Making Time

The Archaeology of Time Revisited

Gavin Lucas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000373561
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Social Philosophy

Making Time grapples with a range of issues that have crystallized in the wake of 15 years of discussion on time in archaeology, since the author's seminal volume The Archaeology of Time, synthesizing them for a new generation of scholars.

The general understanding of time held by both archaeologists and non-archaeologists is often very simple: a linear notion where time flows along a single path from the past into the future. This book sets out to complicate this image, to draw out the key problems and issues with time that impact archaeological interpretation. Using concrete examples drawn from different periods and places, the book challenges the reader to think again. Ultimately, the book will suggest that if we want to understand what archaeological time is, then we need to accept that things do not exist in time, they make time. The crucial question then becomes: what kinds of time do archaeological materialities produce?

Written for upper level undergraduates and researchers in archaeology, the book is also accessible to non-academics with an interest in the topic. The book is relevant for cognate disciplines, especially history, heritage studies and philosophy.

1

Time matters

The duplicities of time

The concept of time, like almost everything else, has fallen foul of the deep dualisms that have riven western thinking.¹ Natural Time is the universal clock, ticking away down the years, centuries and millennia within which events are measured while Cultural Time is how different societies in the past and present mark or represent time: their calendars, festivals, routines, myths and histories. Natural science gives us natural time, while social science and the humanities chart the multifarious ways different cultures have expressed this natural time. Time is, on the one hand, an objective property of the physical world; on the other, a subjective experience of human mind. Physical time and felt time. One might go on listing the permutations of this essential dualism but I think these preliminary remarks will make my point. Indeed, in my prologue I recounted how such dichotomies framed my earlier work on time. To some extent this was almost implicit, an accepted assumption which led me to reject or re-interpret everything on one side of this dichotomy (natural/physical time) in favour of the other (cultural/felt time). Yet in another sense, I was acutely aware of this dichotomy and, through the work of philosopher Paul Ricoeur, saw it as an inevitable tension, what Ricoeur called the aporias of time. Ricoeur’s solution was to posit a third time – narrative time – with which to bridge the dualism between what he called cosmological and phenomenological time and I have been both enamoured and dissatisfied by his solution ever since. I will return to Ricoeur in a later chapter but I mention him here because in many ways, it is impossible to tackle this dualism without invoking philosophy.

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

The Einstein–Bergson debate

In 1922, Albert Einstein, who was then in his early 40s, had been invited to be the guest speaker at the annual meeting of the French Philosophical Society. Inevitably, he was asked to present his theory of relativity, publication of which had occurred just a few years previously but whose renown began with his four 1905 publications, including one on special relativity. Einstein’s fame was in the ascendant and his ideas, particularly as they pertained to time were causing ripples of excitement across Europe and the world. But also present at the meeting was Henri Bergson, then well into his 60s but the doyen of French philosophy. Bergson did not like what Einstein had to say. After Einstein gave his lecture, Bergson offered a half-hour critique, to which Einstein replied only briefly, but included in his reply was his famous quip: The time of the philosophers does not exist. Well, who could take such an insult lying down? Bergson wrote an entire book challenging Einstein,² and even seems to have been instrumental in preventing him getting the Nobel Prize for his work on relativity; instead, Einstein received it for his work on the photoelectric effect. A bit like giving Darwin a prize for his work on earthworms, ignoring his theory of evolution by natural selection. And yet in the end, it was Einstein who became a household name while Bergson’s fame diminished.

So what was the debate all about? Put simply, relativity theory challenged the notion of time as duration by demonstrating the impossibility of simultaneity in any absolute sense. Because simultaneity was relative, duration crumbles; relativity theory suggests that event x and event y might succeed one another, be simultaneous or precede one another, dependent on a frame of reference. So from one point of view, x might be before y, but from another, it might come after it. If this is the case, duration, understood as a flow of time, is purely a subjective illusion. Time, with space, constitutes a durationless field, which modern physics calls the block universe view of time. This contradicted the very basis of Bergson’s philosophy which argued for duration as the primordial form of time. For Bergson, physical time was an abstraction which gave the illusion of reality because of its measurement by clocks. Yet the irony is, clock time itself was also subverted by the implications of relativity.

I have usually assumed that time as expressed through clocks and calendars is fundamentally about sequence: the ticking of seconds on a clock, the regular passing of days and years. At its most basic, it is time as a segmented, equally-spaced series of units, what in mathematics is known as an interval scale or measure. This is certainly true of time as we use it in everyday life, as it appears on our phones, computers, clocks and diaries. Yet in terms of managing and co-ordinating this time into a singularized metrology, the key property is not succession but that of simultaneity: knowing that my clock has the same time as yours, that the seconds or minutes on two clocks are of equal duration, that we both recognize that today is 7 July 2020 or that if you are in Australia and I am in Iceland, that you are ten hours exactly ahead of me. Of course, in practice, clocks can differ, but in principle they can all be synchronized to the same time and where it matters, they usually are. Your computer for example has an internal clock that runs off its own battery, called a CMOS chip; every time you connect to the Internet, the clock re-calibrates itself using Network Time Protocol (NTP) which is designed to synchronize your computer time to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) as registered on a recognized website such as time.gov.

It all sounds quite simple but in fact a great deal of work and effort went into establishing UTC as will be further discussed in Chapter 2 and more importantly, such synchronization today relies completely on the network of satellites, fibre-optic cables and Wi-Fi signals, though originally it was made possible by trans-oceanic and trans-continental telegraph lines and later radio waves.³ With any synchronization, the problem is essentially knowing the time at a location different from the one you are at; as the French polymath Henri Poincaré put it: ‘[we] must, without being at Paris, calculate Paris time.’⁴ In all cases, even with the Internet, the time delay between sender and receiver is incorporated into any synchronizations, underlining the crucial connection between time and space and until high-speed communication was made possible through telegraphy, calculating such delays were prone to too much error. But just as this synchronization was being created, Einstein’s theory undermined its very basis by inaugurating the loss of simultaneity. What then, remains of clock time?

Poincaré wrote an important but under-cited paper about time in 1898 where he argued that our intuitive perceptions of sequence or simultaneity are not based on anything substantial, but simply conventions.⁵ These conventions vary from case to case, but at their foundation, we use them because they are convenient. Ultimately, Poincaré argued that time was a procedure: something we do with clocks and that any qualitative, intuitive notion we have of it is based on the quantitative measures we perform with our instruments, that is, clocks. Although he does not mention him by name, Poincaré was, essentially, contesting his fellow countryman Henri Bergson’s philosophy of intuition and time.⁶ He also anticipated many of the points that surfaced in the famous Einstein–Bergson debate of the 1920s.⁷ Clock synchronization and simultaneity thus become something we make, not something we observe in nature. This procedural notion of time is a theme that will take on great relevance for this book.

It has been debated how much Bergson misunderstood some key parts of Einstein’s theory of relativity, but Chapter 3 of his book Duration and Simultaneity seems to get to the heart of the difference. There, Bergson makes a distinction between contemporaneity and simultaneity. For Bergson, our primary experience of time as duration or flux can be described as the perception of contemporaneous flows; sitting around a table at a restaurant for example, there are waiters bustling around, other diners conversing, a clock ticking on a wall. In our perception, Bergson argues that we see all these events as both one and many simultaneously; we can choose to filter out everything and focus just on one, such as the person opposite us, or we can soak up the atmosphere of all together. It is this very ability to see events as both a unity and multiple that constitutes contemporaneity. For Bergson, time – in its pure state – is ‘multiplicity without divisibility and succession without separation.’⁸

It is from the primacy of ‘contemporaneous flows’, that we abstract a notion of ‘simultaneous instants’; like the flow, simultaneous events can be perceived as a unity or singled out. A waiter drops a tray at the same time as a child cries at another table; in one sense, these are part of the contemporaneous flows, but in defining them as simultaneous instants, we are implicitly drawing on what Bergson called a spatialized sense of time. Real duration is ‘thick’, it has no instants; the idea of an instant as a unit of time is a product of spatializing time, converting it into something measurable. Bergson explained the difference by analogy to drawing a line across a sheet of paper; as I close my eyes and make the movement with my hand, the experience is one of undivided continuity. When I open my eyes and see the drawn line, I now perceive a record of that act, a record which though also appears undivided, can now be divided: I can mark cuts or points along it, measure it and so on. For Bergson, spatialized time depended on the materialization of movement, a transition from what he called the unfolding (that is, the movement of pencil across paper) to the unfolded (the line on the paper). It is on such materializations that spatial time – clock time or physical time, is dependent.

I think Bergson’s analogy of the line and his idea of the unfolded provide more food for thought, especially in terms of understanding time as a material process so I will return to this in my final chapter. For now though, I want to remain with this idea of a tension or opposition between these two approaches to time. Physical time, expressed as an objective relation measurable by clocks, was ultimately relative and therefore multiple. Simultaneity and succession were therefore also relative: two events which appear simultaneous to person A, could appear successive to person B and vice versa. Philosophical time expressed as the subjective experience of a consciousness was an intrinsically indivisible and unified phenomenon. Simultaneity and succession were derivative perceptions from basic contemporaneous flows.

We can perhaps express this tension between simultaneity and contemporaneity by contrasting two different moments of temporal wonder, experiences we can probably all relate to. On a clear and starry night if you cast your eyes upward, you see a myriad of twinkling lights, each one a luminous globe like our own sun, or a planet lit up by such a sun. When you gaze at these stars you are directly observing the past – in the present. Because it takes time for light to travel, the image you see is not the ‘now’ of the star but its past. When I first heard about this, it was mind-blowing. What are ‘contemporary’ events to us are past for the objects caught up in those events. Reversing this, imagine someone on a distant planet, pointing a telescope to our earth a hundred light years away – they would actually be seeing our world as it was in 1921. These are quite startling ideas, even if we are also used to them, but what they illustrate is the relativity of simultaneity.

Now picture a more earthly scene; instead of looking up, look down to the ground and there you see a glint that catches your eye. This is no star – but the reflection off a shiny object half buried. You reach down and pick it up and in your hand you realize you are holding a flint axe. Nobody makes or uses these kinds of things anymore where you live and in fact it turns out to be a Neolithic axe, made around 6,000 years ago. You are looking directly at the past – in the present. This object has persisted, and it is due to this persistence that you are able to hold it now in the present. Sadly, for archaeologists, the same is not true of its maker. Yet this is still a wondrous thing, this tactile, immediate contact with a past contemporaneous with the present.

These two moments of wonder are both deeply temporal and play off the juxtaposition of the past in the present. But they do this in very different ways. In the first, the juxtaposition is symmetrical, whereas in the second it is not; that is, what is present for A is past for B and vice versa in the starry sky. In the second, there is no symmetry; the axe inhabits my time, but I cannot inhabit its time (except in my imagination). More importantly though, simultaneity in the first case is dependent upon and relative to space, the distance between me and the star. In the second case, contemporaneity is dependent upon persistence, the continuity and then contiguity of the axe with me, that is, Bergson’s contemporaneous flows. I am not sure how easy it is to reconcile these two cases or argue that one is more primary than the other. But what I do know is that the fallout of this opposition has arguably had deleterious effects on historical disciplines like archaeology.

The bifurcation of time and archaeology

The great divergence between physical time and felt time in many ways left historical and archaeological time in limbo – or better yet, increasingly stretched out, with one foot on world time and the other o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: Time after time
• 1. Time matters
• 2. The archaeological clock
• 3. Time scales
• 4. The shape of time
• 5. The same time
• 6. Another time
• 7. The archaeological time machine
• Epilogue: Making history
• Index