Nature to assemble one randomly as opposed to the universe in which we actually live, where we are required to bake the cake from scratch, then slice it and plate it. But the reasons for the low-entropy universe, which drag us back all the way to the Big Bang, are not our concerns here. Our focus here is on the connection in time between events that we locate in the past with those we observe in the present. The takeaway is that something about which we have a strong intuition, the arrow of time, is not fundamental to the way Nature works. Having established this, we now can draw further conclusions about the relationship between past and present in the realm of physics. The preceding paragraphs suggest that our strong intuitions about cause and effect past and present, need revisiting. We now introduce arguably the strangest idea of twentieth-century physics and, in so doing, further downgrade the intimate link between past and present that we described when discussing astronomy earlier. The possibility emerges that, while we can view past and present as connected, they are in fact independent entities. Figures 14.4 and 14.5 are examples of space-time diagrams, powerful tools for understanding relativity. They depict perhaps the strangest idea in all of science. But to understand it we need to step back and build some brand new intuitions. Consider living your entire lifetime at one location in the one-dimensional universe represented in these figures, with a vertical line indicating a fixed spatial position as time passes vertically. Motion on the space-time diagram, therefore, involves lines that are not vertical. For example, moving at constant speed to the right would be a diagonal line that tilts toward the spatial axis. The faster the motion, the greater the tilt. The diagonal line in Figure 14.4 indicates motion at the speed of light. Since that is a limiting speed, all other motions at constant speed must tilt less toward the x axis than the diagonal line. Let us now consider events in space-time. Event A is associated with a position along the space axis and a time along the t axis, both of which are 200

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Figure 14.4 A diagonal line on a space-time diagram represents motion at constant speed. The greater the speed, the greater the tilt of the diagonal line toward the space axis. The diagonal line represents the speed of light. We place events A through E on the diagram. A occurs first at a location on the left of the origin, B occurs after A but to the right of the origin, C occurs after B but at a location to the right of where B occurs, D occurs after C but to the right of where C occurs, and E occurs after all other events but closest to the origin.

Figure 14.5 In addition to the perpendicular space/time axes, an additional set of space/time axes are included for an observer moving to the right. For the moving observer, events A, B, C, and D all occur at the same time.

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negative. Event B occurs close to the origin of the space axis but on the other side, so its value is positive. If we imagine we are located at the origin of the space axis, then event A happened in our past and to our left while event B will occur in the future but to our right. Events C and D will also occur in the future but further away from us to our right. Event E, instead, will occur after all the other events but it will happen near us. The key to obtaining time and space coordinates for these events is as follows. To get times for each event I start at the event and move in the direction of the space axis until I hit the time axis. For event A, for example, I must move horizontally (because the space axis is oriented horizontally) to the right. For events B, C, D, and E, instead, I must move horizontally to the left, which ticks off progressively larger values of time along the vertical time axis. In order to obtain the space coordinate of each event, on the other hand, I must start at the location of the event in the space-time diagram and move vertically (because the time axis is oriented vertically). For event A this means I must move upward until I hit the space axis at some negative value (i.e., to the left of the origin). For events B, C, D, and E, I obtain the spatial locations by moving vertically downward. I obtain a small positive space value for event E and progressively larger ones for events B through D. With these ideas in hand, we introduce an additional feature which has both theoretical as well as experimental support, the constancy of the speed of light: regardless of the speed of the observer, the latter always measures light to be moving at the same speed, c. This leads us to the space-time diagram in Figure 14.5. The non perpendicular axes describe space and time according to an observer who is moving to the right with a speed that is represented by the diagonal time axis. The reason they are tilted is to ensure that this moving observer also measures light to be moving at the same speed c. By comparison, the time axis of Figure 14.4 describes our static motion through space and time. We are sitting motionless at the spatial origin, which on the space-time diagram amounts to moving straight up along the vertical direction. Hence, the time axis describes the path through space-time of observers who measure time along that axis. Let us now explore the space-time events according to the moving observer. Event A is to the left of the diagonal spatial axis and events B,C, and D are to the right of the origin on the diagonal space axis. Event E is a bit tricky. To obtain its spatial location on the diagonal space axis, I must start at event E and move along toward the diagonal space axis by tilting in the same way that the diagonal time axis is tilted. In other words, I must tilt leftward and downward. I reach the diagonal space axis a bit to the left of the origin, so so event E occurs closer to the origin of the diagonal space axis than event A. All this is similar to what the stationary observer measures. But now let us find the times associated with these events. Start at event A and move toward the diagonal time axis but along the space axis and then do the same for events B,C, and D. While for the former I must move to the right and up, for the latter three I must move to the left and down. They all converge on the same time value, namely the origin, or time equals zero. Event E, instead, requires that I move from event E to the right and upwards to obtain its time value, which is some positive nonzero time. Hence, from the perspective of the observer in motion, events A, B, C, and D, all occur at the same time, while event E occurs in the future. These are issues of principle. If relativity theory is correct, it states that simultaneity is observer dependent. What that means in practical terms is astonishing, well beyond our commonsense intuitions. Event A, which from one perspective occurs in the past and is therefore in some sense gone, nonexistent, is, from another perspective, occurring at the same moment as event B. Now event B is considered not to have happened yet from the perspective of the non-moving observer. The astonishing fact is that both observers are correct and no violation of causality emerges from this. If I throw a ball to you and you catch it, the picture of this event is the same from all perspectives. There is no perspective from which we end up flipping the

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cause-and-effect association. The study of relativity involves showing how standard cause-andeffect relationships remain satisfied regardless of the perspective. And it is possible for us to do this on our space-time diagram. What ultimately emerges from these ideas is that all the events in space-time, those that occur in the past of some observer and those that occur in the future of that same observer, are equally real. Many of them could be occurring in the present of some observer. A useful analogy might be reading a novel. Page 7 might be describing the events in the youth of the main character in the story, while page 100 might describe the character in old age. Although you might be tempted to experience the events that you are currently reading (say on page 40) as the present events, in no way would you argue that page 7 and page 100 are less real than page 40. They are not only equally real; their existence is, in a very real sense, independent. It is the words that somehow convey a connection to you as a reader. Something similar occurs in space-time. The events of past, present, and future are all equally real, but the laws of Nature connect them in a way that suggests causality. So what do we come away with when we ask what is the relationship between the past and the present in cosmology? Although physical laws instantiate a connection between the present and the past, the two are fundamentally independent. To use yet another an analogy, if we think of the number line, there is a sense in which the numbers are connected to each other operationally. Think of 3 as resulting from adding 1 and 2. But we would be remiss in not noting that 3 lives on the number line in the same way as 1 and 2 do, and their existence is more fundamental than the operation 1 + 2 = 3, which does not live on the number line except in the abstract space of addition. The analogy with the events of space and time is in thinking about the operation that takes numbers 1 and 2 and produces the number 3 as a kind of cause-and-effect relation. Accordingly, while that operation (a cause-and-effect relation) is one way of looking at the three numbers, it is not a fundamental aspect of their existence. In the same vein, the events of the universe should be thought of as existing independently and time should be viewed similarly to an equation depicting an addition operation, an abstraction that allows us to make sense of and categorize events embedded in the space-time continuum. Like the number line, space-time events in the space-time continuum are basic entities. Future investigations that we expect will shed light on the essential nature of the cosmos involve recasting an approach that characterizes reality in terms of space, time, and matter and replacing them with something more fundamental. This resolution resides in the subdiscipline of physics known as quantum, dealing with reality on the smallest of scales. There are hints that a new notion of space-time will emerge from a fuller understanding of quantum entanglement, with considerable repercussions for scientific notions of past and present. Modern science began with some basic assumptions about the nature of reality that conform to everyday experience. From that, and using our commonsense intuition, we built an intuitive picture of how past and present operate in our world. But on closer inspection, and guided by the patterns we observe in nature, we have found that the relationship is less fundamental, and that, instead, it is emergent. What science will say about the relationship between these foundational ideas in the future remains to be seen.

Note 1 It may be useful to define terms here. Astronomy tends to focus on smaller units like clusters of galaxies, galaxies, and things like the interstellar medium within galaxies. Cosmology is the study of the origin and evolution of the universe as a whole.

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Suggested Reading Carroll, Sean. From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. New York: Dutton, 2010. Greene, Brian. The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality. New York: Knopf, 2005. Kirshner, Robert. The Extravagant Universe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. Kragh, Helge. Conceptions of Cosmos: From Myths to the Accelerating Universe: A History of Cosmology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Kragh, Helge, and Malcolm Longair. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Modern Cosmology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Malkan, Matthew, and Ben Zuckerman, eds. Origin and Evolution of the Universe: From Big Bang to Exobiology, 2nd ed. Singapore: WSPC, 2020. Natarajan, Priyamvada. Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016. Overbye, Dennis. Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: The Story of the Scientific Quest for the Secret of the Universe. New York: Harper Perennial, 1992. Perlov, Delia, and Alex Vilenkin. Cosmology for the Curious. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2017. Price, Huw. Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Prigogine, Ilya. The End of Certainty. Time, Chaos and the New Laws of Nature. New York: Free Press, 1997. Tyson, Neil deGrasse. Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017.

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15 DISENGAGING WITH THE PAST Extinction and Resets of the Biosphere1 Roy E. Plotnick In 2020 and 2021, amid the Covid-19 pandemic, a major recreational outlet for my wife and me were visits to the various forest preserves of Cook County, Illinois. These protected natural areas make up nearly 70,000 acres and include wetlands, prairies, forest, woodlands, and savannas, with targeted nature preserves. Their establishment in the early twentieth century must count as one of the major conservation accomplishments in the history of the United States, along with the near contemporaneous creation of the National Park Service. Visiting the forest preserves, one might naively expect that one is getting a glimpse of an area that is virtually untouched by the presence of humans; that it represents the ecology of some ancient time. This is of course not correct: every acre bears the impacts of humanity, not only by populations since European settlement, but by indigenous populations before that. The concept of “unspoiled nature” erases the long history of land use by indigenous peoples. Illinois, the Prairie State, in 1820 had some 22,000,000 acres of prairie. Periodic fires, many set by Native Americans to drive game, kept it an open grassland. Now only 2,500 acres remain, with the rest turned into farmland. This prairie remnant must be actively managed to keep out invasive plants and other threats. Illinois was once home to elk, which were extirpated by 1850, and bison, gone by 1808. The demise of these large herbivores impacted both the carnivores that preyed on them (cougars disappeared by 1870) and the vegetation that they ate. The deer that we occasionally see in the preserves are the only remaining native large-bodied mammals. But the forest preserves also record an earlier loss of even larger animals. In several places, the remains of mastodons and mammoths have been uncovered (Figure 15.1). These huge megaherbivores (>1000 kg) disappeared about 14,000 years ago, towards the end of the last ice age and roughly contemporaneous with the first arrival of humans in the Americas. Whatever the cause of their extinction, whether climate change, hunting, or some combination, their disappearance from the landscape has had impacts that last until this day, such as the loss of the animal dispersers of the seeds of the Osage orange.2 Occasionally the forest preserves offer glimpses of even earlier life. In places one can see the bedrock of the region, 425-million-year-old Silurian dolomites (Figure 15.2). They record a time when the area was near the equator, under a warm tropical sea; these rocks were created from the remains of innumerable marine organisms. The dolomites contain fossils of ancient DOI: 10.4324/9781003026570-18

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Figure 15.1 Mammoth tooth and tusk. About 14,000 years old. Uncovered in Forest Park, Illinois. Pleistocene mammoth and mastodon remains have been found throughout the Chicago area. Source: Photo by author.

Figure 15.2 Quarry in Silurian Age rocks, Thornton, Illinois. This area preserves an ancient coral reef. Silurian rocks underlie the Chicago region. Source: Photo by author.

animals that belong not only to extinct species but to entire orders that have disappeared. But the rocks also impact modern ecosystems; they underlie the distinctive vegetation that grows on dolomite prairie soils. 206

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The way in which the history of life recorded in the Cook County forest preserves is replicated, in one form or another, across the globe illustrates one of the key lessons of paleontology: the living world is not only a product of what is happening today but also the result of what has happened before. We have breathable air because photosynthesis evolved. We have bees in prairies because flowers appeared. Dolomite soils exist because ancient organisms produced carbonate minerals. To paraphrase Theodosius Dobzhansky (Dobzhansky 1973), nothing in today’s biosphere makes sense except in the light of the fossil record. Life on Earth today is merely a snapshot of an ever-changing scene.3 A related key lesson of paleontology is the impact of extinction. The reality of extinction is paleontology’s great contribution to human thought, dating back to the eighteenth century when Georges Cuvier proved that mastodons no longer walked the Earth. As Norman Newell pointed out back in 1963: “If we may judge from the fossil record, eventual extinction seems to be the lot of all organisms.”4 Or, in a statement that Stephen Jay Gould attributed to David Raup, “to a first approximation, all species are extinct.”5 Marshall summarized these ideas within his “laws of paleobiology”: that all lineages go extinct, and that living species are a small fraction of those that have ever existed.6 He also points out that extinction wipes out a clade’s history (a clade is a named taxonomic group) by removing ancestors and their relatives, and that this history would be unknown without fossils. Not long after Cuvier, as paleontologists documented the history of life on Earth, they recognized that extinctions came in waves, which we call mass extinctions, with the largest episodes killing most of the extant species on Earth. The idea of a stable, unchanging biosphere proved untenable; it became possible to think of worlds before our own. In the centuries since, paleontologists have documented what those earlier Earths were like and how the modern biosphere emerged from them. Paleontology thus provides the historical narrative for biology; it explores what life was like in “deep time.”7 Extinctions are a key part of that historical narrative. The current biological world is very much the product of extinctions in the past. Mammals and birds dominate the land in the present because the bird’s dinosaur ancestors perished in the past; snails and clams are common seashells today because the once dominant brachiopods were devastated by extinction. And I do not see mammoths wandering the forest preserves because they no longer exist as living animals. In this chapter, I will explore some of the many ways that the fossil record illuminates the biological world of today. This is a story of irreparable loss but also of persistence. I will discuss the major extinction episodes and how they reset the biosphere to new and permanent states. I will also describe how the current extinction will leave a permanent signal in the fossil record of the future. The broad pattern of animal life over the Phanerozoic Eon, the last 541  million years of Earth history, can be seen in the fossils we collect from progressively younger rocks. In a collection from 500-million-year-old Cambrian rocks, I  will find abundant trilobites, a vanished class of arthropods. But when I collect fossils from Ordovician Age rocks in Illinois, from about 450 million years ago, I will find only the occasional trilobite. There will instead be plentiful brachiopods, crinoids, bryozoans, horn and tabulate corals, huge nautiloid cephalopods, and some clams and snails. At a Pennsylvanian Age site, some 150 million years younger, I will find almost the same fauna. Trilobites, however, will have become very scarce. Key details will have changed, with different kinds of brachiopods and corals and fewer trilobites, but the life in the oceans is fundamentally the same in the Ordovician and Pennsylvanian. For nearly the entire period from the late Cambrian to the end of Permian, a stretch of some 250 million years, the oceans were dominated by more or less the same groups of organisms. 207

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Figure 15.3 Pennsylvanian Age brachiopods, Oglesby, Illinois. Brachiopods are a dominant form of sea life during the Paleozoic. Scale units are centimeters. Source: Photo by author.

If I go to South Dakota, however, and collect in 100-million-year-old marine rocks from the Late Cretaceous, the picture is very different. A day’s haul will produce common bivalves and snails, the beautiful ammonoid cephalopods, rare crabs and lobsters, and the occasional fish. If one is very lucky (I have not been), one can find the remains of marine reptiles. There are almost no brachiopods or crinoids and certainly no trilobites. The picture would not be substantially different at any time from the beginning of the Triassic, 252 million years ago, until the end of the Cretaceous, 66 million years ago. Along the coast of Maryland, at Calvert Cliffs, is a famous fossil site of Miocene age, some 15 million years old. There are abundant snails and clams, as well as barnacles, crab claws, sea urchins, and shark teeth. Whales and other aquatic animals are rare and treasured finds. The fauna looks fundamentally like what one would find in the oceans today. Gone are the marine reptiles and ammonoids. What I have just described is what I like to call the “gestalt of the fossil record.” The recognition that we can divide the history of life over the past 540 million years into three great eras, the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic (“ancient life,” “middle life,” and “new life”) reflects some fundamental divisions. The dividing lines between these three eras are two of the largest mass extinctions in Earth history, the Permian-Triassic (P-Tr) extinction that concluded the Paleozoic, and the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) at the end of the Mesozoic. These three great eras, which together comprise the Phanerozoic Eon, have been qualitatively recognized by paleontologists and geologists for nearly 200 years. However, as Norman Newell perspicaciously said in 1971: The great geological time divisions, the periods and eras, are nineteenth-century conventions designed to reduce the voluminous data of earth history to meaningful and manageable proportions. They are as natural or as artificial as the chapters in any 208

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history book. Each period of the time scale is a more or less convenient grouping of associated events, and the history of each is unique simply because the course of history is largely stochastic, a fortuitous chain of cause and effect.8 A great deal of paleontological research since the 1960s has been focused on producing increasingly refined quantitative understandings of these changes in global biodiversity over time and the magnitude, impacts, and causes of the episodes of biodiversity decline. In 1963 Newell published a highly influential article in Scientific American, “Crises in the History of Life,” where he identified six major extinctions in animal life, at the ends of the Cambrian, Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Triassic and Cretaceous Periods.9 This was based on a compilation he developed of families of marine organisms.10 Newell also reviewed the evidence, obvious even then, that humans had become key agents of mass extinction. In the 1980s and 90s, J. John (“Jack”) Sepkoski Jr. attempted to bring additional quantitative rigor to the history of biodiversity by producing and then analyzing massive databases of the occurrence in the fossil record of families and genera of marine organisms.11 These analyses led to two concepts that became major motifs in subsequent paleontological thought.12 The first of these is that the fossil record of marine organisms can be partitioned into groups that wax and wane more or less in unison and that together dominate huge spans of Phanerozoic time.13 These were termed “evolutionary faunas.” The oldest of these is the Cambrian Evolutionary Fauna, comprised chiefly of trilobites. This was succeeded by the Paleozoic Evolutionary Fauna, dominated by organisms such as brachiopods and crinoids, predominant from the Ordovician until the end of the Permian. This is the fauna that I collect in the rocks of northern Illinois. The Modern Evolutionary Fauna rose to dominance in the Triassic and remains so today, represented by organisms such as clams, snails, crabs, and bony fishes. This is what I would collect in South Dakota and coastal Maryland. The evolutionary faunas do overlap, of course; for example, elements of the Paleozoic fauna still survive today but are much less common, while trilobites survived until the end of the Paleozoic. The second concept, which Sepkoski developed in concert with his colleague David Raup, was that there was a clear overall pattern to the history of global biodiversity.14 In brief, in the Cambrian there was a rapid rise of biodiversity, with the first appearance of nearly all phyla and many classes of animals, the highest levels in the taxonomic hierarchy. This was the Cambrian radiation, also known as the “Cambrian explosion.”15 This was followed by another rapid rise of diversity, this time at lower taxonomic levels within phyla and classes, such as families, during the Ordovician. This increase is now termed the Great Ordovician Biodiversity Event.16 The Ordovician terminated with an abrupt dip in diversity, the end-Ordovician mass extinction. Diversity then recovered and remained more or less constant for a very long interval, except for another drop near the end of the Devonian. At the end of the Permian there was the sharpest drop yet; this end-Permian mass extinction may have seen a loss of 80–95% of all species.17 Biodiversity recovered again, steadily rising to a current maximum, punctuated by sharp declines at the end of the Triassic and Cretaceous. The five major drops in diversity identified by Sepkoski and Raup became enshrined as the “five mass extinctions,” providing the context for discussions of today’s “Sixth Extinction.”18 Recent decades have seen marked improvements in data and methodology in documenting these overall patterns and intense focus on each of the five major extinctions, as well as on many of the smaller ones.19 This work has brought into question whether there were actually five mass extinctions, since biodiversity decline (“depletion”) can also reflect a drop in the number of originations of new species and brings into question whether the rise in biodiversity to a maximum level in recent times is real or an artifact.20 What remains clear, however, is that each 209

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episode of biodiversity depletion and recovery is a reset of the biosphere, with a removal of many incumbent forms and their eventual replacement by new ones from among the survivors. It has also become evident that such resets involve not only the variety of organisms but also the range of their ecological functions.21 The revival of ecosystems following extinctions, it turns out, is often much more rapid than the recovery of biodiversity.22 Three extinction episodes illustrate how important these episodes were in creating the modern biosphere. The first of these is the huge extinction at the end of the Permian, which has been called “when life nearly died” or “the great dying.”23 Increasing evidence supports the idea that the culprit was a series of huge volcanic eruptions in what is now Siberia, which initially produced major climate shifts.24 Then the magma intruded rocks rich in organic material, producing a massive release of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane. The impacts on atmospheric and oceanic chemistry and physics were rapid and immense; temperatures dramatically increased, and the oceans acidified and their oxygen levels dropped.25 Primary production by photosynthetic organisms remained low for about five million years.26 In the oceans, the P-Tr extinction shattered the incumbent Paleozoic Evolutionary Fauna, allowing it to be replaced by the Modern Evolutionary Fauna. Prior to the extinction, Permian oceans had thriving marine communities that typified the Paleozoic Evolutionary Fauna. Widespread organisms included rhynchonelliform (“articulate”) brachiopods, bryozoans, sponges, crinoids, rugose and tabulate corals, the huge single-celled fusulinids (foraminifera), chondrichthyan fish (sharks and their relatives), goniatite ammonoids, as well as snails and bivalves.27 In places, organisms constructed huge reefs. Within a period of 60,000 years or less, these communities collapsed. Trilobites, which were already very rare, finally disappeared, as did the blastoid echinoderms, the fusulinids, goniatite ammonoids, and both rugose and tabulate corals.28 Reef ecosystems vanished. Other groups, including gastropods, bivalves, brachiopods, crinoids, and fish, all suffered major declines but were not wiped out completely. As marine systems slowly recovered in the course of the Triassic, they came back looking considerably different. Corals reappeared in the Middle Triassic, but they belonged to a new group, the Scleractinia, which builds coral reefs today. Brachiopods and crinoids survive until today, but they have never returned to their previous levels of diversity and abundance. Snails and bivalves rebounded to become the dominant shelled organisms. A new group of ammonoids radiated to replace the lost goniatites. The diversity of bony fish, especially of ray-finned fishes, markedly increased.29 Instead of the marine mammals of today, there were diverse marine reptiles. The animals of the Paleozoic oceans would have looked very strange to a human diver (if they existed). In contrast, except for ammonoids, the invertebrates and fish of Mesozoic oceans would look familiar. It was a major step towards the marine biosphere of today, triggered by ancient volcanic eruptions. On land, the incumbent dominant Permian vertebrates were mammal relatives, the synapsids. This group was also devastated by the P-Tr extinction, although the extinction interval on land lasted some one million years.30 The Triassic saw the rise of the unrelated diapsids, which would evolve into the crocodilians and dinosaurs that would dominate for the remainder of the Mesozoic, until they in turn were devastated by the end-Cretaceous extinction. The first true mammals also appeared in the Triassic, evolving from the surviving synapsids. The end-Cretaceous (K-Pg) extinction, 66 million years ago, is by far the best understood and most famous. First, because it represents the end of the iconic non-avian dinosaurs (an awkward phrase that recognizes that birds are dinosaurs), but second, because of the spectacular nature of its cause: the impact of a massive asteroid at Chicxulub on the Yucatán Peninsula. Although repeatedly challenged since its initial publication, the impact hypothesis of Alvarez 210

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et  al. (1980) has become generally accepted, with recent evidence greatly strengthening the case.31 The details are too well known to repeat here, beyond saying that the impact triggered tsunamis, seiches, fires, darkness, acid rain, and acidified oceans. Things got very bad, very fast. The most well-known victims were the iconic non-avian dinosaurs, along with their flying relatives the pterosaurs and the wide diversity of marine reptiles. The ammonoids, which had close brushes with extinction at the Permian and Triassic extinction events, were not so fortunate this time. The single celled planktonic foraminifera were nearly wiped out. Birds and mammals also suffered diversity losses; toothed birds disappeared altogether. Overall, the recovery of ecosystems took hundreds of thousands of years, but global biodiversity took millions of years to return to pre-extinction levels.32 As life recovered, it was again reset from what it was before the extinction. Mammals diversified over the next 10 million years to produce nearly all the groups we are familiar with today, including such disparate groups as bats and whales.33 Birds also diversified rapidly to produce nearly all living groups. Ammonoids were gone, but their octopus and squid cousins became diverse and abundant. To a large extent, the modern biosphere is a direct product of the asteroid impact. We see bats and birds in the sky, not pterosaurs; whales and dolphins in the ocean, not plesiosaurs; elephants on land, not sauropods. Even the presence of humans, as part of the post-K-Pg radiation of primates, can be argued to be the contingent result of that ancient extinction. One place this can be seen is in the Amazon. In a remarkable study that took 20 years to complete, Mónica Carvalho and her colleagues examined plant communities in Colombia, about 1500 km south of the impact site in the Yucatán, before and after the extinction event. Prior to the impact, the rainforests in the region were open canopy and contained a diverse group of flowering plants (angiosperms), conifers, and ferns. Plant diversity declined 45% in the extinction and took some 6 million years to recover. The recovering forests did not look like those during the Cretaceous; instead, they more closely resembled those in the region today: they were dense, closed canopy, and dominated by angiosperms. As Carvalho and her collaborators point out, the impact, a historical “accident[,] . . . altered the ecological and evolutionary trajectory of tropical rainforests, in essence triggering the formation of the most diverse biome on Earth.”34 The third extinction event is far more recent. It saw the loss of many large mammal species at the end of the last ice age (the Wisconsin glaciation in North America) and is known as the Late Quaternary Megafaunal Extinction.35 Megafauna are mammals weighing more than 44 kilograms (l00 lbs). Because this is a terrestrial extinction, it is usually not included with the big five, as these are mainly based on the marine record. Prior to the extinction, North and South America contained a diverse array of mammals, many of them huge. The La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles, dating from about 40,000 years ago, preserve the typical fauna of the Pleistocene ice age, such as mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths, bighorn sheep, pronghorns, dire wolves, grey wolves, cougars, short-faced bears, American lions, and saber-toothed cats. Megafauna also ranged throughout Eurasia. By 11,000 years ago, as the last ice withdrew from North America, most of these animals, in particular the large ones, were gone from the Americas. The extinction of megafauna in Eurasia seems to have occurred in two pulses, at 45,000–20,000 and 12,000–9,000 years ago. A similar loss of large mammals had occurred earlier in Australia, with a possible peak around 44,000 YBP.36 In North America, among the herbivores, no animal greater in size than 1000 kilograms survived, including, of course, the mastodons and mammoths found in my local forest preserves. Native horses vanished. Every carnivore over 100 kilograms, save brown bears and jaguars, also disappeared. 211

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The causes of Late Quaternary Megafaunal Extinction have been fiercely argued for decades. In North and South America and Eurasia, it coincides with major climate shifts, shown by the rapid melting of the ice sheets, as well as the first appearance or spread of modern humans.37 The peak extinction in Australia roughly corresponds to the arrival of humans.38 To what extent the extinctions are due to climate, people, or an interaction between the two remains contentious and under active study.39 There is much greater consensus on the lingering impact of the extinction on the current biosphere. Examples abound of cases where organisms seem to be adapted to interact with herbivores and predators that no longer exist. The idea of “evolutionary anachronisms” was first developed by Janzen and Martin in 1982 in the wonderfully titled paper “Neotropical Anachronisms: The Fruits the Gomphotheres Ate.”40 They pointed out that traits of many modern forest flora in Costa Rica can be explained by their prior interactions with now vanished mammals that once inhabited that forest. For example, many nuts and seeds have coats too thick and tough to be digested by modern denizens of the forest. The fruits of some trees rot beneath the tree without being eaten, leaving their seeds undispersed. The loss of herbivores in the forest had major impacts on these trees’ ability to disperse. In one of my favorite sections, Janzen and Martin point out how ecologists could be badly misled in their understanding of the biology of these plants if they were unaware of their evolutionary history. They also suggest that such North America species such as honey locusts, Osage oranges, and pawpaws may also be similar evolutionary anachronisms.41 Another wonderful example is the pronghorn. These are the fastest animals in North America. They can reach top speed of about 60 miles an hour and are able to cruise at 45 miles an hour for long distances.42 There are currently no native predators that can come close to reaching that speed, which approaches that of African cheetahs. However, among the extinct felids found at places such as La Brea are two extinct species of the American cheetah Miracinonyx. In 1997, the pronghorn biologist John Byers suggested that the speed of pronghorns was a relic of its pursuit by Miracinonyx, a function of what he termed the “ghost of predators past.”43 Ecosystems also carry the aftermath of the extinction, as discussed in detail by Malhi et al. (2016).44 For example, if you have ever seen images of modern forest elephants, you know how much damage they can do by both eating and trampling. By suppressing tree growth, they allow the survival of grass and forbs. It would be expected that the loss of mammoths and mastodons would have major impacts on ecosystems, producing a shift to closed canopy forests in wet climates and to fire-dominated systems in dry regions. Much of the native vegetation in North America at the time of European settlement reflects the loss of the megaherbivores. Smith et al. (2010) examined the impact of the megaherbivore loss on the global methane budget.45 Because methane is a significant greenhouse gas, its concentration in the atmosphere has major impacts on climate. They estimate that about half of the methane emission due to herbivores was lost, a value supported by independent data. Methane values have since recovered and due to the massive growth of livestock are now at least double the value prior to the megafauna extinction. The Late Quaternary Megafaunal (LQM) Extinction can be considered the dramatic opening act of a single current and ongoing extinction.46 All previous mass extinctions have been mainly triggered by the collapse of the food chain; they are “bottom up” phenomena. The LQM and the current extinction instead are mainly “top down,” with the loss of major consumers and predators and an ongoing reduction in animal body sizes.47 They also differ, of course, in the key role played by humans. The sixth extinction is inseparable from the Anthropocene, the informally named period of Earth history characterized by anthropogenic impacts.48 212

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The current extinction episode will also leave a distinct signal, both in the surviving biosphere and in the fossil record. Although the modern extinction has not approached ancient ones in magnitude, it resembles them in rate.49 It may still, over the next several hundred years, approach them in scale. Some 25% of all mammal species are currently threatened with extinction. The loss of surviving megafauna may not be that far off, with corresponding long-term impacts on ecosystems.50 Another reset may be underway. One of the most difficult aspects of comparing these past extinctions with that going on today are the many differences in the nature of the data.51 In a pair of papers, my coauthors and I attempted to address this issue by asking, “What would today’s extinction look like to some future paleontologist, thousands or even millions of years in the future?” The first of these papers asked, “What will be missing from the fossil record of the mammal species that are going extinct today?”52 Our conclusions were sobering; only about 9% of the species currently threatened with extinction are known as fossils. The remaining 91% may not only go extinct, but they may leave no record of their existence except in ephemeral human accounts. The second paper asked the parallel question, “What of today’s mammals will be there?”53 The result is equally sobering. The current biomass of livestock and humans combined is more than 20 times that of all wild mammals.54 The preservation potential of people and their domestic animals, in places such as cemeteries and landfills, is far higher than that of wild animals. The future fossil record of mammals will consist mainly of pigs, cattle, and humans, perhaps with the occasional hunted deer. What is the lesson for us of past extinctions? First, that which we often perceive as unspoiled nature is anything but. The forest preserves, national parks, and similar areas are vital to maintaining, or perhaps even restoring, what is left. Restoration requires a careful appraisal of the “baseline” to which we are restoring. Although some wilderness areas in North America have never been directly impacted by humans, including by indigenous peoples, many have a long history of usage prior to European settlement. Are we seeking to restore to a state prior to European settlement? Prior to the arrival of indigenous peoples? Do we want to recreate the Pleistocene, as some of have suggested we do?55 As Kolbert has pointed out, removing human impact requires human impact.56 Second, extinctions are contingent events that shape the living world forever.57 The current biosphere reflects the resets caused not only by the major mass extinctions but also the many other smaller-scale ones that have occurred in Earth history. Third, we must be sanguine about recovery from the present biotic crisis. The aftermath of the K-Pg extinction teaches us that the recovery of ecosystems takes tens to hundreds of thousands of years and can be highly volatile. Biodiversity may take tens of millions of years to reach pre-extinction levels. If left alone, life will locate a path to recovery. At best, however, this process takes far longer than the span of modern human existence. We must preserve what we have before it is lost forever. Finally, dealing with the reality of extinction and other agents of global change requires the unique perspective of paleontologists and other students of Earth history. Ongoing alterations in the Earth’s atmosphere, the extinction of species, the large-scale modifications of the land surface, the acidification of the oceans, the retreat of glaciers: all of these are transformations whose ultimate outcomes we cannot see and whose impacts we cannot accurately predict. Paleontologists are uniquely qualified to know what happens when things in the natural world go really bad and how this impacts life. What will the world of the future be like with carbon dioxide levels twice those of today? With acidified oceans? With massive species loss? We simply do not know; it will strongly 213

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depend on how fast we get there. But if you want at least a clue, ask a paleontologist. We have seen it before. The fundamental concept of paleontology is that “life has a history.” But paleontologists do not see the study of that history as divorced from the study of the living world today. In order to interpret the biology of ancient organisms and ecosystems, we are students of the anatomy, morphology, physiology, development, genetics, ecology, and so forth of living organisms. At the same time, we insist that truly understanding the modern biological world requires knowing its history. Paleontologists “bring the dead to life” by reconstructing the biology of long-extinct organisms while also integrating the fossil record and the modern biological world to understand the history of life on Earth.

Notes 1 The author would like to thank Paul M. Dover for inviting me to write this chapter and Karen Koy for providing useful comments on the manuscript. 2 Y. Malhi, C.E. Doughty, M. Galetti, F.A. Smith, J.-C. Svenning and J.W. Terborgh, “Megafauna and ecosystem function from the Pleistocene to the Anthropocene.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113.4 (2016), 838–846; C. Barlow, The Ghosts of Evolution (New York: Basic Books, 2000). 3 T. Dobzhansky, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution.” The American Biology Teacher 35.3 (1973), 125–129. 4 N.D. Newell, “Crises in the history of life.” Scientific American 208.2 (1963), 76–92, here 77. 5 S.J. Gould, “The golden rule–a proper scale for our environmental crisis.” Natural History 99.9 (1990), 24–30, here 24. 6 C.R. Marshall, “Five palaeobiological laws needed to understand the evolution of the living biota.” Nature Ecology & Evolution 1 (2017), 0165. 7 Roy Plotnick, Explorers of Deep Time. Paleontologists and the History of Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022). 8 N.D. Newell, “The very last moment of the Paleozoic Era.” In A. Logan and L.V. Hills, eds., The Permian and Triassic Systems and their Mutual Boundary. Canadian Society of Petroleum Geologists Memoirs 2 (Calgary: Canadian Society of Petroleum Geologists, 1973), 1–10. 9 Newell, “Crises.” 10 See also N.D. Newell and C.C. Albritton, Jr., “Revolutions in the history of life.” In C.C. Albritton, ed., Uniformity and Simplicity: A Symposium on the Principle of the Uniformity of Nature. Geological Society of America Special Paper 89 (New York: Geological Society of America, 1967), 63–91. 11 J.J. Sepkoski Jr., R.K. Bambach, D.M. Raup and J.W. Valentine, “Phanerozoic marine diversity and the fossil record.” Nature 293 (1981), 435–437; J.J. Sepkoski Jr., “A factor analytic description of the Phanerozoic marine fossil record.” Paleobiology 7.1 (1981), 36–53; J.J. Sepkoski Jr., “Ten years in the library: New data confirm paleontological patterns.” Paleobiology 19.1 (1993), 43–51; J.J. Sepkoski Jr., “Biodiversity: Past, present and future.” Journal of Paleontology 71.4 (1997), 533–539; J.J. Sepkoski Jr., “A compendium of fossil marine animal genera.” Bulletins of American Paleontology 363 (2002), 1–563. 12 D. Sepkoski, Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 13 Sepkoski Jr., “A factor analytic description.” 14 Sepkoski et al., “Phanerozoic marine diversity”; Sepkoski Jr., “Ten years”; D.M. Raup and J.J. Sepkoski, Jr., “Mass extinctions in the marine fossil record.” Science 215.4539 (1981), 1501–1503. 15 D. Erwin and J.W. Valentine, The Cambrian Explosion: The Construction of Animal Biodiversity (Greenwood Village, CO: Roberts and Company, 2013). “Explosion” is actually a misleading description of a process that may have taken twenty million years. 16 A.L. Stigall, C.T. Edwards, R.L. Freeman and C.M.Ø. Rasmussen, “Coordinated biotic and abiotic change during the great Ordovician biodiversification event: Darriwilian assembly of early Paleozoic building blocks.” Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 530 (2019), 249–270. 17 D.M. Raup, “The size of the Permo-Triassic bottleneck and its evolutionary implications.” Science 206.4415 (1979), 217–218; S.M. Stanley, “Estimates of the magnitudes of major marine mass extinctions in Earth history.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113.42 (2016), E6325–E6334.

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Disengaging With the Past 1 8 E. Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2014). 19 J. Alroy et al., “Phanerozoic trends in the global diversity of marine invertebrates.” Science 321 (2008), 97–100; A.M. Bush, S.C. Wang, J.L. Payne and N.A. Heim, “A framework for the integrated analysis of the magnitude, selectivity, and biotic effects of extinction and origination.” Paleobiology 46.1 (2020), 1–22; R.K. Bambach, “Phanerozoic biodiversity mass extinctions.” Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 34 (2006), 127–155. 20 R.K. Bambach, A.H. Knoll and S.C. Wang, “Origination, extinction, and mass depletions of marine diversity.” Paleobiology 30.4 (2004), 522–542. 21 M.L. Droser, D.J. Bottjer, P.M. Sheehan and G.R. Mcghee, “Decoupling of taxonomic and ecologic severity of Phanerozoic marine mass extinctions.” Geology 28.8 (2000), 675–678. 22 S.A. Alvarez, S.J. Gibbs, P.R. Bown, H. Kim, R.M. Sheward and A. Ridgwell, “Diversity decoupled from ecosystem function and resilience during mass extinction recovery.” Nature 574.7777 (2019), 242–245. 23 M.J. Benton, When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time (London: Thames  & Hudson, 2003). 24 S.D Burgess, J.D. Muirhead and S.A. Bowring, “Initial pulse of Siberian traps sills as the trigger of the end-Permian mass extinction.” Nature Communications 8.1 (2017), 164. 25 J.L. Penn, C. Deutsch, J.L. Payne and E.A. Sperling, “Temperature-dependent hypoxia explains biogeography and severity of end-Permian marine mass extinction.” Science 362.6419 (2018), eaat1327. 26 K.V. Lau, K. Maher, D. Altiner, B.M. Kelley, L.R. Kump, D.J. Lehrmann, J.C. Silva-Tamayo, K.L. Weaver, M. Yu and J.L. Payne, “Marine anoxia and delayed earth system recovery after the endPermian extinction.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113.9 (2016), 2360–2365. 27 A.A. Dineen, P.D. Roopnarine and M.L. Fraiser, “Ecological continuity and transformation after the Permo-Triassic mass extinction in northeastern Panthalassa.” Biology Letters 15.3 (2019), 20180902. 28 S.D. Burgess, S. Bowring and S.-Z. Shen, “High-precision timeline for earth’s most severe extinction.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111.9 (2014), 3316–3321. 29 C. Romano, M.B. Koot, I. Kogan, A. Brayard, A.V. Minikh, W. Brinkmann, H. Bucher and J. Kriwet, “Permian – Triassic Osteichthyes (bony fishes): Diversity dynamics and body size evolution.” Biological Reviews 91.1 (2016), 106–147. 30 P.A. Viglietti et al., “Evidence from South Africa for a protracted end-Permian extinction on land.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118.17 (2021), e2017045118. 31 L.W. Alvarez, W. Alvarez, F. Asaro and H.V. Michel, “Extraterrestrial cause for the Cretaceous-tertiary extinction – experimental results and theoretical interpretation.” Science 208.4448 (1980), 1095–1108; A. Chiarenza, A. Farnsworth, P.D. Mannion, D.J. Lunt, P.J. Valdes, J.V. Morgan and P.A. Allison, “Asteroid impact, not volcanism, caused the end-Cretaceous dinosaur extinction.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117.29 (2020), 17084–17093; S.P.S. Gulick et al., “The first day of the Cenozoic.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116.39 (2019), 19342–19351; M.J. Henehan et al., “Rapid ocean acidification and protracted Earth system recovery followed the end-Cretaceous Chicxulub impact.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116.45 (2019), 22500–22504; C.J. Sprain, P.R. Renne, L. Vanderkluysen, K. Pande, S. Self and T. Mittal, “The eruptive tempo of Deccan volcanism in relation to the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary.” Science 363.6429 (2019), 866–870. 32 Alvarez et  al., “Diversity decoupled”; T.R. Lyson et  al., “Exceptional continental record of biotic recovery after the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction.” Science 366.6468 (2019), 977–983. 33 M. Chen, C.A.E. Strömberg and G.P. Wilson, “Assembly of modern mammal community structure driven by late Cretaceous dental evolution, rise of flowering plants, and dinosaur demise.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116.20 (2019), 9931–9940; D.J. Field, A. Bercovici, J.S. Berv, R. Dunn, D.E. Fastovsky, T.R. Lyson, V. Vajda and J.A. Gauthier, “Early evolution of modern birds structured by global forest collapse at the end-Cretaceous mass extinction.” Current Biology 28.11 (2018), 1825–1832; G. Mayr, “The origins of crown group birds: Molecules and fossils.” Palaeontology 57.2 (2014), 231–242. 34 M.R. Carvalho et al., “Extinction at the end-Cretaceous and the origin of modern neotropical rainforests.” Science 372.6537 (2021), 63–68; B.F. Jacobs and E.D. Currano, “The impactful origin of neotropical rainforests.” Science 372.6537 (2021), 28–29. 35 A.D. Barnosky, “Megafauna biomass tradeoff as a driver of quaternary and future extinctions.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105, Supplement 1 (2008), 11543–11548. 36 S. Van Der Kaars, G.H. Miller, C.S.M. Turney, E.J. Cook, D. Nürnberg, J. Schönfeld, A.P. Kershaw and S.J. Lehman, “Humans rather than climate the primary cause of Pleistocene megafaunal extinction in Australia.” Nature Communications 8 (2017), 14142.

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Roy E. Plotnick 37 A.D. Barnosky, P.L. Koch, R.S. Feranec, S.L. Wing and A.B. Shabel, “Assessing the causes of late Pleistocene extinctions on the continents.” Science 306.5693 (2004), 70–75. 38 Van Der Kaars et al., “Humans rather than climate.” 39 Barnosky et al., “Assessing the causes”; L.R.G. Desantis, J.M. Crites, R.S. Feranec, K. Fox-Dobbs, A.B. Farrell, J.M. Harris, G.T. Takeuchi and T.E. Cerling, “Causes and consequences of Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions as revealed from Rancho La Brea mammals.” Current Biology 29.15 (2019), 2488–2495; J.T. Faith, J. Rowan, A. Du and P.L. Koch, “Plio-Pleistocene decline of African megaherbivores: No evidence for ancient hominin impacts.” Science 362.6417 (2018), 938–941; J.L. Metcalf et al., “Synergistic roles of climate warming and human occupation in Patagonian megafaunal extinctions during the last deglaciation.” Science Advances 2.6 (2016). 40 D.H. Janzen and P.S. Martin, “Neotropical anachronisms: The fruits the gomphotheres ate.” Science 215.4528 (1982), 19–27. Gomphotheres are a group of proboscideans that vanished during the Late Quaternary megafaunal extinction. 41 A readable overview of this is Barlow 2000. 42 J.A. Byers, Built for Speed: A Year in the Life of Pronghorn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 43 J.A. Byers, American Pronghorn: Social Adaptations and the Ghosts of Predators Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 44 Malhi et al., “Megafauna.” 45 F.A. Smith, S.M. Elliott and S.K. Lyons, “Methane emissions from extinct megafauna.” Nature Geoscience 3.6 (2010), 374–375. 46 T.J. Braje and J.M. Erlandson, “Human acceleration of animal and plant extinctions: A late Pleistocene, Holocene, and Anthropocene continuum.” Anthropocene 4 (2013), 14–23. 47 F.A. Smith, R.E. Elliott Smith, S.K. Lyons and J.L. Payne, “Body size downgrading of mammals over the Late Quaternary.” Science 360.6386 (2018), 310–313. 48 J. Zalasiewicz, C. Waters, C. Summerhayes and M. Williams, “The Anthropocene.” Geology Today 34.5 (2018), 177–181. 49 A.D. Barnosky, “Paleontological evidence for defining the Anthropocene.” In C.N. Waters, J.A. Zalasiewicz, M. Williams, M.A. Ellis and A.M. Snelling, eds., A Stratigraphical Basis for the Anthropocene. Geological Society Special Publication 395 (London: The Geological Society, 2014), 149–165; A.D. Barnosky, N. Matzke, S. Tomiya, G.O.U. Wogan, B. Swartz, T.B. Quental, C. Marshall, J.L. Mcguire, E.L. Lindsey, K.C. Maguire, B. Mersey and E.A. Ferrer, “Has the earth’s sixth mass extinction already arrived?” Nature 471.7336 (2011), 51–57. 50 W.J. Ripple et al., “Collapse of the world’s largest herbivores.” Science Advances 1.4 (2015); Mahli et al., “Megafauna.” 51 Barnosky et al., “Has the earth’s sixth mass extinction already arrived?” 52 R.E. Plotnick, F.A. Smith and S.K. Lyons, “The fossil record of the sixth extinction.” Ecology Letters 19.5 (2016), 546–553. 53 R.E. Plotnick and K.A. Koy, “The Anthropocene fossil record of terrestrial mammals.” Anthropocene 29 (2020), 100233. 54 Y.M. Bar-On, R. Phillips and R. Milo, “The biomass distribution on earth.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115.25 (2018), 6506–6511. 55 C.J. Donlan, Joel Berger, Carl E. Bock, Jane H. Bock, David A. Burney, James A. Estes, Dave Foreman, Paul  S.  Martin, Gary  W.  Roemer, Felisa  A.  Smith, Michael  E.  Soulé and Harry  W.  Greene, “Pleistocene rewilding: An optimistic agenda for twenty‐first-century conservation.” The American Naturalist 168.5 (2006), 660–681. 56 Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction. 57 S.J. Gould, Wonderful Life. The Burgess Shale and the Nature of Life (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1989).

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16 THE HUMAN DEEP PAST (PALEOANTHROPOLOGY) Deborah I. Olszewski

Introduction Human ancestors in the remote past had cultures, behaviors, artifacts, and lifeways that are no longer extant or vanishingly rare in today’s world. The farther one extends back into this deep past, the more challenging it becomes to reconstruct our prehistory as a species, with changes in physical form, brain size, and brain organization also having occurred. This does not mean that there are not facts to be gathered and observations to be made, but our interpretations must reckon with the incompleteness of the paleoanthropological record. Paleoanthropology is the study of the human past from the late Miocene through the Pleistocene geological epochs.1 The data upon which it relies come from archaeology, the fossil record of human ancestors and related lineages, geology, climate, and habitat reconstructions, dating of materials and sequences, genetics, evolutionary theory, and other fields. The record of the deep human past is incomplete for two major reasons. One is the effects of taphonomic processes that determine whether organic remains such as bones and charcoal are preserved over time, as well as whether the materials deposited at a site undergo transformations after deposition. Three such examples might be a site that has experienced erosion, which has removed some of the original materials; a site where scavenging animals have removed or gnawed on bones; or one where hominins (humans, their ancestors, and related lineages) selected some stone artifacts and removed them to elsewhere in the landscape. Most organic remains do not survive, especially for sites in deep time. Similarly, the hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of millennia that have passed provide ample time for geological processes to have impacted the original “pristine” site – removing materials, affecting the stratigraphy (layers) of the site, and burying the site so that it is no longer visible. The second major reason for incompleteness of the record relates to where paleoanthropologists have chosen to do research. Not all areas of the world have been investigated equally, and some not at all. Take Africa, where the ancestors of modern humans originated. Due to a variety of historical, political, and logistical reasons, the paleoanthropological record is more detailed for southern and eastern as opposed to central Africa. There simply have been more research programs, site surveys, site excavations, and thus discoveries in southern and eastern Africa compared to other regions of the continent. This means that what is known for deep time in hominin prehistory in Africa is only partial. Even within a well-researched area, there DOI: 10.4324/9781003026570-19

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can be gaps in coverage. For example, the Kalahari region is less well-known paleoanthropologically than are the coastal regions of southern Africa.2 Although fossils interpreted as hominins first appear some 7 million years ago (mya) during the late Miocene, those that predate 3.3 mya are not associated with identifiable markers of material culture, such as stone artifacts.3 One can interpret some aspects of the pre-3.3 mya behaviors based on functional morphology interpreted from their remains – for example, whether they were occasionally or habitually bipedal. Data from paleoenvironmental and geological studies are similarly informative for what they reveal about habitats, whether woodlands, savannas, lake margins, or otherwise. It is currently impossible, however, to discuss if they had “culture,” although we might surmise, based on studies of nonhuman primates (apes and monkeys), that these early members of the hominins had the capacity for similar behaviors. These might include cracking open nut shells using natural stones or branches as hammers, using simple twigs or grass stalks to retrieve termites from their mounds, or developing in-group traditions for termite eating that contrast with neighboring groups.4 These are basic behavioral features that are shared with current-day humans, but using these modern analogues to interpret the earliest potential members of the human lineage remains speculative. Because these earliest hominins did not leave an archaeological record, I will not consider them here. The following sections represent time intervals during which various hominin lineages lived. Modern humans (Homo sapiens) appear in this paleoanthropological record only ca. 300 thousand years ago (kya). As such, interpretations of many of the hominin behaviors in the earlier time intervals are subject to considerable discussion because modern human analogues cannot be directly applied to them. This creates additional entanglements within the overall theme of this volume on engaging the past with the present. The necessity of incorporating knowledge, for example, from functional skeletal anatomy (such as changes in shoulder morphology that permitted modern throwing capabilities) and from the behaviors of extant nonhuman primates, such as common chimpanzees and bonobos, engage the present with the past, but often beyond the confines of modern human comparisons. Debates about hominin behaviors and the analogues used within each of the time intervals are assessed within these contexts.

Hominin Behaviors From 3.3 to 2 Million Years Ago There were several identifiable hominin lineages in Africa in the interval from 3.3 to 2 mya, including various species of Australopithecus, Paranthropus (a side branch to the lineage leading to modern humans), and Homo. Debates continue as to which species of Australopithecus are in the direct line to Homo, with many researchers favoring Australopithecus afarensis. The earliest acknowledged direct ancestors of modern humans (first appearing 2.8 mya) are H. habilis and H. rudolfensis. The remoteness in time of these hominin populations means that current-day human behaviors are unlikely to be directly applicable to the lifeways of early hominins. There are few archaeological sites that contain both hominin fossils and stone artifacts, although many of these sites have animal bones, which may have accumulated due to natural deaths, predation by other animals, or hominin use as marrow and meat sources. While it is not without controversy, the earliest cultural materials (stone artifacts) have been dated to 3.3 mya.5 Because stone is durable, allowing for its preservation compared to organic materials such as wood that might also have been used as tools, stone artifacts often are the only material items available with which to interpret the cultural behaviors of earlier hominins. At Lomekwi 3 in Kenya, 3.3 mya artifacts indicate that stone was used for hammers and anvils, perhaps to crack open nuts or animal bones to extract the marrow. A few of these stone artifacts were flaked, with detachments (flakes) originating either as a by-product of hammering 218

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or possibly as deliberate removals so that their sharp edges could be used for cutting or slicing tasks. These behaviors, while within the repertoire of current-day humans, are not exclusive to hominins as they are seen also in nonhuman primates. If marrow extraction were one of the activities for which these early tools were used, however, this would represent a novel hominin innovation because nonhuman primates do not use hammers to extract marrow from bones. The 3.3 mya date and location of Lomekwi 3 place it in the time interval and geographical region of Australopithecus afarensis, and there are no known species of the genus Homo this early in the hominin timeline. Whether or not Au. afarensis is therefore a “tool-user/tool-maker” remains an open question. One confounding factor in associating hominin species with stone artifact use in the interval from 3.3 to 2 mya is the rarity of fossil finds. Thus, while sites with stone artifacts and animal bones are known, very few also have hominin fossils. Lomekwi 3 is a single cache of data. It may be an example of a rare behavioral set, invented once and then lost as a group tradition. It could also be that paleoanthropologists simply have not yet recovered similar examples. What can be said is that beginning around 3 mya, the use of stone artifacts becomes more common. This is when the Oldowan tradition (named after Oldupai – formerly Olduvai – Gorge, in Tanzania) appears.6 It is characterized by stone artifacts such as cores, flakes, choppers, spheroids, and some scrapers. Studies of these stone artifacts have elucidated how stone was shaped and flakes detached,7 as well as the uses to which some of these artifacts were put, such as butchery, wood cutting and scraping, grass, sedge, and reed cutting, and processing of underground storage organs.8 The Oldowan tradition is widely thought to exhibit behavior exclusively associated with genus Homo, in this case, H. habilis; the justification for this assumption is based primarily on the slightly larger brain size of this hominin group compared to the australopiths. There is currently no reason, however, to think that australopith groups could not also have made and used stone artifacts (see Plummer et al. (2023) in endnote 6). The greater abundance of Oldowan stone artifacts at sites and their distribution throughout the landscape in many areas of Africa indicates that the use of stone for tasks had become an important feature of hominin cultural behaviors. The relatively low frequency of Oldowan sites until 1.7 mya, however, seems to indicate that this cultural behavior was occasional rather than habitual or obligatory.9 In other words, while the use of stone artifacts was valuable, Oldowan hominins were not necessarily dependent on them. This suggests that applying analogues based on current-day human behaviors is not straightforward or practical, as current-day humans are obligatory users of artifacts and technologies, such as cars, computers, and chopsticks. The Oldowan tradition demonstrates that hominins added stone artifacts as options available to access food resources. These could be of direct use, such as obtaining meat from animal carcasses, evidenced by cut marks on bones and marrow from animal bones, revealed by percussion marks from hammerstones on bones.10 The stone artifacts also may have been used to make simple wooden artifacts that could be used as digging or termiting sticks. But were these early hominins hunters (perhaps similar in some respects to current-day humans); active scavengers (scaring predators away from their kills to have access to nearly fully fleshed carcasses); passive scavengers (opportunistically finding carcasses in the landscape, using what meat was left and accessing the marrow in bones); or some combination of these strategies? Scavenging is not a common current-day human behavior, while hunting of medium to large-sized animals is not indicated by the types of stone artifacts available in the Oldowan tradition. Paleoanthropologists have also examined the distribution of Oldowan stone artifacts to theorize about the transport of stone across the landscape. By analyzing the location of stone raw material sources in the landscape compared to where Oldowan artifacts made of those raw materials are found, these studies suggest that Oldowan-using hominins were carrying stone artifacts over much greater distances (by 2 mya, up to 12 kilometers or more: Potts 2012) than 219

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do nonhuman primates such as chimpanzees, which use stones as hammers to open nutshells.11 Hominins also transported parts of animal carcasses to safer locales. Such behavior resembles that of modern humans because it involves the anticipation of needs in disparate places in the landscape. There are, however, additional considerations when interpreting such patterning. The distances over which Oldowan artifacts are found from stone raw material sources, for example, may not result from carrying a stone a long distance across the landscape at one moment in time. Instead, it may be a pattern that emerges over time as the result of separate instances of transporting stone artifacts over shorter distances. These shorter distance movements “accumulate” over time and appear to be a pattern of long-distance transport.12 If the transport distances thus reflect an emergent pattern, then Oldowan-using hominins are anticipating needs, but perhaps not to the degree that current-day humans might do in similar circumstances.

Hominin Behaviors From 2 Million to 300,000 Years Ago Beginning about 2 mya, Homo erectus appears in Africa13; few would dispute that this species represents a direct line to modern humans. H. erectus has a larger body and larger brain than earlier members of genus Homo and the australopiths; brain size in H. erectus increases over time.14 H. erectus is the first group of hominins to have a postcranial skeleton that is very similar to current-day humans’ in many respects. It is the first to have a modern form of habitual bipedalism and the first to exhibit a modern shoulder configuration. These skeletal features imply that H. erectus was capable of long-distance traveling, walking, and running, as well as high-speed throwing, possibly reflecting the use of thrown spears in hunting: both of these are present in modern humans.15 Supporting evidence for long-distance movements by H. erectus comes from non-African archaeological sites, which indicate that these hominins were most likely the first to move out of Africa (between 2 and 1.8 mya). They eventually populated the Middle East, southern, eastern, and southeastern Asia, and Europe, and although paleoclimate was warmer than today, these hominin groups initially tended to be distributed in the warmer southern areas of regions such as Europe. Because H. erectus is very similar structurally to current-day humans (as are many of the Homo species known from this time range), it is tempting to think of the attribution of current-day human behaviors to them as reasonable. But their capabilities might not have been used in ways that are characteristic of current-day humans. To what extent, for example, did H. erectus move over long distances for the sake of exploration (a current-day human behavior) as opposed to simply following animal herds as a food resource, a behavior that would in some cases lead to migration out of Africa? Within Africa, early H. erectus groups are associated with the Oldowan, Developed Oldowan, and Acheulian traditions of stone artifacts. The stone artifacts characteristic of each tradition were made and used contemporaneously.16 One interpretation might be that each tradition represented a different activity set. In some cases, for example, distinctive stone artifacts from each tradition are found at the same site, implying a wide range of activities, while in other cases, sites have stone artifacts of only one of these traditions, suggesting that specific tasks were sometimes highly localized in the landscape. While the Oldowan and Developed Oldowan have abundant choppers, cores, and flakes, the Acheulian tradition (1.7 mya) has the addition of large cutting tools (LCTs), including hand axes. Acheulian artifacts were used for butchery, as well as for woodworking and plant processing.17 The application of stone-flaking techniques to create a hand axe made of bone is clearly an episode of innovation.18 There are many more archaeological sites that date from 2 mya to 300 thousand years ago (kya), which may represent a transition from occasional to habitual use of stone artifacts, resulting in the production of many more stone artifacts and thus more sites.19 Alternatively, the greater abundance of sites in 220

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this interval might be due to the fact that they are closer in time to us today and thus there has been less time during which they could have been removed by taphonomic processes. Other possible explanations are that hominin population size was greater, which resulted in more sites, or hominins were more mobile across the landscape, creating new sites each time they moved. Meat-eating becomes more prominent during this interval, with sites containing an abundance of bones of large animals.20 Does this mean that early H. erectus hunted? Perhaps, although hunting as an interpretation is based primarily on the idea that H. erectus had early access to fully fleshed animal carcasses, attested by stone artifact cutmarks on bones. Definitive evidence of hunting appears around 337 kya at the site of Schöningen (Germany), where excellent organic preservation has yielded sharpened wooden spears, about 2 meters long, intermingled with horse bones.21 These spears were made and used by H. heidelbergensis, who were descendants of H. erectus. This direct evidence of hunting suggests that at least some aspects of current-day human behaviors may be more applicable to understanding these human ancestors. Additionally, during the interval from 2 mya to 300 ka, there are two intriguing occurrences. One is the appearance of fire at a very limited number of archaeological sites. At Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa, for example, plant ash and burned animal bones are present in Acheulian deposits from about 1 mya.22 The potential benefits of fire use include supplying warmth; cooking meat and plant foods to make them more palatable, easy to digest, and pathogen-free; keeping predators away; and providing opportunities for social engagement. These uses of fire accord with current-day human behavior. What is not known, however, is if H. erectus was able to make fire as opposed to using it opportunistically (i.e., gathering embers from natural fires and taking them back to the site). The rarity of evidence of fire use during most of this time interval suggests that its use was occasional, and while it may have conferred several benefits to H. erectus and descendant groups, access to fire’s benefits does not appear to have been a major feature of their behaviors, contrary to what we see among current-day humans. The second interesting aspect of this time interval is that early descendant groups of H. erectus were the first to occupy somewhat colder habitats in Europe. Paleoenvironmental and archaeological evidence from the Happisburgh (England) site indicates that hominins lived at the edge of the southern boreal forest about 800 kya.23 The ability to expand into and successfully exploit new habitats is a characteristic of current-day humans. The degree to which these earlier human ancestors needed to apply new strategies to expand into this novel niche is unknown, as their stone artifacts were basic forms, such as flakes and cores from which flakes were struck. Whether or not these hominins were present during the colder months of the year, as opposed to moving south to warmer areas, also leaves open the question of the durability of their inhabitation of this new habitat.

Hominin Behaviors From 300 to 70,000 Years Ago In Africa, this interval marks the first appearance of modern human fossils (H. sapiens), both early skeletal forms (just prior to 300 kya)24 and later groups who were skeletally and behaviorally modern, after about 100 kya.25 In Europe, some skeletal features of the Neandertal lineage appear around 430 kya, but the full complex of anatomical traits attributed to Neandertals dates to about 130 kya.26 Another hominin lineage of relevance is the Asian Denisovans.27 Some of the early anatomically modern African groups migrated about 200 kya into the Middle East28 and perhaps also into Greece.29 Within Africa, stone artifacts are classified as Middle Stone Age (MSA), while outside of Africa, they are attributed to the Middle Paleolithic (MP); the evidence from both the MSA and MP demonstrates regional and chronological variability. Neandertals and prehistoric H. sapiens outside of Africa made and used MP stone 221

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artifacts. These stone technologies include relatively widespread MSA and MP use of prepared cores, in a tradition known as the Levallois technique, which modifies stone to produce specific removals of flakes and pointed forms and, in some cases, elongated, parallel-sided removals called blades. While these are innovations (which can also be found occasionally in the late Acheulian or related traditions), they are not confined to H. sapiens, just as mounting evidence suggests fire use is not exclusively a H. sapiens behavior. Debates regarding fire use in this time interval have not yet resolved the question of whether evidence of fire use is the result of being able to make fire or instead is due to opportunistic use of fire, e.g., collecting embers from a wildfire. The MSA, which is exclusively the product of H. sapiens, however, appears to document much greater variability in stone artifacts, particularly in point types and technologies such as bipolar percussion to remove small flakes and bladelets.30 There is also a multitude of MSA behavioral innovations, including the consumption of shellfish, appearance of symbolism in the form of ocher paints and geometric engravings in ocher and ostrich eggshell, the wearing of personal ornaments, the manufacture of mastics (“glues”) for hafting stone artifacts onto handles or shafts for spears and arrows, and burial with personal ornamentation.31 Of all these innovations, however, only burial with personal ornamentation is found uniquely among prehistoric H. sapiens. MP archaeological data from Neandertal sites indicates that they also engaged in similar innovative behaviors – personal ornaments, mastic manufacture, use of minerals to make paints or start fires, engravings on bone, and shellfish consumption, among others.32 That H. sapiens and Neandertals shared most of these behaviors, some of which are assumed to have symbolic significance, implies that in many ways these two lineages are cognitively similar. Does this mean that using modern human behaviors to model not only the behaviors of prehistoric H. sapiens but also those of Neandertals is appropriate to understanding both groups? Or do questions about the frequency and abundance of such evidence in the archaeological record of these two lineages mitigate the extent to which we can use current-day modern behaviors in reconstructing the lifeways of one or both groups? Of potential relevance to the applicability of extant modern human behaviors to understanding the past is the fact that prehistoric H. sapiens interbred with other hominin lineages, including Neandertals and Denisovans, based on studies of ancient DNA from fossils.33 Prehistoric H. sapiens, when they encountered these other species in the landscape, recognized them as similar to themselves. This in turn implies that the cultural behaviors of all these hominin lineages either were “human” in some way or that none of these groups practiced what might be defined as “human” culture. The latter perspective is not the one accepted by most paleoanthropologists because it dismisses the importance of African MSA archaeological findings. These are widely interpreted as features (e.g., personal ornaments, art, bone tools, use of red ochre) of modern human behaviors that were in place in H. sapiens groups by at least 70 kya.34 In contrast, while more paleoanthropologists have come to view Neandertal behavior as possessing many of these features,35 there are those who believe that Neandertals were sufficiently different or that taphonomic issues with some of the Neandertal data, especially data interpreted as symbolic behavior, preclude us from describing Neandertal behavior as human.36 Such arguments remain unresolved due to the nuanced ways in which the data have been interpreted. Disagreements persist over whether perspectives about different hominin lineages subtly influence viewpoints on their behaviors, if convergence in cultural behaviors can occur, and if perceived differences between hominin lineages resemble cultural differences across peoples and regions, much as is seen in the world today. 222

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Hominin Behaviors From 70 to 12,000 Years Ago Early in this interval, some groups of H. sapiens migrated out of Africa; their descendants eventually populated not only Eurasia but Australia after 65 ka37 and the Americas after 20–15 ka.38 H. sapiens entered Europe around 45 kya, where they shared parts of the landscape with Neandertals until about 40 kya. H. sapiens after 45 kya was successful in occupying cold habitats in Pleistocene Europe, although some groups may have occasionally gone locally extinct.39 The extent to which Neandertals also permanently occupied the coldest European habitats is not as conclusive, as they may have migrated closer to the Mediterranean regions during intensely cold periods. This difference in tolerance for cold climates might be linked to the strategies used by these two lineages in surviving the cold. Archaeological evidence, for example, suggests that prehistoric H. sapiens hunted fur-bearing animals to a greater extent than did Neandertals.40 This may mean that H. sapiens used fur for warm clothing. Additionally, the earliest eyed bone, antler, and ivory needles (useful in sewing close-fitting clothes) are found at H. sapiens sites as early as about 45 kya and become more common during later cold intervals after 35 kya across Eurasia.41 In contrast, despite the similarities in some aspects of cultural behaviors engaged in by both Neandertals and prehistoric H. sapiens, Neandertals were extinct by 40 kya. This does not necessarily imply that Neandertals were less behaviorally capable than prehistoric H. sapiens, but may instead reflect their smaller group sizes, lower genetic diversity, and relative isolation from other Neandertal groups.42 After about 40 kya, modern H. sapiens were the sole remaining representative of the hominins. Until just after the end of the Pleistocene, about 12 kya, they lived in a world composed exclusively of hunter-gatherers; occasionally there are small, apparently year-round, villages that appear.43 The archaeological record contains a plethora of evidence for complex behaviors, symbolism, innovations, and high levels of cumulative culture, all features consonant with current-day human behaviors. Of these, perhaps the most significant is language, without which it would be difficult to accumulate and pass on knowledge. While the evolution of language and the anatomical and neural structures necessary for the production of spoken language most likely unfolded gradually over a long period, perhaps beginning about 2 mya,44 few would argue that prehistoric H. sapiens did not employ modern forms of language at least as early as 50 kya.45 Other hominin lineages such as Neandertals likely also had some form of language, although the degree to which this may have been modern in form is not known. Earlier or nonmodern forms of languages, for example, might not have had the full range of vowel sounds used in modern languages. It is probable therefore that it is not until after about 50/40 kya, when the paleoanthropological record indicates that both modern behaviors and modern forms of language are most likely present, that directly applying ideas built upon current-day human behaviors is feasible in translating prehistoric H. sapiens behaviors. Even in these instances, however, one should remain cautious because H. sapiens behaviors are diverse. They vary according to time and place; some behaviors may have become extinct, while others bear only superficial resemblance to modern ones. Such observations highlight what has been called the “tyranny of the ethnographic record.”46 In other words, the sample of extant modern hunter-gatherer groups is extremely small compared to those who inhabited the deep past. Thus, observations of extant groups should not be used as if they represent the totality of possible behaviors in the past. Even if one consults not just knowledge of living groups, but adds those described ethno-historically, the overall sample remains relatively small.47 Beyond this, extant and historically known hunter-gatherers have evolved over time behaviorally; they are hardly static remnants of the Stone Age.48 They have interacted with farming and pastoral groups, with 223

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industrialized societies, and missionaries, and have adopted some of the trappings of the modern world, such as using vehicles to travel across the landscape, and replacing stone artifacts with metal ones.

Reflections This chapter’s goals were to reflect on what is known about the deep past, to speculate on how different from today’s prevailing behaviors they may have been and assess whether current-day modern human practices can be used to interpret the human deep past. There are no easy answers. Prior to 2 mya, none of the hominin groups were skeletally or behaviorally modern. They had somewhat different forms of habitual bipedalism,49 which may have limited the distances that they traveled daily across the landscape. Their stone artifacts, the fabrication of which may have been only an occasional endeavor, did not apparently include “weapons” that could be used in hunting, even though paleoanthropological evidence indicates that they accessed meat and marrow from animal carcasses.50 Is the absence of such evidence the result of taphonomy, which might eliminate organics such as wooden spears? Extant huntergatherer groups primarily hunt with weapons, snares, and other devices, although some occasionally scavenge. The debate concerning whether earlier human ancestors had access to animal carcasses due to hunting or to scavenging is not yet resolved, but analyses of stone artifact cutmarks on prehistoric animal bones used to support a hunting interpretation are based on how current-day humans butcher carcasses. That is, the patterns of cutmarks on long bone shafts suggest meat acquisition that comes from early access to fully fleshed carcasses, either through hunting or active scavenging. Did these hominins prior to 2 mya share food (meat, marrow, insect, or plant-based) within the group (a current-day human behavior), or was their sharing limited to only a few individuals, based on gender or participation in acquiring the resource, as is typical of chimpanzees? Did these earlier hominins exhibit “eat as you go” or “delayed consumption” as their main behavior?51 For the most part, current-day humans delay consumption, which enhances the potential for sociality, the establishment of cultural norms, and cooperation within groups. After 2 mya, hominin groups were physiologically much more similar to current-day humans, whose functional patterns can be more directly applied to assess the potential for long-distance travel, for hand-carrying of stone artifacts, foods, and other objects,52 and for throwing capabilities among premodern hominins.53 Using current-day humans as analogues for cultural behaviors, however, remains difficult. H. erectus groups were the first to leave Africa, although this is unlikely to have been a deliberate migration akin to those we see in today’s world. H. erectus inhabited warmer habitats that did not require extensive innovations in strategies compared to the African regions from which they came. It can be assumed that these human ancestors cooperated more with other individuals within the group than did earlier hominins; likely they were more social and exhibited a range of emotions similar to current-day humans.54 Hunting was most probably the main way that meat and marrow were acquired, although stone artifacts still did not include recognizable weapons. Wood was likely used to make thrusting and throwing spears, but due to the taphonomy of organic preservation, direct evidence for these is not found until just before 300 kya.55 Their hunting strategies would have been similar to those of historically or ethnographically huntergatherer groups known to historians and ethnographers. Strategies would have required knowledge about the landscape and the behaviors of animals, and would have involved planning, and the organization and equipping of those involved in the hunt. The extent to which a rudimentary form of language would have been required is not known and may 224

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not have been necessary; many animals cooperate while hunting without using language. A few hominin groups were able occasionally to occupy somewhat colder regions, but the use of fire is present only sporadically at sites before about 300 kya, suggesting that cooking foods, obtaining warmth and protection, and social gatherings around a fire were not major components of their behaviors. It is not until about 300 kya that H. sapiens originate in Africa and later that the full Neandertal trait complex appears in Europe. The earliest members of H. sapiens were skeletally very similar to current-day humans, except for the shape of the cranium, which did not achieve its globular configuration until about 100 kya.56 This may have had implications for brain lobe organization and cognition, which in turn impacted behavioral capabilities. It might explain, in part, the more abundant appearance of symbolic evidence after 60/50 kya. By 300 kya, all hominins were accomplished hunters, and after about 120 kya, there is ample evidence of innovations such as hafting stone artifacts onto organic handles or shafts, in some cases to create weapons. Comparisons to current-day humans clearly help us understand these strategies. Fire at sites is more evident, suggesting that its use became habitual. Cooking foods may have been more common, but intriguingly is not a necessary strategy, as attested in current-day human traditions in northern (cold) latitudes of deliberately preparing and eating rotted meat and fish.57 The lack of fire at some sites or during particular time intervals, therefore, may not be overly significant with respect to nutrition. By at least 50 kya (but likely earlier), modern forms of human languages would have enabled symbolic behavior that may have been restricted to H. sapiens, even if Neandertals also had a rudimentary form of language. Language is one of the key adaptations of current-day humans, and the use of language made prehistoric H. sapiens similar to us today. Despite our ability to apply some aspects of current-day human behavior to augment our understanding of the deep past, it remains true that none of these prehistoric groups are entirely like current-day humans. Each had its own “history” of adaptations, innovations, and strategies, the mix of which is almost certainly unlike the combinations that we see in extant or historically known hunter-gatherer groups.58 There also are many assumptions that must be questioned: for example, the expectation that once an innovation appears in the paleoanthropological record, that it will both continue and invariably become the norm for deep-past hominins. Fire use is one such instance, originating about 1 mya but not becoming widespread until 400/300 ya,59 and probably not a habitual or obligatory practice of H. sapiens until after 50/40 kya. Even some extant hunter-gatherer groups either do not possess knowledge of fire-starting or find it easier to borrow embers from neighboring groups.60 Another example would be the application of fire to clayey sediments, a basic process involved in the creation of ceramics. Upper Paleolithic modern humans in Europe discovered this process some 28 kya.61 It was then “lost” and rediscovered 10,000 years later,62 only to be lost again, and rediscovered in the context of ceramic containers, first in southern China some 18 kya and then independently in other parts of the world.63 The deep past cannot be directly read like historical documents, which themselves are generally subject to bias. Hominins prior to 300 kya had fundamental behaviors that were shared between lineages and with current-day humans, but we must remember that they were decidedly not current-day humans. After 300 kya, several hominin lineages were similar in many ways, suggesting that “human” culture was an attribute they all shared. Defining “human” culture, however, is an issue to which numerous books and articles have been devoted, without necessarily reaching a widely accepted consensus. This means that deciding what is or is not “human” culture in the paleoanthropological record remains open to debate. 225

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Notes 1 F.C. Howell and J.D. Clark, eds., “Recent studies in paleoanthropology.” American Anthropologist 68.2 (1966), 238–295. 2 J. Wilkins, “Ga-Mohana Hill North Rockshelter, South Africa.” In A. Beyin, D.K. Wright, J. Wilkins, A. Bouzouggar and D.I. Olszewski, eds., Handbook of Pleistocene Archaeology of Africa: Hominin Behavior, Geography, and Chronology (Cham: Springer Nature, forthcoming). 3 M. Brunet, F. Guy, D. Pilbeam et al., “A new hominid from the Upper Miocene of Chad, Central Africa.” Nature 418 (2002), 145–151. 4 C. Boesch, A.K. Kalan, R. Mundry et  al., “Chimpanzee ethnography reveals unexpected cultural diversity.” Nature Human Behavior 4 (2020), 910–916: M. Haslam, L.V. Luncz, R.A. Staff et al., “PreColumbian monkey tools.” Current Biology 26 (2016), R515–R522. 5 W. Archer, V. Aldeias and S.P. McPherron, “What is ‘in situ’? A reply to Harmand et al. (2015).” Journal of Human Evolution 142 (2020), 102740; S. Harmand et al., “3.3-million-year-old stone tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya.” Nature 521 (2015), 310–315; J.E. Lewis and S. Harmand, “An earlier origin for stone tool making: Implications for cognitive evolution and the transition to Homo.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 371 (2016), 20150233. 6 D.R. Braun, V. Aldeias, W. Archer et al., “Earliest known Oldowan artifacts at > 2.58 Ma from LediGeraru, Ethiopia, highlight early technological diversity.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 116 (2019), 11712–11717; T.W. Plummer, J.S. Oliver, E.M. Finestone et al., “Expanded geographical distribution and dietary strategies of the earliest Oldowan hominins and Paranthropus.” Science 379 (2023), 561–566; S. Semaw, M.J. Rogers, J. Quade et al., “2.6-million-year-old stone tools and associated bones from OGS-6 and OGS-7, Gona, Ethiopia.” Journal of Human Evolution 45 (2003), 169–177. 7 N. Toth and K. Schick, “The Oldowan: The tool making of early hominins and chimpanzees compared.” Annual Review of Anthropology 38 (2009), 289–305. 8 C. Lemorini, T.W. Plummer, D.R. Braun et al., “Old stones’ song: Use-wear experiments and analysis of the Oldowan quartz and quartzite assemblage from Kanjera South (Kenya).” Journal of Human Evolution 72 (2014), 10–25; C. Lemorini, L.C. Bishop, T.W. Plummer, et al., “Old stones’ song – second verse: Use-wear analysis of rhyolite and fenetized andesite artifacts from the Oldowan lithic industry of Kanjera South, Kenya.” Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 11 (2019), 4729–4754. 9 J.J. Shea, “Occasional, obligatory, and habitual stone tool use in hominin evolution.” Evolutionary Anthropology 26 (2017), 200–217. 10 M. Domínguez-Rodrigo, “Hunting and scavenging by early humans: The state of the debate.” Journal of World Prehistory 16 (2002), 1–54; R.J. Blumenschine, “Percussion marks, tooth marks, and experimental determinations of the timing of hominid and carnivore access to long bones at FLK Zinjanthropus, Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania.” Journal of Human Evolution 29 (1995), 21–51. 11 L.V. Luncz, T. Proffitt, L. Kulik et al., “Distance-decay effect in stone tool transport by wild chimpanzees.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 283 (2016), 20161607. 12 Ibid. 13 A.I.R. Herries, J.M. Martin, A.B. Leece et al., “Contemporaneity of Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and early Homo erectus in South Africa.” Science 368 (2020), aaw7293. 14 M. Grabowski, “Bigger brains led to bigger bodies? The correlated evolution of human brain and body size.” Current Anthropology 57 (2016), 174–196. 15 On walking and running, see A.L. Zihlman and D.R. Bolter, “Body composition in Pan paniscus compared with Homo sapiens has implications for changes during human evolution.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 112 (2015), 7466–7471; on throwing see N.T. Roach, M. Venkadesan, M.J. Rainbow and D.E. Lieberman, “Elastic energy storage in the shoulder and the evolution of high-speed throwing in Homo.” Nature 498 (2013), 483–486. 16 Semaw et al., “2.6-million-year-old stone tools.” 17 M. Domínguez-Rodrigo, J. Serrallonga, J. Juan-Tresserras, L. Alcala and L. Luque, “Woodworking activities by early humans: A plant residue analysis on Acheulian stone tools from Peninj (Tanzania).” Journal of Human Evolution 40 (2011), 289–299; N. Solodenko, A. Zupancich, S.N. Cesaro et  al., “Fat residue and use-wear found on Acheulian biface and scraper associated with butchered elephant remains at the site of Revadim, Israel.” PLoS One 10 (2015), e0118572. 18 K. Sano, Y. Beyene, S. Katoh et  al., “A  1.4-million-year-old bone handaxe from Konso, Ethiopia, shows advanced tool technology in the early Acheulean.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 117 (2020), 18393–18400.

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INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Apologie pour l’histoire ou métier d’historien (Bloch) 9 – 11, 19 – 31 apophatic past 51 – 52 Araujo, Valdei 53n16 archaeology 14, 57, 58, 143 – 157; colonialism in 144; critical perspectives on 153 – 155; dating techniques in 144, 146 – 151; development of 143, 145 – 146; essentialism in 154; excavation in 143; as existing in present 155; heritage and 108, 110, 112; paleoarchaeology 7; paleolithic 153, 154; “Pompeii Premise” in 153; in popular imagination 144; pottery in 148; public 115; relative vs. absolute dating in 146; scales of temporality in 151 – 153; sites damaged in 152; stratigraphy in 148; Three Age System in 147 – 148, 154 – 155; types of materials in 153; as Western 153 – 154; see also paleoanthropology Archean Eon 175 – 176, 178 architecture: classical 117 – 122, 127 – 130; Trump executive order on 117 – 122, 128 – 129 archives 14, 158 – 170; archivage and activation in 160 – 168, 169n13; case studies of 161 – 167; definitions of 160, 169n10; digitalization and 162, 167; key characteristics of 159; marginalized communities in 162, 167 – 168; pertinence and provenance in 162, 163, 164, 168; pluralization in 167 – 169; in service of power 158, 161, 162; silencing in 161, 162, 163, 167, 168, 169, 170n14 Aristotelianism 70 Aristotle 194 art history 14, 117 – 142; architecture 117 – 122, 127 – 130; cartoons 126; medieval illumination 122 – 123, 128, 129, 133, 134; painting 122 – 123, 124, 125, 130 – 138; sculpture 124 – 125, 126, 126, 131, 132, 138, 139, 140

Acheson, Dean 40 Acheulian artifacts 220, 221, 222 Adoration of the Mystical Lamb (van Eyck brothers) 122, 124 Aeneid (Virgil) 1 Afghanistan War 39, 40 Africa: archaeology in 144, 146; hominins in 217 – 225 African Americans, heritage and 110, 111 ahistorical past 47 – 48, 52 AIM (American Indian Movement) 110 Allen, John 82n71 Allen, Woody 1 Alvarez meteorite thesis 7, 210 – 211 Amazon 211 American Antiquities Act (1906) 108 American Indian Movement (AIM) 110 Americas 211, 212; beavers in 185, 186 – 187; evolutionary anachronisms in 212; exotic species in 181; extinctions in 205, 211; human arrival in 64, 181, 205, 223; precolonial environment of 184 – 185, 213 anachronism 11, 26, 29; evolutionary 212 Analects (Confucius) 84 – 89, 91 – 95, 98, 98n5, 100n25; translations of 99n11 ancient history 28 Annales 9, 22; contemporary events in 24, 29, 30n23; facts as constructed in 25; histoire-problème in 20, 25 – 26; longue durée in, 60 Anthropocene 15, 43 – 45, 47, 177; challenges of 189 – 191; geological definition of 46; sixth extinction and 212; start date of 190 Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) 46 anthropology 57; see also paleoanthropology Antiquités celtiques et antédiluviennes (Boucher) 145

229

Index Asia 41, 57, 146, 184; hominins in 220, 221; see also Eurasia associated past 47, 52 astrogeology 7 astronomy 7, 11, 59, 60, 61 – 62, 63; definition of 203n1; Doppler shift in 195 – 198; exoplanets in 173, 178; past-to-present causation in 194 – 199 astrophysics 15 Augustine of Hippo 1 – 2 Australia 144, 175, 185; extinctions in 211, 212; hominins in 223 Australopithecus 218, 220 A. afarensis 219 Austria 34, 191 AWG (Anthropocene Working Group) 46 Aymara 2

Bo Yu 87 Brandi, Felipe vii, 13, 19 – 31 Braudel, Fernand 60 Breakfast Club, The 139 Breitinger, Johann Jakob 166 Brincken, Friedrich Gotthard von 131 – 133 British Museum 109, 111 Broken Eggs, The (Greuze) 137 – 138, 137 Bronze Age 147, 154 Brown, Cynthia Stokes 60 Brown, Lancelot “Capability” 191 Buddhism 85 Buffon, Georges Louis LeClerc, Comte de 4 Bullinger, Heinrich 165, 166 – 167, 170n27, 170n30 Burguière, André 30n23 burial 222 Burns, Andrea 110 Bush, George W. 35

Bahamas 44 Balthasar, Johann Kaspar 164 Barr, James 73 – 74 Basilica of Maxentius and Constantine 125 – 126, 133 BBC 7 beavers 185 – 188 In Beaver World (Mills) 189 Benedict XVI, Pope 77 Benjamin, Craig vii, 14, 56 – 65 Berthrong, John 100n39, 101n50 Bible 8, 72 – 78, 145; time and 73 – 75 Biblical Words for Time (Barr) 73 – 74 Biden, Joe 122, 133 big history 14, 50, 56 – 65; future and 56, 62 – 64; increasing complexity in 60 – 63, 64; origins of 56 – 57 Billoud, Sébastien 99n8 biodiversity 209 – 211, 213 biology, evolutionary 7 – 8, 11, 15, 58 – 62 bipedalism 218, 220, 224 Bismarck, Otto von 35 bison 205 Bjornerud, Marcia 4, 12 black holes 195, 196 – 197 Blacks, heritage and 110, 111 Blanc, Mel 139 Bloch, Marc 2, 9 – 11, 13, 19 – 31, 60, 79n18; on Christianity 72 – 73; in French Resistance 9, 19, 20; on history as science 20, 22 – 24, 26; on uniquely Western attention to memory 84 Blocher, Henri 80n38 Bob Marshall Wilderness 189 Bodnar, John 109 Boltzmann, Ludwig 200 Bonaventure, Saint 78 Bonifacio, Baldessare 160 Book of Changes 86 Book of Poetry 88 Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes, Jacques 145

Cairo genizah 160, 168, 169n12 Cambridge University 160 candles, astronomical 198 – 199 Cano, Melchor 70 Canyon Creek fire (1988) 189 cartoons 126, 132, 138 – 139, 142n34 Carvalho, M.R. 211 catastrophism 6 – 7 Catholicism 12, 14, 69 – 83; see also Christianity Centre de recherches comparées des sociétés anciennes 28 Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) 25 Cepheid variables 198, 199 Chaisson, Eric 61 Chakrabarti, Pratik 154 Chen Kang 87 chestnut blight 184 Chicxulub asteroid 210 – 211 Childers, Leisl Carr 103 China see Confucianism Christian, David 56 – 57, 60 Christianity 69 – 83, 137; Bloch on 72 – 73; documents in 71 – 72; ecumenical movement in 81n53; future in 76, 77 – 78; genetic method in 71 – 73; Gothic architecture and 130; hermeneutics in 75 – 77; history and 70 – 72, 79n8; medieval 79n8, 82n72; present in 69 – 70, 78, 78 – 79n3; Reformation and 162, 165 – 167; time in 73 – 75; today in 69 – 70, 78 – 79n3 Christus und die Zeit (Cullmann) 73 chronometry 57 – 60, 148 – 151 chronopolitics 155 Civil Rights movement 110 Civil War 104, 107 Clampett, Bob 139 Clark, Christopher 34 – 35

230

Index Clark, Gregory T. vii, 14, 117 – 142 classical architecture 117 – 122, 127 – 130 Classified Conversations (Zhu Xi) 95, 96 – 97 Clean Air Act (1970) 189 Clean Water Act (1972) 189 CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) 25 Coastal Carolina University 113 Codex Amiatinus 122, 133 Cold War 7 Collingwood, R.G. 20, 23, 24, 27 colonialism: archaeology shaped by 144; archives and 158, 169n12; decolonizing approaches and 47, 50, 111; heritage and 108 – 109, 111 Colton, Harold 112 Colton, Mary 112 Confederate flag 107 Confederate monuments 104 Confessions (Augustine) 1 – 2 confirmation bias 38 Confucianism 14, 84 – 101; canons of 94 – 95; pronunciation in 93; public responsibilities in 92 – 93; reading Mencius in 89 – 90; reading techniques in 96; reading Zhou classics in 86 – 88; rituals in 90 – 94, 96 – 98, 100n28; transmitting Zhou culture in 85 – 90, 91, 98, 99n21; Xunzi and 93 – 94; Zhu Xi and 85, 94 – 98, 98n7, 99n8, 100n39, 100 – 101nn46 – 47, 101n50 consilience 63 Constantine I, Roman emperor 125, 126, 131, 133 constructionism 49 – 50 continents, formation of 176 controlled burns 188 – 189 corals 206, 207, 210 Corpus Christi Federal Courthouse 118, 120, 120, 121, 127 cosmology 60, 194, 199 – 203, 201; definition of 203n1; see also astronomy Croce, Benedetto 20, 23, 24 Crosby, Alfred W. 63 – 64 Cuban Missile Crisis 38 Cullmann, Oscar 73, 77, 83n75 Cuvier, Georges 6, 207 Cwiekowski, Frederick 71 – 72 Cycle of Erosion 182

Davis, William Morris 182 decolonizing approaches 47, 50, 111 deep history 50 On Deep History and the Brain (Smail) 12 deep past 50, 52, 224; see also paleoanthropology deep time 4 – 5, 14 – 15, 173, 207, 217 De Locis theologicis (Cano) 70 dendrochronology 149 – 150 Denisovans 221, 222 “Devil’s Right Hand, The” (Earle) 134 Dictionnaire de théologie catholique 71 digital revolution, archives and 162, 167 Diller, Phyllis 139 Diné (Navajo) 112 dinosaurs 7, 207, 210, 211 dissociated past 50 – 52 disturbance 181 – 182 DNA 8, 58 – 59, 60 – 61, 104, 222 Dobie Gillis 139 Dobrynin, Anatoly 38 Dobzhansky, Theodosius 207 documents 56 – 58; in Christianity 71 – 72 dogma 76, 81n60 Dong Zhongshu 98n7 Doppler effect 194 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 34 Dou, Gerrit 134 – 136, 136 Dover, Paul M. vii, 1 – 16 Dry River Falls 6, 6 Duby, Georges 20, 28, 29, 60 Ducos, Blaise 134 – 136 Durkheim, Émile 23 Earle, Steve 134 earth: critical zone of 180, 181; environmental science of 180 – 193; history of 173 – 179; life emerges on 173, 175 Earth Day (1970) 189 Earth System Science (ESS) 46 Ebrey, Patricia 94 École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) 25 ecumenical movement 81n53 Egypt 109, 149 Einstein, Albert 3, 197 Elementary Physical Geography (Davis) 182 elk 205 elk grasslands 187 Ellis, George 3 England 21, 32, 145, 160, 221 entropy 200 environmental science 180 – 193; beaver case study in 185 – 188; controlled burns case study in 188 – 189; disturbance in 181 – 182; fragmentary record in 183; legacy effects in 183 – 184; mysterious past in 183 – 185; “natural” as defined in 184; reference conditions in 184 – 185

Daehnke, John 114 Daffy Duck 139 Danish National Museum 147 – 148 Danowski, Déborah 44 Dante Alighieri 126 dark energy 195, 197 – 198, 199 dark matter 195, 197, 197 – 198 Darth Vader 158 Darwin, Charles 5, 7, 58 – 59, 145 dates, history and 57, 58 – 59

231

Index ESS (Earth System Science) 46 Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, An (Newman) 76 – 77 essentialism 51, 154 eternalism 3 ethnicity and race 8; heritage and 102 – 103, 104, 105, 107, 109 – 114 Eurasia: beavers in 185, 187; extinctions in 211, 212; hominins in 223; see also Asia; Europe Europe: archaeology and 143 – 146, 148, 149, 153 – 154; architecture of 117 – 122, 127 – 130; archives in 158 – 169; historiography in 9, 13, 19 – 31, 44, 45, 49; hominins in 220, 221, 223, 225; immigration from 109; painting in 122 – 123, 124, 125, 130 – 138; postwar era in 41; sculpture in 124 – 125, 126, 126, 131, 132, 138, 139, 140; and white settlement 181, 184 – 185, 186 – 187, 205, 213; see also colonialism European Recovery Program (Marshall Plan) 41 Evans, Joanne 168 Evans, John 145 – 146 Event Horizon Telescope 195 evolutionary anachronisms 212 evolutionary biology 7 – 8, 11, 15, 58 – 62; see also paleoanthropology evolutionary faunas 209, 210 exoplanets 173, 178 exotic invasives 183 – 184 extinctions, mass 15, 205 – 216; Late Quaternary Megafaunal 211, 212, 216n40; lingering effects of 212; sixth extinction 15, 209, 212 Eyck, Hubert van 122, 124 Eyck, Jan van 122, 124 Ezra 122, 128, 133

fires in 188 – 189; succession in 181; wood-wide web in 180 Forest Service, U.S. 188 fossils: paleoanthropology and 217 – 228; paleontology and 205 – 216 Foucault, Michel 50 Four Books 95 France, historiography in 9, 13, 19 – 31 France-Observateur 24 Francis, Pope 77 Freleng, Friz 126, 138 – 139 French Resistance 9, 19, 20, 28 Frere, John 146 Friedrich, Caspar David 122, 125, 130 – 131 Frisch, Michael 103, 106 Frost, Robert 190 Furet, François 24 Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis 22 future: archives and 159; big history and 56, 62 – 64; in Christianity 76, 77 – 78; earth in 177 – 178; growing footprint of 43 – 45, 53n12; technology and 43 – 47, 51 – 52 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 96 Gaddis, John Lewis 3, 11 – 13, 12; and “landscapes of history” 11 – 13, 33, 35 – 36 Garofalo, David vii – viii, 15, 194 – 204 gender history 8 genealogy 104 – 105 general relativity 3, 195, 196 genetic method, in theology 71 – 73 genizah repositories 160, 168, 169n12 geology 4 – 7, 11, 15, 58, 59, 182; Anthropocene defined within 46; archaeology shaped by 143, 145; deep-time 14 – 15; development of 143; downward-backward link in 175; through earth history 173 – 179; see also environmental science Germany 24, 33, 41, 44, 221; archaeology in 149, 149, 153, 221; historiography in 58; in postwar era 40, 41; Romantic painting in 122, 125, 130 – 133; in World War I 33, 34; in World War II 9, 41 Gesché, Adolphe 81n60 Ghana 2 Gilbert, Grove Karl 182 Giraudo, Cesare 78 Glassberg, David 104 Gothic architecture 122, 130 Gould, Stephen Jay 4, 207 Graetz, Heinrich 79n17 Grand Canyon 4, 175 Graubünden 167 Great Depression 40 – 41 Great Fire (1910) 188 Great Oxidation Event 176 Greece 28, 221 Greek architecture 118 – 120, 119, 127 – 130

Fagniez, Gustave 22 Falconer, Hugh 145 Fareld, Victoria 47 Faulkner, William 1, 117 – 118 faunas, evolutionary 209, 210 Fawcett, Edmund 125, 133 Febvre, Lucien 20, 23, 29, 30n11, 31n35, 60; on anachronism 26; Annales co-founded by 24; on facts as constructs 25; on histoire-problème 26 – 27 Fernández-Sebastián, Javier 44 Feudal Society (Bloch) 21 Fibber McGee and Molly 139 fires, forest 188 – 189 fire use 221, 222, 225 Five Classics 86, 88, 94, 95 flux-luminosity relation 194, 198 – 199, 198 Fontana, Carlo 120 – 122, 121 forest preserves 205 – 206, 213 forests: controlled burns in 188 – 189; 1938 hurricane and 184; extinctions and 212, 213;

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Index 48 – 50; social 57, 105; source analysis in 37 – 39; as subjective 23 – 24, 26, 27 – 28; see also big history; heritage; public history hominins see paleoanthropology Homo 219 H. erectus 220, 221, 224 H. habilis 218, 219 H. heidelbergensis 221 H. rudolfensis 218 H. sapiens 60, 62, 218, 221 – 222, 223, 225 Hong, Sun-ha 45 Hopi 112 Horry County Museum 113 Hottinger, Johann Heinrich 170n26 Hoxne brick pit 146 Hsün Tzu 94 Hubble, Edwin 198 Hubble Space Telescope 196 Hughes-Warrington, Marnie 63 Humani Generis (Pius XII) 71 Hunt, Lynn 49 hunter-gatherers 7, 223 – 224 hurricanes 184 Hutton, James 4, 5, 182

Greek language 73, 74, 80n24 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste 137 – 138, 137 Groot, Jerome de 104 – 105 Grotte Chauvet 143, 144 guishen 96 – 97 Guizot, François 19, 22 Hadean Eon 174 – 175 Haladyn, Julian Jason 133 Hammond Beeby Rupert Ainge Architects 118, 119 Han Dynasty 57, 94 Hanna and Barbera 139 Happisburgh 221 Hartley, L.P. 1, 13, 103 Hartman-Cox Architects 120, 120 Hartnett, Hilairy viii, 14 – 15, 173 – 179 Head, Randolph C. viii, 14, 158 – 170 Hebrew language 73, 74, 80n24, 80n47 Hegel, Georg 36, 58, 78 Herculaneum 143, 151 heresy 75, 81n54 heritage 8 – 9, 14, 47, 102 – 116; archaeology and 108, 110, 112; Blacks and 110, 111; colonialism and 108 – 109, 111; genealogy and 104 – 105; history vs. 102 – 106; identity and 104, 109; immigrants and 109, 111; Indigenous Americans and 107, 108, 110, 111, 112 – 114; many voices in 104, 106, 109; nostalgia in 106 – 107, 111; pioneers and 107 – 108; race, social justice and 102 – 103, 104, 105, 107, 109 – 114; shared authority in 105 – 106, 109 hermeneutics 75 – 77 Herodotus 11, 57 Hickman, Dwayne 139, 140 histoire immédiate 24 – 25 histoire-problème 26 Historian’s Craft, The (Bloch) 9 – 11, 19 – 31 historicism 8, 47, 49 – 50, 54n20 history 8 – 14, 143; anachronism in 11, 26, 29; ancient and medieval 28 – 29; art 14, 117 – 142; Bloch on 9 – 11, 19 – 31; Christianity and 70 – 72, 79n8; contingency of 35; dates and 57, 58 – 59; debate on continuing relevance of 43 – 55; debate on demand for expertise of 48 – 50; deep 50; documents and 56 – 58; facts in 25 – 26; Gaddis on 11 – 13; heritage vs. 102 – 106; histoire immédiate 24 – 25; historicism vs. constructionism in 49 – 50; ignored in policy-making 33 – 42; journalism vs. 24, 33; methodical historiography in 25, 27; modern idea of 44; physical sciences and 11 – 12, 59 – 60; present in justification of 48 – 50; present-past line in 32 – 42; of present time 24 – 25, 31n33; problem-oriented 25 – 27; as science 19, 20, 22 – 24, 26; science and 59 – 60; and seeing like an historian 35 – 36; self-justification of

IBM Tower 122 ice ages: art in 144; most recent 6, 64, 144, 205, 211; of Pleistocene 181 – 182 Ignatius Loyola 82n72 IHTP (Institut de l’Histoire du Temps Présent) 25 Iktinos 119, 120 immigrants, to U.S. 109, 111 India 154 Indiana Jones movies 144 Indigenous Americans 184 – 185, 205; heritage and 107, 108, 110, 111, 112 – 114 Inferno (Dante) 126 inherited past 47, 52 Institut de l’Histoire du Temps Présent (IHTP) 25 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 43 International Coalition of Sites of Conscience 111 invasives, exotic 183 – 184 Iraq War 39, 40 Iron Age 147, 154, 155 Janzen, D.H. 212 Japan 35, 40, 41, 189 Jefferson, Thomas 118 Joachim of Fiore 77 – 78 John XXIII, Pope Saint 77, 82nn66 – 67 Johnson, G. Wesley 105 Johnson, Lyndon B. 38 – 39 Johnson/Burgee Architects 122, 123 Joll, James 32 journalism, history vs. 24, 33 Journet, Charles 71

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Index Malhi, Y. 212 mammoths 205, 206, 211, 212 Man and Nature (Marsh) 189 Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, The 139, 140 Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor 122, 126, 133 Mareit River 191 Marrou, Henri-Irénée 20, 23, 27, 28 Marsh, George Perkins 189 Marshall, C.R. 207 Marshall, George 40, 41 Marshall Plan (European Recovery Program) 41 Martin, P.S. 212 Marx, Karl 78 mass extinctions see extinctions, mass mastodons 205, 206, 207, 211, 212 Matthew 123, 129 May, Ernest 39 McKemmish, Sue 168 McPhee, John 4 – 5 Meaning in History (Löwith) 73 Meldahl, Keith 4 Mencius 85, 89 – 90, 98n5, 99n16 Meringolo, Denise 103, 112 methane values 212 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer 139 Metternich, Klemens von 35 Meyer von Knonau, Gerold 164 – 165, 166, 168 Michelet, Jules 9, 27, 29n2 Middle Ages: archives of 159, 162; Christianity in 79n8, 82n72; historians of 28 – 29; illumination in 122 – 123, 128, 129, 133, 134 Middle East 28, 148, 149, 220, 221 Middleton, Kate 69 Milkmaid, The (Vermeer) 134, 135 Mills, Enos 189 Missoula, Lake 6 MNA (Museum of Northern Arizona) 111 – 113 Momigliano, Arnaldo 22 Monod, Gabriel 22 – 23 Mozambique 44 Mr. Lovebird 139 Mrs. Lovebird 139 Museum of Northern Arizona (MNA) 111 – 113 Mycenae 152 mysticism, Christian 78n3

Joutard, Philippe 24 Judaism 72, 73 – 75; genizah repositories and 160, 168, 169n12 Kallikrates 119, 120 Kant, Immanuel 58 Kaufman, Ned 102 – 103 Kelley, Robert 105 Kelvin, William Thomson, Lord 5 Kennedy, John F. 38 Kennedy, Paul 40 Kennedy, Robert F. 38 Kent’s Cavern 145 Kenya 218 – 219 Ker, Ian 81 – 82n65 Ketelaar, Eric 169n13 Kewanwytewa, Jimmy 112 Khrushchev, Nikita 38 Kitchen Maid, The (Dou) 134 – 136, 136 Koerner, Joseph Leo 131 Kolbert, E. 213 Koselleck, Reinhart 44 Kudla, Hubertus 169n3 Lacombe, Paul 23 Lacouture, Jean 24, 25 landform development 182 landscape architecture 190 – 191 Landscape of History, The (Gaddis) 11 – 13, 33, 35 – 36 Langlois, Charles-Victor 23 language 223, 224 – 225 Late Quaternary Megafaunal (LQM) Extinction 211, 212, 216n40 Leavitt, Henrietta 198 legacy effects 183 – 184 Le Goff, Jacques 20, 28, 29 Leopold Report (1963) 188 Levallois technique 222 Levin, Kevin 107 Li 91 Libby, Willard 58 Life with Feathers 126, 132, 138 literary criticism 8 logjams 184, 190 Lomekwi artifacts 218 – 219 Lonetree, Amy 111, 114 Lowenthal, David 9, 103 Löwith, Karl 73 LQM (Late Quaternary Megafaunal) Extinction 211, 212, 216n40 Lubac, Henri de 78 luminosity-distance relation 194, 198 – 199, 198 Luther, Martin 166 Luzern city archive 164 Lyell, Charles 5 – 6, 59, 174

NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) (1990) 110, 113 Nandy, Ashis 47 – 48 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) 7 National Council on Public History (NCPH) 105 National Endowment for the Humanities’ Enduring Questions Program 3, 15 National Park Service 188, 205 National Trust for Historic Preservation 110

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Index partisanship 36 past: debate on continuing relevance of 43 – 55; deep 50, 52, 224; dissociated 50 – 52; as foreign country 1, 8, 13, 103; interdisciplinary commonalities on 13; lengthening of 4; recurring vs. unfolding 46, 47, 49 – 50, 52; role in societal practices 47 – 48; varying definitions of 1, 47 – 48; see also specific disciplines Pastoureau, Michel 133 Pearl Harbor bombing 35 pendulum 199 – 200, 199 Pereira, Mateus H.F. 53n16 Peru 113 Peshtigo fire (1871) 188 Phanerozoic Eon 207, 208, 209 photography 146, 147 photosynthesis 176 physical sciences see sciences, physical; specific disciplines physics 1, 2 – 3, 199 – 203 Pioneer Mother 108 pioneers 107 – 108 Pirenne, Henri 10 Pius XII, Pope 71 Plantonism 70 Playfair, John 4 Plotnick, Roy E. viii, 12, 15, 205 – 216 plurihistoricity 49, 52, 55n38 Polybius 12 Pompeii 143, 144, 151, 152, 152, 153 “Pompeii Premise” 153 Pontifical Biblical Commission 75 Porr, Martin viii, 14, 143 – 157 posthumanism 51 – 52 pottery 148 predictive policing 46 Prescott, Cynthia Culver 108 present: in Christianity 69 – 70, 78, 78 – 79n3; in justification of history 48 – 50; varying definitions of 1 – 2; see also specific disciplines presentism: confirmation bias and 38; context and 39; in heritage 103; in history writing 11; information overload and 36 – 37; in policy-making 33 – 42; in science 3; strategic thinking vs. 40, 41 present past 47, 52 Prestwich, Joseph 145 – 146, 155 Principles of Geology (Lyell) 5, 6, 174 pronghorns 212 Proterozoic Eon 177, 178 Protestantism 70, 72, 162, 165 – 167 public archaeology 115 Public Historian, The 105 public history 9, 102 – 116; emergence of 105; shared authority in 105 – 106, 109 Puett, Michael 99 – 100nn21 – 22 Pyne, Stephen 188

Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) (1990) 110, 113 Native Americans see Indigenous Americans natural range of variability 183, 185 natural sciences see sciences, physical; specific disciplines Navajo (Diné) 112 NCPH (National Council on Public History) 105 Neandertals 221 – 222, 223, 225 negative theology 51 neo-Confucians 85, 98 Neolithic Era 148 neo-Scholasticism 71 Neustadt, Richard 39 Newell, Norman 208 – 209 Newman, John Henry 76 – 77 Newton, Isaac 2 – 3, 195 New York Times 122, 127, 130, 133, 134 New Zealand 185 Nietzsche, Friedrich 47 nitrate pollution 180 – 181, 190 Nora, Pierre 25 Norse mythology 2 Nouvel Obervateur, Le 24 Oakeshott, Michael 11 O’Collins, Gerald 82n65 Oecolampadius, Johannes 165 Oldowan artifacts 219, 220 Olszewski, Deborah I. viii, 15, 217 – 228 One Atlanta Center 122, 123 Optatam Totius 71 optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) 149 Orientalism 144 On the Origin of Species (Darwin) 5, 145 Ortega, Nicolas 124 – 126, 130, 133, 134 Orthodox Christianity 70 Ouzel fire (1978) 189 oxygen 176 Ozouf, Mona 25 painting 122 – 123, 124, 125, 130 – 138 palaeolithic archaeology 153, 154 paleoanthropology 15, 154, 217 – 228; definition of 217; incomplete record of 217; stone artifacts and 218 – 225 paleoarchaeology 7 paleoecology 181 – 182 Paleolithic Era 57, 153, 154, 221, 225 paleontology 7, 11, 205 – 216; evolutionary faunas in 209; extinctions discovered by 207; six major extinctions and 209; three great eras in 208 Panero, James 141n16 Pangea 177 Paranthropus 218 Parthenon 119, 119

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Index Qi 89, 96, 97, 100 – 101n47 Quedlinburg 149, 150 Quiet Please! 139 race and ethnicity 8; heritage and 102 – 103, 104, 105, 107, 109 – 114 radiometric dating 58, 144, 146, 148 – 149, 150 – 151 Ranke, Leopold von 27, 58, 59, 158 Raup, David 207, 209 records: definitions of 159, 169n6; see also archives recurring past 46, 47, 52 reference conditions 184 – 185 regressive method 21, 71, 72 relativity 202 – 203; general 3, 195, 196 religion see Christianity; Judaism; theology restoration 190 – 191, 213 retrodiction 16n11 Revue Historique 22 Richards, Thomas 158, 169 Ricœur, Paul 74 – 75, 80n47, 80n50 rituals, Confucian 90 – 94, 96 – 98, 100n28 rivers 182, 190, 191; beavers’ role in 185 – 188, 186, 189; logjams in 184, 190; mill dams in 183; restoration of 190 – 191 Rocky Mountain National Park 189 Roden, David 51 – 52 Rodin, Auguste 126, 132, 138, 139, 140 Rolan, Greg 168 Romantic painting 122, 125, 130 – 133 Rome, ancient 12; architecture of 118 – 122, 127 – 130; sculpture of 124 – 125, 126, 131 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 35 Rothman, Lily 134 Rubin, Vera 195, 197 Rück, Peter 170n18 Rudwick, Martin 5 Rurans, Robert 122 – 125, 127, 133 Russia 34 Rutter, John 69

Simangan, Dahlia 44 Sima Qian 57 Simmler, Johann Jakob 170n26 Simon, Zoltán Boldizsár viii, 14, 43 – 55 six arts 85 Slaughterhouse-Five (Vonnegut) 1 Smail, Daniel Lord 12 Smith, F.A. 212 Smokey Bear 188 social history 57, 105 social justice 8; archives and 161, 162, 163, 167, 168, 169, 170n14; heritage and 102 – 103, 104, 105, 107, 109 – 114 Soil Conservation Service 187 Sollas, William 5 Song Dynasty 85, 94, 97, 98 Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) 107 South Africa 175, 221 Soviet Union 7, 38 space-time 199 – 203, 201 speed of light 200, 201, 202 Spengler, Oswald 47 Spier, Fred 63 Spohn, William 79 Spokane Flood 6 – 7 Steeves, Nicolas ix, 14, 69 – 83 Stone Age 145, 147, 154, 221, 221 – 222, 223; Neolithic Era 148; Paleolithic Era 57, 153, 154, 221, 225 stone artifacts 218 – 225 Stoutamire, William F. ix, 14, 102 – 116 strategic thinking 40, 41 stratigraphy 148 Strickler, Johannes 164 – 165 Sullivan, Andrew 124 – 125 supernovae 197 – 198, 199 Suri, Jeremi ix, 13 – 14, 32 – 42 Sweetie Face 139 Swiss Reformed Church 165 Sylvester 139

Saint-Acheul 147 Samuels, Kathryn Lafrenz 109 San Marcello al Corso 120 – 122, 121 Sarich, Vincent 59 schism 75, 81n54 Schliemann, Heinrich 152, 155 Schöningen 153, 221 sciences, physical 2 – 3, 13, 14; history and 11 – 12, 59 – 60; see also specific disciplines sculpture: Rodin 126, 132, 138, 139, 140; Roman 124 – 125, 126, 131 SCV (Sons of Confederate Veterans) 107 Seignobos, Charles 23, 30n19 Sepkoski, J. John (“Jack”), Jr. 209 September 11 attacks 34, 35 Ševčenko, Liz 111

Tale of Two Kitties, A 139 Taste of Catnip, A 139 technology, future and 43 – 47, 51 – 52 Tempest, The (Shakespeare) 1 Tertullian 76, 81n61 theology 8, 69 – 83; context and 71; history and 70 – 72; negative 51; see also Christianity; Judaism Thérèse de Lisieux, Saint 79n3 Thinker, The (Rodin) 126, 132, 138, 139, 140 Thomas, Julia Adeney 44 Thompon, Bill 139 Thomson, C. J. 147 Thomson, Keith 7 Three Age System 147 – 148, 154 – 155 Thucydides 22 Tillman, Hoyt 97, 100 – 101n47

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Index time: in biblical perspective 73 – 75; in cosmology 199 – 203, 201; cyclical vs. linear 2, 73; in earth history 173 – 179 Tom and Jerry 139 trilobites 207, 209, 210 Trojan War 152 Truman, Harry 40, 41 Trump, Donald 37, 117 – 122, 128 – 129, 133 Tsosie, Rebecca 111 Turner, Frederick Jackson 107 Tuscaloosa Federal Building and Courthouse 118 – 119, 119, 121, 127 Tutankhamun tomb 143, 144, 153 Tu Weiming 98, 98n5, 99n14 Tweetie Pie 139

Wallace Wimple 139 Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (Friedrich) 122, 125, 130 – 131 Warner Brothers 126, 132, 138, 139 Waser, Johann Heinrich 163 – 164 Washington, George 118 Wearmouth-Jarrow monastery 122, 128 Weber, Max 47 Wilcox, David R. 112 Wilderness Act (1964) 188 William, Prince 69 Wilson, Allan 59 Wilson, Edward O. 63 Wise Quacking Duck, The 139 Witmore, Christopher 155 Wohl, Ellen ix, 15, 180 – 193 Wonderwerk Cave 221 Wong, David 99n17 wood-wide web 180 World War I 32, 33, 34 – 35 World War II 40, 41, 60; French Resistance in 9, 19, 20, 28 Wudi, Han emperor 57

unfolding past 46, 47, 49 – 50, 52 uniformitarianism 5 – 6, 174, 182 United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) 107 United States: archaeology in 144; architecture in 117 – 122, 127 – 130; cartoons in 126, 132, 138 – 139, 142n34; in Cold War 7, 38; environmental science in 180 – 193; heritage in 7, 14, 102 – 116; in postwar era 32, 41; September 11 and 34, 35; in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq 39, 40; in World War II 35 universe: expansion of 195 – 196; past-to-present causation in 194 – 204 university architecture 130 “unspoiled nature” 205, 213 updatism 53n16 Ussher, James 4

Xi, Chen 100 – 101n47 Xiongnu 57 Xuan, King of Qi 89 Xunzi 84, 85, 93 – 94 Yellow: The History of a Color (Pastoureau) 133 Yellowstone National Park 187, 189 Yeo, Geoffrey 159 Ygdrassil 2

Vatican II Council 71 – 72, 73, 76, 77 Vendé, Yves ix, 14, 84 – 101 Vermeer, Johannes 134 – 137, 135 Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting 134 Vernant, Jean-Pierre 20, 28, 29 Vico, Giambatista 59 Vidal-Naquet, Pierre 20, 28 Vienna Coronation Gospels 123, 129, 133 Vietnam War 38 – 40 Vincent of Lérins 76, 77, 81nn62 – 63 Virgil 1 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 44 Vonnegut, Kurt 1

Zhou culture see Confucianism Zhu Xi 85, 98n7, 99n8, 100 – 101nn46 – 47, 101n50; Confucian canon changed by 94 – 95; reading method of 95 – 96; rituals and 96 – 98, 100n39 Zigong 87, 88 Zimbabwe 44 Zuni 112 Zurich 162; central chancellery archive in 163 – 165, 168; Reformation letters in 165 – 167 Zweig, Stefan 32, 33, 34 Zwicky, Fritz 195, 199 Zwingli, Ulrich 165, 166, 167

Waccamaw Indian People 113 – 114 Walking with Dinosaurs 7

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