Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-qxdb6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-28T05:53:10.559Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Archaeology, anthropology and the stuff of time

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 May 2015

Thomas Yarrow
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Lucas's discussion of contemporaneity makes an important contribution to archaeological understandings of chronology and dating and to broader debates about temporality. Extending his earlier work on time (Buchli and Lucas 2001; Lucas 2001; 2005), Lucas's central insight is that contemporaneity is not a function of a shared unit of time but of the specific relations through which objects are imbricated. The approach is likely to have profound implications for archaeological approaches to chronology. Whether or not it undermines the current preoccupation with absolute dating, it should certainly give renewed impetus to those branches of archaeology that make it possible to examine time as a matter of the specific material properties of artefacts. This is important, first, because it opens up the possibility of more nuanced empirical understanding of the very stuff of time (literally how it is materially manifest) and, second, because such empirical understandings enable conceptual refinement and extension of the categories through which time is understood. Of broader interest for non-archaeological readers are the ramifications of this discussion of contemporaneity for the ways in which time is investigated and conceptualized. Writing as an anthropologist, interested but with no expertise in archaeological dating, it is these latter considerations that I want to pursue in my comments, as these relate to contemporaneity and to the broader investigation of time.

Type
Discussion
Information
Archaeological Dialogues , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , June 2015 , pp. 31 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bear, L., 2014: Doubt, conflict, mediation. The anthropology of modern time, Oxford.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brumann, C., in press: Heritage agnosticism. A third path for the study of cultural heritage.Google Scholar
Buchli, V., and Lucas, G., 2001: Archaeologies of the contemporary past, London and New York.Google Scholar
Dalsgaard, S., and Nielsen, M., 2013: Introduction. Time and the field, Social analysis 57 (1), 1–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grasseni, C. (ed.), 2007: Skilled visions. Between apprenticeship and standards, New York and Oxford.Google Scholar
Ingold, T., 2007: Materials against materiality, Archaeological dialogues 14 (1), 1–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ingold, T., 2010: No more ancient; no more human. The future past of archaeology and anthropology, in Garrow, D. and Yarrow, T. (eds), Archaeology and anthropology. Understanding similarity, exploring difference, Oxford, 160–70.Google Scholar
Jones, S. and Yarrow, T., 2013: Crafting authenticity. An ethnography of heritage conservation, Journal of material culture 18 (1), 3–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lucas, G., 2001: Critical approaches to fieldwork. Contemporary and historical archaeological practice, London and New York.Google Scholar
Lucas, G., 2005: The archaeology of time, London.Google Scholar
Rabinow, P., and Stavrianakis, A., 2014: Designs on the contemporary. Anthropological tests, Chicago.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strathern, M., 1990: Artefacts of history. Events and the interpretation of images, in Siikala, J. (ed.), Culture and history in the Pacific, Helsinki, 25–41.Google Scholar