In this chapter I summarise the problems with current approaches to change in archaeology and prehistory as presented in Chapter 2 and 3, and present an alternative perspective that overcomes these problems. I argue that how we understand time is crucial to our understanding of change. I consider the advantages and disadvantages that current relational approaches to the world present for understanding change and time in prehistory. I outline my own theoretical position which I will adopt for the rest of the thesis which seeks to address the problems identified at the outset of the chapter. The problems and solutions discussed in this chapter are relevant to wider archaeology. They stem from the broader history of archaeological thought and practice.
What is wrong with change?
At the end of Chapter 3 I discussed the various interpretations that have been offered for the decline of the Ronaldsway Late Neolithic and emergence of the Early Bronze Age. I suggested that explanations from Burrow (1999), Frieman (2008) and Woodcock (2008; 2004; 2001) rely on creating dichotomous opposing summaries of the two periods so that they seem fundamentally different. I also demonstrated the ways in which current explanations rely on singular causes at single moments in time. Such explanations effectively isolate change into a single moment; they make stasis the norm and change something that happens only occasionally. These explanations also suggest a linear causation. The presence of these kinds of problems in texts on the prehistory of the Isle of Man is typical of work in other periods and places. In Chapter 2 I brought to the fore many of the problems with our existing approaches to change through my discussion of the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age.
I aim to develop an approach that moves beyond:
Singular causation in single moments of time
A focus on origin and revolution moments
Technological determinism
Unilinear explanations
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This approach needs to acknowledge that both the movement of people and ideas and innovations occurred in prehistory, but that it is vital we seek to explore how it is that actants are changed as they move through time and/or space and that we adopt an approach that does not understand communities as closed groups. In the following section I will show how some of the problems I have identified with change in prehistory have their root in our understanding of time.
Why time matters for change
“Time and change are close bedfellows, they are so related as concepts that, perhaps, it is hard to think of them apart…”
Lucas, 2005: 2 Our concepts of time impact on how we understand and approach change. I demonstrate that our conception of time has contributed to approaches that focus on revolutions and origins and has links to unilinear, progressive and technological determinist approaches to change. I thereby call for more nuanced understandings to time so as to allow different approaches to change to emerge.
Considering chronology
Chronology – the ‘science of computing dates’ (Oxford English Dictionary, hereafter OED) is predicated on a model where time is unilinear and uniform. Time goes in one direction, in a single line, in equal and measured chunks and our explorations of the past often follow suit. An example of this is ‘The Three Age System’ which is a form of chronological framework. As discussed in Chapter 2, it is not just a chronology it is part of an explanatory framework for prehistory: bronze causes social changes. Lucas argues, for example, that the work of Sahlins and Service (1960) is built on the Three Age System and is a product of our chronological systems. The notions of bands, tribes and states presented by Sahlins and Service (1960) is universalising, progressive and unilinear. This is a model that still carries weight in American and European archaeology where prehistoric societies may be fitted into a staged development (Lucas, 2005: 12); for example they are still presented as an appropriate way to
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understand societies in Renfrew and Bahn (2004: 177-226). As such, it may be demonstrated that our chronology (and the specific understanding of time it implies) impacts on our understanding of change in prehistory creating some of the problems identified above.
One can also associate the search for ‘origins’ with unilinear models of chronology (see for example Gamble, 2007). Archaeologists are often searching for the ‘origins of agriculture’ or the ‘origins of inequality’ and media coverage is always available to those who find ‘the earliest…’. We are searching for ways to fix the essence and origin of given phenomena in time (Lucas, 2005: 54-6). Such searches for origins deny complex causality by suggesting that any phenomena can be located at a single point in time. These kinds of searches rely on linear concepts of time, they always end in the present where closure is offered and retrospect is key in the construction of explanation and narrative.
Chronology is vital to archaeology. Without chronology no study of the past is possible.
However, chronology is based on a very specific concept of time. Chronology is predicated on a view of time that is universal, linear and uniform, a view which Lucas (2005: 2) describes as, “…
a limiting one, especially when we see that it has also influenced the nature of archaeological interpretation of cultural change and prehistory”. By relying heavily on chronologically-based understandings of time we provide the background to sustain “impoverished interpretations of cultural change” (Lucas, 2005: 2).
Splitting the past from the present
The past may be viewed as dead, gone, fossilised and completely separate from the present.
Lucas’ (2005) discussion of this divide between the past and present is very insightful. Lucas suggests that archaeology creates a double temporality out of its materials. Archaeology acts to make things ‘lost’, separate and different – they belong to the earlier blocks of time in the chronological record – they are recovered and then kept ‘outside’ of our normal life in glass cases and museums. This serves to fragment time, creating a stark divide between past and present (Lucas, 2005: 126-7). Archaeology acts to make past objects familiar once again, contextualising them, restoring them to our time. Objects are seen as lost rubbish before they are found: separate from us, they are un-changing; they are not a part of our world in motion.
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Twentieth century nationalism and anthropology served to further enhance this double temporality. Nationalism in the twentieth century sought to recover the origins and ancestors of European nations in the past, connecting past and present back together whilst anthropological exploration brought Europe into contact with other ways of lives, a past closer to nature, ‘primitive’ and different, far-away from today, presumably like the Europe of prehistory.
It is this kind of model of the past as completely separate from the present that is behind Matthew Johnson’s diagram that accompanies the discussion of ‘middle range theory’ in Archaeological Theory (1999) (Figure 4-1). The past and present are separated by a gulf and we are asked how archaeologists build a theoretical bridge between the two. This is problematic as it posits a clear break between interpretation in the present and the past that we wish to gain an understanding of.
Figure 4-1: The gulf between past and present. Taken from Johnson, 1999: 14, fig 2.1
Archaeology benefits from seeing past and present as connected rather than divided. As I will argue later this past-present divide, predicated on a chronological model of time is a falsehood, the past is not dead and gone, objects are still part of assemblages and relationships in the present.
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Archaeology has not been naive to the impact of its conception of time on its interpretations.
The post-processual turn lead to a realisation that time was not universally experienced and that western clock time was just one way to experience and conceptualise time. Shanks and Tilley (1987) argued that to rely on only modern western clock time in our stories about the past is to serve to legitimate the modern western viewpoint ignoring those of other peoples.
Time moved from being an uncontentious issue to one that needed to be explored more thoroughly and re-theorised (McGlade, 1999: 141-2). This led to numerous discussions of different kinds of time known from anthropological research in other societies13 (for example, Bradley 1991; Gosden 1993) and the widespread introduction of the term ‘temporality’ (for example, Ingold, 2000). Temporality became viewed as the specific experience of time whereas, time itself became associated with chronology, a kind of external measure that acted as a container for action (this same notion of the human experience of time as oppose to clock time is captured in the notion of kariological time (McGlade, 1999: 144)). Temporality, Ingold (2000: 194) tells us is not chronology (the regular dated passage of time), nor is it history (events that may be dated in chronological order). Temporality, Ingold claims, is social, it is about people living and going about their lives together (Ingold, 2000: 195) (for a statement refuting this claim, see Murray, 2006: 83).
By considering temporality alongside chronology authors attempt to unseat the dominance of chronology over explanation. By having both chronology, as the external measure of time that allows one to place action within the overall history of the world, and temporality, as the human experienced passage of time, one is able to add a social and potentially local dimension to our understanding of time. We can both talk about an event having happened at a henge at 2000 cal BC and talk about how it evoked a sense of temporality relating to seasons and repeated rituals for those who took part. Such explanations escape accusations of being universalising or relying on modern western conceptions of time that are inappropriate in prehistory.
However introducing the concept of temporality is not necessarily a panacea. I draw parallels between the time/temporality debate and the place/space debate that also occurred (perhaps
13 This may be referred to as ‘ethnographic time’
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more vigorously) in the 1990s (see Casey, 1996; Tilley, 1994). Following the publication of Phenomenology of the Landscape (Tilley, 1994) the notion that place is specific and experienced whereas space is an abstract measure came to the fore. Whitridge (2004: 213) comments on the semantics of this debate suggesting that the place-space debate (and I would add the time-temporality debate) can be likened to the sex-gender divide, and that the continued tension and spilt ink on the matter, tends to serve only to reify a nature-culture divide. Ultimately such divides are levelled as both sides are the result of social construction – none of them pre-exists the other as a universal truth.
Time Perspectivism
Bailey’s concept of Time Perspectivism (2007; 1987; 1981) confronts the issue of time and change. It starts from the basis that time has not always been understood or experienced in the same way and seeks to look at the past from multiple perspectives, rather than just from one located in the present. It is often cited as drawing on the Annales School of history (for example Braudel, 1972). Annales scholars suggest that there are three scales of time acting at once that are all intertwined. The longest of these time spans is the longue duree which includes geo-history and long term processes. In the medium term there is structural history of the past where social and economic changes occur and in the shortest term there are the histories of individual lives and events (Bintliff, 1991: 6). Different phenomena operate over these different time scales (Bailey, 2007: 201), for example climate change could be understood as operating in the long duree. These different scales of time, Annales scholars, and Bailey (2007) argue bring into focus different factors causing change, they require therefore different methods to understand them.
Bailey (2007) argues that archaeology works at a scale radically different and incommensurable with other subjects such as anthropology or history. As such he does not believe that the theories or methods of these disciplines are appropriate when considering long term changes in archaeology. Rather, he takes the stance that we have to develop our own methods. Bailey’s approach also draws on the notion of the landscape as a palimpsest:
that is a landscape in which material builds up in a multi-temporal way but equally may also be erased and lost, making once separated moments in time proximate again.
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Annales approaches in archaeology and the work of Bailey have attracted critique. The longue duree is suggested to leave no space for human action or effect, rather it is reductionist, with environmental change often given a prominent role in explanations (Barker, 1995: 3). Thomas (1996a: 36) argues that shorter time scales come to look like a mere background for ecological change, ruling out a role for human agency, individuality and creativity. Given the 1990s and early 2000s emphasis on agency (see Dobres and Robb, 2000; Hodder, 2000), this latter point was not well received. Barker (1995: 3) argues that even Braudel, one of the leading scholars of the Annales school fails to interweave the different scales, but rather relies heavily on the features of the longue duree, such as the environment, as an explanation (see also Harding 2005: 92).
Bailey suggests that the scale at which one focuses their research and the data one looks at will affect the nature of the answer one produces. If the scale is essentially arbitrary, then the answer could be interpreted to also be arbitrary. Bradley (1991: 212) has argued that the kind of resolution necessary to carry out a Braudelian-style of archaeology is just not possible and that instead other means (specifically a ritual-mundane divide of time) are more appropriate to understanding the mechanisms of change in the past. Bradley (1991: 210) also suggests that scale and resolution will always cause a problem for archaeologists, implying that Bailey is unlikely to be successful at overcoming this problem even using a time-perspectivist approach.
Lucas (2005: 47-8) argues that Bailey conflates the data span of archaeology with the resolution available. Archaeology has a deep time span, but equally there are more fine-grained resolutions available now for most periods. Bailey also conflates real time with chronological time (a frequent mistake in archaeology): the real lived and experiential time of the past is not the same as the chronological spread of dates we use to construct narratives (though obviously, as discussed above, the two need to be related in archaeological narratives). This sentiment is echoed by Harding (2005: 88) who suggests that Braudel and the Annales School actually lack any sense of temporality; time in the Annales School is divorced entirely from its social context where it gains any meaning. The scale of time we selected to research relates only to the question we seek to answer. It does not relate to any sense of temporality for past communities.
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I agree with Bailey that the scale at which one focuses their research will certainly effect the kinds of answers produced. I would go further and suggests that the scale of analysis emerges from the questions we seek to answer. However, this does not mean that the answers we produce are not useful: our answers cannot expect to correspond completely with the reality of the past. The past is too complex for that, moreover, it is a past that we can only know in the present through our own engagements with it, through archives, objects and microscopes and through this engagement the past that we know is changed and therefore is no longer the past that past people lived within. Multiple scales of time certainly exist and attempting to understanding the past should involve multiple scales of time.
Responses to Time Perspectivism focusing on experiences of time
There are two main branches of response to the impact of the Annales School and Time Perspectivism in archaeological theory. There are those who have sought to explore the experience of time within past societies and there are those that have continued to explore how we relate different time scales. I will discuss ideas that focus on the experience of time first. The emphasis on experience of time led to an exploration of how time was experienced in other societies via the work of those such as Bloch (1977) and Gell (1992). Many of the case studies that draw on ethnographic analogy rely on a binary temporal opposition such as that between abstract and substantial time, ritual and mundane time or linear and cyclical time.
These, of course, hold much in common with the earlier discussion of the difference between temporality and time. Lucas (2005: 93) suggests that such temporal oppositions often prove to be “…more harmful than useful”. The most frequent critique that is given of these approaches is that anthropological methods and theories are not appropriate for archaeological research.
Robb (2007: 292), for example, notes that there is a tendency for ethnography to capture very rapid change or stop-gap moments in time, rather than continual, long term change. Some changes that can have a large impact cannot be observed at the ethnographic scale: a 1%
increase in the birth rate might only mean the birth of 1 or 2 babies during an ethnographic study, however over a time scale of 70 years this would double a population (Robb, 2007: 292).
Responses to Time Perspectivism focusing on how different scales of analysis connect
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The other reaction to the Annales School is a continued debate over how it is that different scales of time are connected. This debate is clearly linked to the discussions of structure and agency that occurred in the 1990s and 2000s (see for example, Dobres and Robb 2000 and papers therein). This is almost a re-casting of the Annales School argument about the interweaving of time scales and their importance but with the longue duree dropped from the debate. As I noted earlier Robb (2007: 287) comments that the long term is poorly explored.
Robb (2007: 291) suggests long term change is a result of a dialectic between individual choices and the conditions in which people live. The structure-agency debate centres on the relationship between individual and the wider social conditions and institutions that both enable, and restrict, decisions by agents (for a recent review of the role of agency in archaeology see Robb, 2010). The reality is that the two rely on each other: structure enables people to act and restricts what they do and that structure is equally the product of the actions of people. This argument is sometimes re-cast as event and structure (for example Harding 2005).
In a comparison of Hodder’s Domestication of Europe (1990) and Barrett’s Fragments from Antiquity (1994) Harding (2005: 89) highlights the ways in which both authors use one scale to elucidate the other. In Domestication of Europe (1990) Hodder uses a time scale beyond that of the individual to describe change in the long term across Europe showing changes in structure and implying that it is this long term that defines the short term experience of individuals. In Fragments from Antiquity (1994) Barrett focuses on the repeated daily routine and practice of past people and how this comes to maintain and change the structure over time. The implication is that one can only understand one particular ‘scale’ from the perspective of the ‘other’. Harding (2005) (see also Barker, 1995; Robb, 2007) argues that the two exist in a recursive relationship. This debate in many ways has the same pitfalls as approaches that advocate Annales style analysis or a structure-agency centred approach:
analysis becomes detached from the experiential nature of time. I would argue, that in seeking
analysis becomes detached from the experiential nature of time. I would argue, that in seeking