‘A past no longer past.’ Some implications for a symmetrical archaeology

Christopher Witmore
Postdoctoral Fellow
Stanford Humanities Lab, Stanford University (till June 31st)

Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Institute for Archaeology & the Ancient World, Brown University (after July 1st)

Abstract
A symmetrical archaeology recharacterizes the world, not in terms of dualisms or oppositions, but in terms of mixtures and entanglements. While it poses that we treat humans and things in the same terms, both in our articulations and in our reflexive analyses of our own practices, a symmetrical archaeology also accords the things of the past action now. This understanding holds profound implications for a discipline which considers the past to be separate, distant and distinct. This paper will offer an empirical case from the Greek Argolid and explore the implications of a ‘past no longer past’ for archaeology.

Introductory note
To begin to understand the implications of “a past no longer past” requires that we question our most basic understandings of time itself. To this end I briefly discuss some of the ways time has been understood in archaeology. This discussion lays tracks toward a different notion of time and I will discuss the implications of this for the discipline. Subsequent to my paper, Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal will put forth some more concrete case studies from his exemplary work in both the Amazon and Ethiopia.

Paper
There was a time when it could be said that archaeology was largely in the business of making clocks. Indeed, much of our early disciplinary ‘history,’ which persists (perhaps anachronistically) as a primary agenda in many areas today, was about the temporal measurement and chronological delineation of human presence within a particular area, across a particular nation and eventually through the cross-dating efforts of archaeologists such as Flinders Petrie and V. Gordon Childe throughout much larger regions.

Epoch, era, period, phase, sequence—chronological blocks which are then stacked to form a linear series—these measures of time, or more precisely, these units of a linear temporality were products of archaeologists’ relations with things and their understandings of the material past. Here I underline linear temporality as the outcome of what we do as archaeologists and this will help us in clarifying the nature of time shortly.

Following the exemplar of geology, and allied with (or rather in many contexts under the banner of) history, the archaeology of the late 19th/ early 20th centuries was caught up with the delineation of frames which were treated as containers for successive events.

Chronology is a clock-time. Composed either of laminar, consistent, identical phases, or temporal blocks of variable yet measured duration, this was time as an external parameter. But tied to chronology was the flattening of past relations into synchronic episodes. This event orientation built up a picture of the past as it was.

But, as we practitioners are very aware, the relations between archaeology and time are somewhat more complex. That “pesky problem of the Pompeii premise” in the words of Lewis Binford was a hard thing for an archaeology as much concerned with process as the flattened temporally of the event to shed (1981, 204). Indeed, these synchronic/event-based associations are still with us in everything from settlement pattern analyses in regional surveys as detailed in the work of LuAnn Wandsnider to the basic organizational structure of the Harris Matrix as pointed out by Gavin Lucas.

The crux of the matter has for some come to be framed in terms of ethnographic verses archaeological time. Ethnography deals in actions, situations, events, engagements that are immediate, present and live. Sets of relations in “real-time.” Ethnographic time is easily understood through successive and laminar event.

But archaeology deals with what is left of various pasts. It faces off universal processes of entropy. Archaeology deals with decay, ruin, taphonomic transformations, and these are multitemporal, diachronic processes which cannot be understood within the “quick-time” of lived experience. To be sure, this bifurcation of time into short and long, by practitioners such as Geoff Bailey, has been further complicated by archaeologists such as Tim Murray, but the bifurcation, nonetheless, holds as a means of distinguishing the temporal variability of archaeological materials from that of other disciplines.

Recently, Gavin Lucas has summed up wonderfully these issues of chronology verses time-perspectivism and there is no need to recount this further for my purposes here.

There are two points we should take from this.

First, in moving on from a clock-time of successive event practitioners have come to conflate archaeological time with an entropic time made up of multitemporal processes.

And second, amid these various debates over synchrony verses diachrony one issue has remained constant: time is unidirectional.

As Geoff Bailey has remarked time is often understood to flow as a river or likewise fly like an arrow (1983 169). The river flows, the arrow flies in one unambiguous direction.

Returning to the issue I began with, linear temporality is more about information management and storage than the nature of time (Bowker 2005). Linear temporality is a secondary production suited to measurement, classification and coding. While these are most necessary to our science and humanity they must not be our starting points for understanding our relations with the past.

Here it should be underlined that the measurement of time should not be conflated with the nature of time, as is so often the case. But there is much more to the issue of linear temporality.

It just so happens that the timeline is the modernist image of time par excellence (Witmore 2006). Modernist time ties the contemporary firmly at moorings situated at the end of all that has come before (Latour 1993…). In this regard practitioners today are definitively divided from the past by scientific ruptures and epistemic shifts, which distance and delineate ‘us’ now from ‘others’ then (Latour 1993, 67-69).

Indeed, archaeology has long considered the past to be separate, distant and distinct. Because we have broken once and for all with the past, it is a locus to be demarcated, protected and preserved (Lowenthal 1985). The past is an ‘object’ to be closed off and guarded behind the glass of the cabinet.

The crux of the issue lies with the nature of our relations with things and the material past. Here, to be sure, what is at stake is no less than the very question of what is it to be human?

We are neither separate from the things of the world, nor are we detached from the material pasts. These are thoroughly mixed into the polychronic ensemble of the present. These are thoroughly blended into the distributed collective that is the human being. Because we no longer believe in the myth of such divides we can no longer be subservient to the moderns endeavor at separation. Our distributed collectives are made up of diverse material pasts.

Whether archaeologists are dealing with chronological measures or unidirectional processes of transformation both hinge upon a linear temporality and such external parameters should not be mistaken for time. Time is much more complex. Time is much more chaotic.

For a symmetrical archaeology it is not the time that makes the sorting of landscapes, sites, features and things it is the sorting of these polychronic ensembles that makes time. “Yes time flows like” a river “if one observes it well.” In paraphrasing Michel Serres, rivers are full of calms, countercurrents, whorlpools, eddies and turbulences (Serres with Latour 1995, 58). Time doesn’t simply pass; time percolates.

Moreover, not all that flows along a river ends up in the sea. Time has two arrows. MAKE SLIDE

As a symmetrical archaeology regards the pasts and present as a rich entanglement, material pasts have action. They push back in subtle and often quite direct ways.

A past no longer past means that material pasts are understood to play an active role in the present.

For example, throughout Western Europe segments of a network of Roman roadways still direct the flow of people’s lives today. In each and every case the past has not passed but still has action. Portions of the ancient Roman road network and segments of the contemporary European transportation infrastructure are proximate. Peoples’ lives are directly impacted by Roman achievements in their day to day lives.

Entropy and negentropy (negative entropy) are time’s two arrows. Entropy is an irreversible temporal flow toward amnesia, aging, decay, ruination and death. But neguentropy is an action/force/energy of durable pasts, recycling, memory and unforgetting, the movement of information.

Returning to the ‘glory days’ of archaeological endeavor, consider the great Zeus of Olympia. While the chryselephantine statue produced by the Athenian sculptor Pheidias in the 430’s BC was burned in one of Constantinople’s great fires in 475AD, something of it circulates and persists. We know of this statue because something of it was translated into various media. It was mentioned by authors such as Antipater of Sidon, who lived in the 2nd century BC and it was described by both the geographer Strabo and the 2nd century AD traveler Pausanias. The statue was also translated into other media: coins minted under the emperor Hadrian, who also posed as the seated god in other statues. Articulations in other media act as memory traces and constitute negative entropic processes.

The recent case of the Judas text is a prime example.

Such reverse flows, to be sure, are a common occurrence upon thousands of archaeological excavations.

Likewise, contexts and situations once more proximate in linear time can become more distant while the even more distant past may be folded into the present.

Consider the site of Late Helladic Mycenae. Today thousands of tourists whether curious, disinterested, energetic, or overheated walk paths laid out within a late Bronze Age architectural context. These contemporary engagements are proximate with something of the spatial engagements present in the citadel of approximately 1200 BC. However, the 19th century excavations of Schliemann, Tsountas and the subsequent work of Wace and the British School between 1920 and 1923 displaced an entire Hellenistic settlement and temple of which few tourists are aware. Because those sets of physical engagements with the Hellenistic architectural fabric are no longer possible, they are now more distant.

This percolating time is a common aspect of landscape. The multitemporal mosaic of accreted actions, events, processes. It is the multitude of relations between entities such as the precinct wall of a Classical sanctuary to Demeter and an 18th century house which it acts as foundation for. It is the numerous transactions between people and things such as a contemporary farmer who draws water from a Hellenistic well or an archaeologist who collects a Roman sandstone mortar from an olive grove.

These connections are what make time.

These understandings move us from a solely modern historicism of successive events to an amodern understanding of simultaneous, blended pasts. Just as Binford and Bailey wished to disassociate archaeological time from that of the event by bringing our attention to longer term processes of displacement, decay, deposition, erosion, taphonomy we must add in the reverse flows, the durable pasts, the processes of reassembling. We must add our own hybridized actions into the picture.

Archaeological time as entropic time is asymmetrical as it neither factors in the actions of things, nor does it maintain our own relations as archaeologists which are thoroughly mixed with our fields of study, engagement and endeavor. Archaeological time is percolating time. And our practices contribute to the continual mixing of various pasts in the present.

What, we may at last ask, are the implications of the pasts no longer past?

Some implications of the pasts no longer past.
Materials, media, buildings, cities all make up human society and as such contemporary societies are the assemblages of numerous achievements from many different times. A modernist amnesia treats these as limited to the moment of design, construction and production, the moments of present human engagement, thereby privileging contemporary actions.

The Mercedes S600 is regarded as a marvel of German engineering. But what an engineer brings to the construction of an automobile is a gathering of transactions between humans and things that range in age from a few days to hundreds of thousands of years. The S600 would go nowhere without Neolithic technology of the wheel. Without achievements which occurred at a distance in time and space, which resulted in the wheel, the German automobile industry might not have existed in the first place. “Ta archaea,” literally old things, are folded into the most futuristic of technologies.

In reality, such connotations are wisely captured in the etymology of the term “thing” as a gathering, as a mixed assembly. We may now ask what is assembled into these things?

That ‘pasts are no longer past’ is not to encourage us to transform our practices. We already deal with such complex relations in what we do! Rather, what I have endeavored to do here is limn a path for achieving a way of describing what we do. Symmetrical archaeology is about epistemological possibilities and richer understandings of how the pasts are entangled into our lives and are now.

In place of relegating various pasts to history as that which was, that which is no more, we treat them as the pasts that are.

Contrary to modernist notions that we are stewards of an antiquated and outmoded past (the latter connotations are both carried by the root “arche”), a symmetrical archaeology makes the assertion that archaeology has never been more relevant. The very long term perspective has never been more important in a era of very short term thought.

Regarding the pasts as no longer past is a key to understanding how pasts continue to have action. By understanding humanity in terms of entanglements and mixtures we challenge the human exceptionalism of the modernist establishment. This is the calling of an archaeology which fights under its own colors.