Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T13:38:58.828Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Archaeology and contemporaneousness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 May 2015

Extract

Gavin Lucas has returned to the theme of archaeological time, which has long interested him, and, in this paper, to contemporaneousness in archaeology. For a historian, contemporaneousness is a straightforward matter. The First World War and the Russian Revolution, for example, are considered contemporaneous because the two events took place during the same period of time. Both significantly influenced the course of 20th-century history and influenced each other as well. But for an archaeologist, the very notion of chronology is fundamentally problematic. We date an archaeological object or feature on the basis of morphological attributes that allow us to estimate the time during which it was created. In other words, a historical date (the actual date when some vestige came to be) corresponds, in archaeology, to a probable length of time. Archaeological time floats.

Type
Discussion
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

Anders, G., 2007: Le temps de la fin, Paris.Google Scholar
Beck, U., 2001: La société du risque. Sur la voie d’une autre modernité (tr. Bernardi, Laure), Paris.Google Scholar
Foucault, M., 1994: L’extension sociale de la norme, in Foucault, Dits et écrits, 1954–1988. Vol. 3, 1970–1975, Paris, 7479.Google Scholar
Gumbrecht, H.U., 2013: After 1945. Latency as origin of the present, Stanford, CA.Google Scholar
Hamel, J.-F., 2006: Revenances de l’histoire. Répétition, narrativité, modernité, Paris.Google Scholar
Hartog, F. 2002: Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expérience du temps, Paris.Google Scholar