In this wonderfully rich and thought-provoking article, Gavin Lucas exhorts us to write about archaeology in the mode of the contemporary. This is to attend to the shifting interplay between past, present and future, undertaken through a focus on the relations between objects, in contrast to the impoverished concern with succession and order that a notion of chronological contemporaneity imposes. His paper undertakes the useful task of disentangling concepts around time and contemporaneity, and raises a number of interesting questions. Here, I would like to discuss two of the most compelling contributions of Lucas's paper: the foregrounding of modes of persistence and of consociality, both of which I would like to explore by reflecting on my experiences of historical narrative and alternate temporalities in the history of highland Madagascar. The issue of persistence introduces the question of historical privilege – that is, how do some things persist while others fall to dust? And how is that persistence recognized and maintained? This same question of recognition (and misrecognition) is also at the heart of consociality; how are consociates acknowledged as contemporaneous, and what room is there for refusal?

The idea of writing in the contemporary mode is seductive, and offers a great deal in terms of a productive reorientation of our archaeological narratives. In many ways what Lucas proposes is a powerful new chronotopic configuration for archaeological narrative. As Lucas has explored elsewhere (Lucas Reference Lucas2005, 49–50), the chronotope concept, as developed by Mikhail Bakhtin (Reference Bakhtin, Emerson and Holquist1981), offers a great deal for archaeologists. For Bakhtin, the chronotope was an expression of the various ways in which time and space were fixed and melded in literature. Taking the example of classical Greek adventures, he showed how they were populated with recurring spatio-temporal motifs, including meeting and parting, loss and acquisition, search and discovery. The chronotope is the ‘organizing center’ for narrative events; it is ‘where the knots of narrative are tied and untied’ (Bakhtin Reference Bakhtin, Emerson and Holquist1981, 250). Along these lines, Rosemary Joyce (Reference Joyce2002, 34–38) has explored the narrative chronotopes of the quest and evolutionary progress in popular archaeology. Here, as Lucas observes, the narrative organization is tied to an understanding of the past as distanced from the present through a rigidly unfolding order of temporal succession. Lucas instead suggests that we move away from the automatic periodization of past and present in order to better understand the modes of persistence and consociality through which objects relate to each other and remain present. How is the relationship between past, present and future figured and narrated?

Understanding the narrative frame through which archaeological evidence is made meaningful is a key problem of archaeographical practice. Yet in doing this, Lucas's paper works to do two things that perhaps don't sit together entirely comfortably. It offers a powerful analysis of what contemporaneity is, and also suggests that archaeology should be written in ‘the mode of the contemporary’ (p. 14). There is a tension between the promise of an archaeology written in a chronotopic mode that takes as its orienting principle that the past is not past and that objects persist through their relations, on the one hand, and, on the other, the claim that such an archaeology is one that attends to ‘the changing interplay between present, past and future tense’ (p. 14). As a chronotopic configuration for narrating archaeological materials, the notion of writing in the mode of the contemporary is extraordinarily fecund. However, as a way of exploring the changing interplay between past, present and future, it seems to foreclose on historical possibilities that might indeed push the past into the past and distance it from the present. The mode of the contemporary seems to be a particular figuring of the relationship between past and present, rather than a means of discovering what that relationship might be at different moments.

Here, then, I would like to explore two issues. First, in highlighting contemporaneity as expressed through relationships between objects and subjects, how might other questions around non-contemporaneity be obscured? What room is there for less tangible dimensions of non-contemporaneity (cf. Derrida Reference Derrida and Kamuf1994)? How should we make sense of those who refuse to recognize a relationship of contemporaneity with others? Equally, how might we expand the frame beyond of modes of persistence and consociality to consider how some objects and people are denied contemporaneity? Admittedly, the denial of contemporaneity (or of coevalness, to echo Johannes Fabian (Reference Fabian1983) is closely related to understanding modes of persistence and consociality – but it also seems to demand something more.

Second, and related to this, is the question of how an archaeology in the chronotopic mode of the contemporary can be extended out of the realm of narrative critique and into the world of lived experience: how is history or contemporaneity understood as it is made? As archaeologists, we are concerned not only with narrative but also with enacted experience in the past and how this comes into recognition. Indeed, the question of recognition seems to me to be a primary and undertheorized area of concern for archaeology. Lucas's paper raises a number of interesting issues in relation to this, notably, what are the possibilities for other temporal frameworks through which history and contemporaneity are produced and anticipated? This question is clearly present in Lucas's paper, but is not as fully developed as other aspects of the theme. What kind of futures were imagined by past people, and whose futures were realized? How was the past conceptualized in relation to the present, and how did this preserve and promulgate the material and immaterial traces that we inherit?

In writing about Lincoln's continuing – albeit attenuated – existence in and through objects such as his coat, historical texts and national monuments, we attend to the way in which a particular past is privileged and narrated, and how it is made present today. But what might this offer for approaching Lincoln's understanding of his own relationships, his temporality, and relations to past and future? If we are to take seriously consociality and the non-contemporaneity of the present, how might that encourage a rethinking of temporal relationships not simply in relation to archaeological narrative, but also in earlier times? In other words, how might an archaeology written in the mode of the contemporary reframe the question of ‘the past in the past’? A key issue here is how the future is imagined, and what its relation is to present and past. And here I would like to push back against Lucas's suggestion that we need to ‘dispense with any notion of succession altogether’ (p. 10).

There is a fundamental asymmetry in the contrasting relationships between present and past on the one hand, and present and future on the other. This is an asymmetry that must be grappled with. Following Reinhart Koselleck (Reference Koselleck2004), we can contrast the ‘space of experience’ of the present and past, and the ‘horizon of expectation’ that defines the future. Events and processes of the past and present have spatial extension and an existence that can be seen and documented; they also have a diachronicity that cannot be avoided. The future, in contrast can only be thought, anticipated, projected, but never experienced directly. Koselleck's conceptual categories of the present–past ‘space of experience’ and the future ‘horizon of expectation’ provide a framework for examining the conditions of historical possibility. These exist in the variegated interplay between present–past and the anticipated future, however imagined – whether in a mode of the contemporary or of chronological succession.

I would like to turn to Madagascar at this point to consider an alternate way to imagine the relationship between past, present and future. Here, I hope to build on Lucas's discussion to further think about persistence and consociality in relation to the historical imaginary of the 19th century. Highland Madagascar is well known from Maurice Bloch's work (Bloch Reference Bloch1971; Reference Bloch1977) as a place where the past is vibrantly alive in the present. The past never recedes out of view but rather – with some important qualifications – remains present and known. This is reiterated in the terminology for time, where the word for the past (taloha) is translatable as ‘there, in front of one's head’ (Dahl Reference Dahl1999, 43). This is reiterated in the way in which ‘today’ is divided conceptually into two, with a term for the part of the day that has already passed (androany), and another for the part that is yet to come (anio). Here the key distinction is between the ultimately unknowable future, which lies invisible behind one, and the known and experienced present-past, which is quite literally available to view and interact with in the landscape. However, this present-past ‘space of experience’ was created through violence and political will. It was articulated to a particular future through the historical privilege of some actors and at the expense of others.

It is useful at this point to shift away from a notion of history as textual representation to use another formulation that draws upon history's characterization in many parts of Madagascar. Standing stones, for example, are described in oral histories of the 19th century as ‘history’ or tantara. This word – just like the English-language term ‘history’, is a complex bundle of concepts. Tantara in 19th-century Madagascar included textual sources and oral narratives, as well as standing stones and other monuments. But it also referred to ongoing traditions and practices, handed down to the living from the dead. History could be seen in the landscape, but that space of experience also included the actions through which the living reproduced the past and maintained its contemporaneity. This, then, is a notion of history as something experienced and lived as much as written and recorded. History was found in tradition and custom, in ceremonies and stories. It might seem that more or less anything could be history under these terms, but there was another important way in which tantara could be translated, and this was as ‘privilege’ (Delivré Reference Delivré1974, 164; Reference Delivré and Kent1979). To have history was to have privilege, and to see the evidence of one's past manifest in the landscape. It was also to have the privilege to expect continuity into the future, reproduced by one's descendants, who would care for the dead and interact with them at the site of the ancestral tomb. This privilege was also made visible by the destruction of history that took place when people were enslaved. Captives from raids, criminals, debtors and many others were enslaved and in the process had their ancestral land and tombs taken from them. Having no ancestral tomb, the enslaved were lost to history. This was a deliberate erasure of history by those with political might; the enslaved were excluded from the ‘space of experience’ of their ancestral past and from the ‘horizon of possibility’ for future continuation of their lineage. History existed in the past, but also in the privilege of reproduction and in the ongoing traditions that it made. These could be traditions of narration or of reading, but could also be understood through habitual and quotidian practices – of walking, eating, gathering, building, commemorating and so on.

Lucas's call for an archaeology ‘in the mode of the contemporary’ is at heart a call for better attention to the relationships – temporal and otherwise – between objects, people and historical narrative. As he observes, what is needed is the development of a more sophisticated theory that will allow us to identify different kinds of temporal relationship and consider how they operate in different modes. The Allen operators that Lucas mentions in passing sound a promising line to pursue and I am keen to hear more about how these might play out in an archaeological case study. Another approach to thinking through temporal–material relations is through the dynamics of semeiotic processes – or semeiosis – as developed from the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce. This is a semeiotic theory that differs fundamentally from the more familiar Continental semiotics (hence the different spelling), one which allows us to construct a theory of material–semeiotic relations that operate in the world and in time. To explore this briefly, I would like to turn to the multiple meanings of the English-language term ‘history’ and to explore how it operates as a changeable and varying semeiotic process. This, I hope, will resonate with Lucas's discussion of the contemporary.

When we use the term ‘history’, we can mean at least three different things. First, history can refer to historical sources: archives, oral histories, national heritage and archaeological finds. These are the traces – or signs – through which history is known and written. Historical narrative, or history-as-representation, constitutes the second sense of history. It is perhaps this aspect which most concerns Lucas, at least in this paper. How is the past written, and how are the relationships between objects defined and conceived relative to each other and to the historian–archaeologist? From a highland Malagasy perspective, we might broaden this second sense of history to include all the contemporary practices and traditions through which the signs of history are interpreted. This is to say that history can be experienced affectively and energetically as well as through textual practices of representation. These modes of history-making include not only obvious interpretive sites like museums and national monuments, but also more mundane interpretive practices such as driving along an old turnpike road, or walking the Fosse Way. Equally, affective moods and responses are also forms of history-making from this semeiotic perspective. The feeling of recognition when presented with a forgotten toy from one's childhood is an affective state that interprets an object relative to a past, but without necessarily bringing it into narrative form.

Third, to speak of history can be to discuss the disappeared past – history-as-event in the parlance of conceptual history – but also, as Lucas indicates, broader practices, beliefs and processes. Our understanding of this history is mediated through history-as-trace – whether through objects that persist into the contemporary world, or through more intangible practices and traditions. We must always start with the signs of history – whether these are material traces like pottery or visible absences like the tombs of those enslaved in highland Madagascar. So to summarize, history-as-trace brings us into relation with history-as-past – with other people, with other objects and places – and this relationship is recognized through history-as-interpreting-acts, which may be affective, gestural or representational, among other possibilities.

This, then, is a question of semeiotic traces – material or otherwise – in so far as they are experienced and understood in the present, and reach into the past and future. Along these lines, Lucas's paper encourages me to think about modes of persistence along multiple axes. There are modes of interpretive persistence through which the traces of history are understood affectively and through material and representational practices, some of which are projected into an indefinite future. We can also think through the modes of persistence of material traces, by inquiring into their being as signs, and as material things. Finally, we can ask about the nature of the relationships between such traces and the pasts that we understand them to show us. The objects of the past may be experienced only at a perceptual level, as part of the background of everyday life. Or they may be elaborated upon in narrative or through museological structures. But insofar as they tell us about history in some way they are always situated in an unfolding relation. History unfolds because every narrative or gesture has the potential to become another trace of the past, and in so doing to direct attention away from other semeiotic possibilities.

There is much more that could be said here, particularly in relation to consociality and the question of how we are brought into relation with the dead through their traces. Equally, the question of past futures is an important issue, with much to explore around the question of the anticipated response that was folded into past practices. Geoffrey Scarre (Reference Scarre, Scarre and Scarre2006) notes that it is possible to affect the dead relationally, by acting upon their posthumous reputation. When the tombs of highland Madagascar were forcibly abandoned, this was designed to have an effect on the dead contained within them as much as on the living. These were people who had lived and died with an expectation that they would be respected and remembered. Slavery acted to devalue them posthumously, and to deny them the care that they had anticipated. This in turn damaged the future of the living. The destruction of tombs acted on the present-past and the future, and in so doing denied contemporaneity to the dead.

Coming back to the question of an archaeology of the contemporary as proposed by Lucas, it is clear that this is a particularly rich chronotopic orientation for writing the past, and one that is consonant with the broader interest in contemporaneity as an alternative to the tropes of modernity. I find the concept to be stimulating and productive, and think that it could be usefully developed to encompass more than the relations between archaeological objects and subjects. In this I see great potential for productive conversations with semeiotic approaches. However, I would also emphasize that room needs to be found to take proper account of those excluded from history and contemporaneity, and to allow for full recognition of different chronotopic configurations in the past.