Gavin Lucas has returned to the theme of archaeological time, which has long interested him, and, in this paper, to contemporaneousness in archaeology. For a historian, contemporaneousness is a straightforward matter. The First World War and the Russian Revolution, for example, are considered contemporaneous because the two events took place during the same period of time. Both significantly influenced the course of 20th-century history and influenced each other as well. But for an archaeologist, the very notion of chronology is fundamentally problematic. We date an archaeological object or feature on the basis of morphological attributes that allow us to estimate the time during which it was created. In other words, a historical date (the actual date when some vestige came to be) corresponds, in archaeology, to a probable length of time. Archaeological time floats.
Dating artefacts or features moreover requires chronological markers that are relatively precise, and on most digs they are simply lacking. This was demonstrated again this past summer in Marsal, in Lorraine, when we excavated a pit silo dug into salt production waste materials that contained many pottery shards from the 6th century B.C. Eight human bodies had been tossed into this pit before it was finally filled in. The layer of filling covering the bodies contained pottery and metallic fragments dating from the end of the 6th century B.C. to the first quarter of the 5th. We naturally assumed that the bodies dated from the same period, or perhaps slightly after. Then we got the radiocarbon dating results for the skeletons, which all belonged to a period between 400 and 200 Cal. B.C. The pottery shards and small metallic debris that had been mixed in with the filling certainly dated to the end of the Early Iron Age, but they were still there in the ground when the bodies were thrown in during the fourth or third century B.C. In other words, these material remains were contemporary with that traumatic event even though they were in no way related to it. Historical time – the time of what happened – is the time of events, whereas archaeological time, which is the time of matter – pottery shards, bone fragments, pieces of metal – deals in lengths of time. Events vanish once they are over; not so pottery shards or bone fragments. They remain long after they were made or used.
Given this observation, what can be done? How can we know if archaeological remains are truly related to each other – that is, truly contemporary in historical terms? Gavin would have us draw on Alfred Schutz's notion of consociality, which defines, to put it roughly, the relation between people and the things around them. But isn't this just another way of trying to (re)introduce history into matter – I mean, of course, archaeological matter – that is fundamentally alien to it? Archaeological matter does not conform to the time of historical events. Its future is always just the reworking of what is old, of what is ‘already there’, along with its reshaping in every present that follows. And simply because ‘they’re there’, things are often brought back into play in untimely fashion. That is why archaeology is far better understood as a memory of the past than as the story of ‘what happened there’. Why, then, don't we acknowledge this? Why do we persist in trying to make archaeological remains speak to us as if they were historical documents? As Gavin reminds us, archaeological matter is multi-temporal in that all these objects and features that were created at different times coexist in our present, as they did, by the way, in each present after their creation. The future is not just made of things that are newly created, but rather of the infinite plasticity of the past, of its open-ended potential to become something else, even as it brings its heritage forward. In fact, the future is the transformation of the past, and in that archaeology offers a ‘reading of the past’ that is completely different from traditional history. Why not just come out and say so?
Therefore Gavin shows us that certain seemingly obvious concepts, in particular contemporaneousness, have actually changed over time. In the 1860s, when archaeology was flourishing in Europe, there were people living in the Americas and Australia very much as mankind had lived in the Stone Age. To travel from 19th-century London or Paris into the Welsh or the Breton countryside was to leave an industrial metropolis for a remote rural world where lifestyles and mentalities had changed very little from how they had been 200 or 300 years before. The past existed like an ocean of surviving practices surrounding small islands of modernity with steam-powered engines and public transport systems. That is probably why scholars, at that time, believed comparative approaches to be a powerful tool for reconstituting the distant past: they had only to look around to see that the most ancient ways were still out there, just beyond the gates of the modern world. This is not at all the way we view things today. Our experience of the world has dramatically changed. In an age of Facebook and Twitter, contemporaneousness is a form of simultaneity. We find ourselves in a single present, with individual moments simultaneously experienced all over the world. We are now cut off from the past, which is more and more removed from us, whereas in the 19th century the present bore the full weight of the past.
The way in which we order time has changed, or rather, ‘the regimes of historicity’ (régimes d’historicité), as the historian François Hartog (Reference Hartog2002) phrases it, have been transformed. Our relation to the past is no longer the same. Following the French Revolution, historians believed that reason would lead mankind towards progress and the emancipation of peoples everywhere. But that view came undone in France with the advent of the First Empire, the return of monarchical rule, the outbreak of new revolutions, and then the ephemeral return to a republic just before a Second Empire took over. Clearly, history didn't lead anywhere. It did not, as people had thought, pave the way for the future. After the middle of the 19th century, the events of the past related by history were seen as a relic, a dead thing that had just happened once. It was now obvious that mankind never learned anything from the failures of the past. History was just one instance after another of the strong dominating the weak in different ways. Marxism gained favor by feeding on our disillusionment and on the hope it offered of giving history new meaning, or at least some direction, thanks to the notion of ‘class struggle’. The ‘terrible 20th century’ taught us that this, too, was an illusion.
Thereafter, the terrible shock of the mechanized slaughter of the FirstWorld War, followed by Europe's moral collapse after the Second World War, definitively severed whatever ties still linked the present to the past. Today, the recent past of the 20th century is something that, overall in Europe, we would rather forget, and by which we prefer not to define ourselves. As for the future, it seems to hover over us like a vague threat, and we now live our lives in that ‘risk society’ whose workings have been so thoroughly described by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck (Reference Beck and Bernardi2001). We live in anticipation of catastrophy, in ‘the Final Age’, having retreated into a permanent present that moves along without ever moving on (Anders Reference Anders2007). The repressed past has not ceased ‘haunting’ the present as if it were still current, as if it had never ended (Hamel Reference Hamel2006). We are living a period of ‘latency’ that has not been able to take its place in history, one that seems doomed to keep on repeating itself in the present (Gumbrecht Reference Gumbrecht2013). This overwhelming, never-ending, absolute present is that of the globalized, overcapitalized world that flourished from the end of the 20th century.
Our thinking is shaped by that world. In other words, we cannot conceive our relation to the past and to the present independently of the way in which we exist in the world historically. It is our experience of the world, as that world is given to us, which fashions our understanding of the phenomena we observe. That relation is basically ideological, yet ideology is strangely absent in the works of scholars who deal with matters of archaeological ontology, especially North American scholars. But we can't make ideology disappear by pretending that it doesn't exist. Quite the contrary, by acting as if it does not matter, we confer on it the force of a given, something that doesn't have to be questioned. And in doing so, we unknowingly become its spokesperson.
In the end, the only question truly asked of us is this: do we consider archaeology to be a field of speculative reflection that has no impact on the world, or do we deem the way we conceive archaeology to be inseparable from our attempts to change things, or at least to free our minds of the assumptions and preconceived notions that fetter our thinking? I obviously subscribe to the latter view. If thought does not serve to relieve us of the pressures of ideology and convention, then it necessarily maintains us in a state of subjugation and dependence. Worse still, it makes us instruments for reproducing social norms. For, as Michel Foucault noted, we now live in a society in which power expresses itself as normalcy, ‘which implies an altogether different kind of surveillance and checks that involves maintaining constant visibility, categorizing individuals, establishing a hierarchy, labeling, setting limits, and identifying types. The social norm has become the social divide’, he wrote (Foucault Reference Foucault1994, 75). And that is why it is so important for us to think deeply, as Gavin urges us to do, about matters that deal with our relation to the past, for they have a natural tendency to slip into the mould of normalized concepts, such as contemporaneousness.
