I warmly welcome Gavin Lucas's discussion of time and contemporaneity. I view this as another component of a sustained (and much-needed) investigation of the ontological character of archaeology. Gavin Lucas is presently at the forefront of this line of enquiry. His analysis is much more than an exploration of the ontology of archaeology. It is also a radical rethinking of the basis of the discipline. His analysis takes us back to ‘first principles’ and reveals unexpected and thought-provoking conclusions. Excitingly, his discussion touches upon the very basis of archaeological chronologies and archaeological stratigraphies, and forces us to think about them afresh. Worsaae, Montelius, Childe: these figures stalk the pages of elementary textbooks on archaeology, yet Lucas's analysis allows us not only to appreciate their analytical skills, but also to rethink and question them.

I particularly appreciate the fact that his analysis takes us beyond the arid observation that the past is a contemporary phenomenon, often used as the excuse for postmodern flim-flam and intellectual hand-wringing. Rather than being an intellectual problem that prevents analysis of the past, Lucas demonstrates that the contemporaneity of the past has been recognized since the 19th-century origins of the discipline, often in terms of anachronism. In fact, he demonstrates that the issue of contemporaneity lies at the heart of archaeology.

One of the clear insights that emerges from Lucas's analysis of the question of contemporaneity and the archaeological record is the point that relationality is central to the analysis of archaeological chronologies. This is interesting as the history of archaeological chronology begins with building relative chronologies and then shifts in the radiocarbon era to building absolute chronologies. We have been living in the era of absolute chronologies for at least half a century now, and have experienced several radiocarbon revolutions, the most recent of which claims to provide ever-tighter chronologies by linking radiocarbon dates to Bayesian statistical analysis. While radiocarbon dating has improved our understanding of absolute chronologies immensely, it has also presented us with a past composed of discrete packets of time, a succession of time, though accurately measured. Each of these successive periods of time is then occupied by synchronic relationships. One of the outcomes of this view of time is that archaeological perennial: the study of transitions. As soon as we define chronological periods as a series of successions we are required to explain the transition between them. Archaeological careers have been built on the study of transitions of this kind between distinct units of time, perhaps the most obvious being the transition between the Mesolithic and the Neolithic – the so-called agricultural revolution – though we could also include the transition from feudalism to capitalism or the emergence of anatomically modern humans to the list of well-worn transition debates.

Yet we all know (but don't care to admit) that this model of time is an archaeological fiction. In fact, the archaeological record is composed of a series of different relationships. Simply analysing archaeological relationships in terms of synchronicity or anachronism is a narrowing of the possible relationships between archaeological entities that can take place. Neatly, and carefully, Lucas demonstrates the importance of contemporaneity to archaeological analysis, both at the level of the reconstruction of site chronologies and in terms of consociality: the set of associative relationships that pertain between things. Interestingly, Lucas's work builds on the growing body of research on memory in archaeology, all of which likewise recognizes that relations of contemporaneity (and, in particular, consociality) are crucial to understanding memory. Whether, like Olivier (Reference Olivier, Gustaffson and Karlsson2001; Reference Olivier2011), we recognize the contemporaneity of a series of architectural forms and artefacts or describe these relations of contemporaneity in terms of citation (Jones Reference Jones2007) or temporal percolation (Witmore Reference Witmore2006), Lucas shows that the study of memory in archaeology is simply the ‘tip of the iceberg’ in identifying the significance of contemporaneity. In fact, relations of contemporaneity lie at the heart of the discipline; it is a condition of the study of archaeology.

Lucas emphasizes relationality in his analysis of relations of contemporaneity. This is especially important. Relational approaches in archaeology have mainly been discussed as a development of postprocessual approaches, and have characteristically been associated with hunter-gatherer ontologies (Watts Reference Watts2013; Hill Reference Hill2012). There is nothing wrong with this, though this is a very narrow reading of relationality. If we are to acknowledge the truly relational character of archaeology, the ramifications are immense. A number of authors have already begun to delineate the relational character of the discipline (Fowler Reference Fowler2013; Lucas Reference Lucas2012; Alberti and Bray Reference Alberti and Bray2009; Alberti, Jones and Pollard Reference Alberti, Jones and Pollard2013). The genius of Lucas's approach here is that he shows us that relational relationships occur at various stages of the interpretative process. They occur as we establish the contemporaneity of excavated features just as they occur as we grapple with the relations of contemporaneity between the things we have excavated and ourselves. To consider contemporaneity is to consider the relational character of archaeology at all levels of investigation. Importantly, this approach differs radically from processual and postprocessual approaches in which we observe a disjuncture between the methods of archaeological excavation and the application of theory to the analysis of the features and artefacts excavated. Instead, Lucas offers us the possibility of a seamless approach to both excavation recording and post-excavation analysis and interpretation, achieving the kind of procedural equivalence between the theories we deploy and the worlds we produce argued for by Ben Alberti and colleagues (Alberti et al. Reference Alberti, Fowles, Holbraad, Marshall and Witmore2011, 905).

Lucas offers us the possibility of an exciting future for archaeology. Rather than facing a future dominated by yet more micro-measurement of chronologies using various radiometric dating techniques, the discipline will instead begin to focus its energies on defining and analysing different kinds of relationship. How these relationships are variously assembled says something about the changing character of the archaeological record. Thinking of the archaeological record as so many assemblages to be understood, disentangled and reassembled offers an active role for the archaeological theorist (both Fowler (Reference Fowler2013) and Lucas (Reference Lucas2012) show that the archaeologist is an active component of the archaeological record) and refashions archaeology as the ‘science of assemblages’. As a ‘science of assemblages’, archaeology may begin to offer a methodological and theoretical lead to other cognate disciplines, both in the humanities and in the sciences. In that sense, Lucas's analysis of relations of contemporaneity offers the possibility of the kind of recursive analysis discussed by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (Reference Viveiros de Castro2013) and Martin Holbraad (Reference Holbraad2012) in anthropology, i.e. an analysis that not only illuminates the particular (in this case archaeological chronological relationships), but also bleeds through to illuminate and affect the discipline as a whole.

Added to this, Lucas's work on chronological relationships resonates with the recent call by John Robb and Tim Pauketat, in the edited volume Big histories, human lives (Reference Robb and Pauketat2013), for an increased focus on scale and in particular on history, something they rightly note has been overlooked in postprocessual archaeology. Contributors to the volume, including Clive Gamble (Reference Gamble, Robb and Pauketat2013) and Tim Pauketat (Reference Pauketat, Robb and Pauketat2013), argue for a relational and networked approach to the issue of scale. The most profitable analysis of these issues comes from Pauketat's discussion of North American practices of bundling (or assembling). He discusses differing types of bundling practice from Aztec, Hopewell and Puebloan contexts as bundles of, in and as time. Pauketat's analysis is based on an understanding of relationality. Bundles are composed of a series of relations, and these can in turn be bundled together and attached to further bundles to carry forward historical change. One of the aspects that is lacking from Pauketat's discussion is a thoroughgoing analysis of types of relation. It strikes me that the detailed analysis of chronological relations that Lucas outlines here would benefit the kind of large-scale analysis of history as a series of bundled relationships offered by Pauketat. The approach Lucas takes here begins by discussing relations of contemporaneity during excavation and then goes on to discuss consociality at a slightly greater scale of analysis. Does Lucas feel that he would wish to stop his analysis there, or can his analytical methods be extended to greater scales of analysis (such as those entertained by Pauketat)? It seems from his analysis of relations of consociality that he would be prepared to extend these relations over quite some temporal range. Is there a temporal point where the network can no longer hold, or becomes cut, and, if so, what is it?

I really like the notion of consociality, and in particular Lucas's coopting of the term to an ANT perspective: a consociality of people and things extended through time. However, the issue of gradiency bothers me. In introducing this term, are we not in danger of returning to a successional view of time in which we measure time by its gradiency, or degrees of separation from its consociate? I would like to see this point expanded. How does gradiency relate to time? Is a gradient always atemporal?

Throughout the paper contemporaneity is taken as a given. Things persist or perdure over time. This is what allows them to be cotemporaneous. This lends a slight asymmetry to the final analysis of consociality. Lucas ends the paper by arguing that ‘gradients of reciprocity will change between objects as some objects either cease to exist or subsist weakly in a distributed manner’ (p. 12). Is this not a view of relationality from the perspective of the subject rather than the object? How do we account for material perdurance and ephemerality? Should we also account for practices of maintenance and repair? Is material perdurance purely the result of continued relations of consociality or do we need to factor the differing properties of material substances into models of consociality and contemporaneity? I would like to see this point developed.

Finally, I would like to thank both Gavin and the editors of Archaeological dialogues for the opportunity to comment on this paper. Although I was a member of the audience at the Southampton seminar at which this paper was given, the significance of the argument was not apparent until I sat and carefully engaged with the written paper. I hope that from my comments it is obvious that I think this is a crucially important paper discussing a topic that is fundamental to the discipline. It is precisely the kind of topic we should be debating, and it deserves to be widely read and discussed.