The Temporality of the Landscape Revisited

Abstract

This is an essay about the connections between the passage of time and the condition of archaeological knowledge. It revisits Tim Ingold’s 1993 paper ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’, considering its relationship with the phenomenological and interpretive archaeologies of the 1990s and what we learn from it today. Engaged not so much in an ‘ontological turn’ as in a kind of archival return, the essay compares Ingold’s discussion of Bruegel’s painting The Harvesters (1565) with an archaeological photograph from 1993. A discussion of the after-effects of performance follows, and four theses about temporality, landscape, modernity and revisiting are put forward: 1) The passage of time transforms archaeological knowledge; 2) Archaeological knowledge transforms the passage of time; 3) An archaeological landscape is an object that is known through remapping; 4) Archaeological knowledge is what we leave behind. The essay concludes that archaeology is best understood not as the study of the temporality of the landscape, as Ingold had argued, but as the study of the temporality of the landscape revisited.

I

The Temporality of the Landscape. Why revisit an archaeological paper a generation after it was published? One possible motivation is remembrance. For example, Andrew Sherratt marked the 25th anniversary of the publication of his tutor David Clarke’s influential paper ‘Archaeology: the Loss of Innocence’, 22 years on from Clarke’s untimely death. Sherratt distinguished Clarke’s ‘puckish sketch of the contemporary scene’ from the valedictions written by Gordon Childe before his suicide, noting how new arguments can, over time, come to be mistaken for retrospection (Childe 1958a, 1958b, Sherratt 1998, pp. 700–701). ‘Can the past only be interpreted in terms of the present?’ Sherratt asked.

Another reason is critique. In one such instance, Laurie Wilkie and Kevin Bartoy (2000) sought to ‘recenter’, through recollection, a seminal 1987 paper that defined some of the aims of Marxist-Americanist historical archaeology (Leone et al. 1987). Where Mark Leone and his colleagues had looked ahead ‘Toward a Critical Archaeology’, Wilkie and Bartoy reversed this future-orientation from an alternative present: discerning ‘drawbacks’ in theory, noting ‘hark-backs’ to 19th-century German philosophy, and describing their own aims (using the words of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte) as a come-back ‘to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh’ (Wilkie and Bartoy 2000, pp. 750, 752, 754, 761). ‘My effort has been to adopt a theory that would link past and present,’ Leone replied (2000, pp. 765–766), since archaeology seeks ‘to show us how to think through change’.

A third is the resurrection of neglected ideas, a well-known instance of which is James Deetz’s reconsideration of Walter Taylor’s account, in the second chapter of A Study of Archaeology, of the relationships between history and anthropology (Taylor 1948, Deetz 1988). Taylor’s discussion of ‘contemporary thought’ and ‘past actuality’ suggested that to understand the latter fully and comprehensively ‘would take as long as the happenings themselves’ (Taylor 1948, p. 29). As with archaeological knowledge, Deetz suggested, so with archaeological thinking:

‘Were it still 1948, this essay could be little more than a paraphrase of Taylor’s thoughts in the subject. However…a lot has happened in the intervening time’ (Deetz 1988, p. 13).

Remembrance, critique, resurrection. For none of these reasons, the present essay returns to Tim Ingold’s paper ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’, first published in the autumn of 1993. The paper has not been forgotten. There is so much of value in its argument that it would surely resist any attempt at ‘recentering’. Archaeologists, in any case, should probably be more aware than most of the probability that critique will add only ‘fresh ruins to fields of ruins’ (Latour 2004, p. 225). And neither the paper nor its author has been neglected. Indeed, during the intervening 23 years Tim Ingold (an anthropologist) has become arguably the most influential, and certainly the most consistently interesting, contemporary voice in archaeological thinking. ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’ was a milestone in wider impulses to revitalize the idea that anthropology and archaeology form ‘a necessary unity’: different parts of ‘the same intellectual exercise’ connected through the themes of ‘time and landscape’ (Ingold 1993, p. 152). It was an early waymarker in the movement away from archaeology’s ‘science wars’ between processual realism and post-processual relativism, highlighting ‘the sterile opposition between the naturalistic view of the landscape as a neutral, external backdrop to human activities, and the culturalistic view that every landscape is a particular cognitive or symbolic ordering of space’ (Ingold 1993, p. 152). By introducing two new concepts – the ‘dwelling perspective’ and the ‘taskscape’ – the paper was a landmark in moving archaeological debate beyond the bland assertion that ‘any reconstruction of the past is a social statement in the present’ (Hodder 1985, p. 18), towards the redefinition of archaeological practice as just ‘the most recent form of dwelling on an ancient site’ (Thomas 2001, p. 181).

Waymarker milestone, landmark. The place of ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’ in late 20th-century archaeological thought is clearly marked out. The paper has been repeatedly reprinted: in Julian Thomas’ Interpretive archaeology: a reader (Thomas 2000), in Bob Preucel and Steve Mrozowski’s Contemporary archaeology in theory: the new pragmatism (Preucel and Mrozowski 2010), and in Ingold’s own collection The perception of the environment (Ingold 2000). Its argument has been put to work to inform interpretations of many varied archaeological situations, from Palaeolithic Europe (Gamble 1999, pp. 86–87) to Roman Britain (Gosden 2004, p. 32), to the archaeology of daily life in the Outer Hebrides during the early 19th century (Symonds 1999, p. 107); from the comparative archaeology of the body (Harris and Robb 2013, p. 18) to the comparative archaeology of time (Murray 1999, p. 2). The lasting value of the paper has been to inspire ‘an archaeology that is less interested in symbolic landscapes than it is in taskscapes…and less interested in the mirror game of semiotic reflection and discourse analysis than it is in real-world encounters with the (material) past’ (Kolen 2011, p. 41).

This essay is an exercise in a form of repetition. It aims to revaluate the connections between time and the condition of archaeological knowledge. In considering this theme, archaeologists have generally adopted one of two positions. They have either imagined unidirectional improvements in methods and data, driven by paradigm shifts in ideas that can then be applied to material culture on the one hand, or else they have argued that knowledge emerges in contemporary moments of interpretation, which can be comprehended through reflexive self-awareness or identified with a kind of craft ‘firmly situated in the present’ (Shanks and McGuire 1996, p. 75) on the other. My suggestion here is that both approaches, teleological or presentist, are mistaken, in that they neglect the primary role of the material production of archaeological knowledge – practices that are usually glossed as nothing more than objective documentation or recording. On the contrary, archaeological knowledge, always already implicated in the metamorphosis of material, human, sociocultural, physical and natural environments (Hicks 2003, Hicks and McAtackney 2007), emerges through techniques of temporal protention, central devices for which include the museum and the archive (Hicks 2013) but also encompass the site and the landscape, transformed. Archaeological knowledge requires the creation of these proxy terrains. In other words ideas, for the archaeologist, are at once places in the landscape and displacements in material and textual form. Archaeological knowledge is what is left behind.

For the purpose of exploring this idea, this essay revisits ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’ as if revisiting a place. It retraces steps in order to return to a fault-line in the paper’s line of argument: one that begins with a peculiar form of English Romanticism, and passes gradually towards a central initial question for archaeology today: What are the connections between the passage of time and the condition of archaeological knowledge?

II

‘The Temporality of the Landscape’ (1993, pp. 152ff.) was a dense and meandering paper, but drawing out some of its main ideas is a necessary point of departure. The argument relied on connecting one idea – that the experience of ‘human life is a process that involves the passage of time’ – with another – that ‘this life process is also the process of formation of the landscapes in which people have lived’. Anthropologists, Ingold argued, can study time and landscape by ‘bringing to bear the knowledge born of immediate experience’. And although archaeologists’ focus is on the past they might join this endeavour by re-imagining the purpose of their work as ‘to carry out an act of remembrance, engaging perceptually with an environment that is itself pregnant with the past’.

The paper introduced four keywords to move archaeology beyond dichotomous thinking about ‘nature and humanity’, ‘natural and artificial’, or ‘use’ and ‘manufacture’ – those ‘sterile Cartesian dualisms of mind and nature, subject and object, intellection and sensation, and so on’ (Ingold 2000, p. 167). The challenge, Ingold suggested, was to ‘move beyond the division that has afflicted most inquiries up to now, between the “scientific” study of an atemporalized nature, and the “humanistic” study of a dematerialized history’ (Ingold 1993, p. 172). The new jargon relied in turn on further series of conceptual oppositions, which can be summarized as follows:

1. Landscape is not ‘land’, or ‘nature’, or ‘space’, or ‘a picture in the imagination’, or ‘an alien and formless substrate awaiting the imposition of human order’, or ‘on the side of humanity against nature’, or ontologically separate from the ‘human perceiver’, or ‘built’, or ‘unbuilt’, or ‘an object…to be understood’, or ‘a totality that you or anyone else can look at’. Instead, it is ‘the world in which we stand in taking up a point of view on our surroundings’; ‘perpetually under construction’; ‘qualitative and heterogeneous’; ‘a living process’ and ‘a work in progress’ that ‘becomes part of us, just as we are part of it’; it is ‘constituted as an enduring record of…the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within it, and in doing so, have left something of themselves’. It is ‘the congealed form of the taskscape’. Far from ‘transforming the world’, human actions ‘are part and parcel of the world’s transforming itself’.

2. Temporality is neither chronology nor history. It is not constituted by events as ‘isolated happenings, succeeding one another frame by frame…strung out in time like beads on a thread’. Instead, temporality is a sort of general quality of the landscape, ‘immanent in the passage of events’: experienced rather than measured, as ‘each event encompasses a pattern of retentions from the past and protentions for the future’.¹ Any present moment is not separated by a ‘chronological barrier’ from other moments, but instead ‘gathers the past and the future into itself, like refractions in a crystal ball’.

3. Dwelling is not cartography or surveying. Through embodiment, dwelling does not map or ‘inscribe’, but ‘incorporates’ landscape – unlike ‘the rather peculiar and specialized project of the surveyor or cartographer whose objective is to represent’ the landscape. There are ‘centres’ rather than places: with no boundaries, emerging through ‘people’s engagement with the world’, not as ‘fixed forms’ ‘cut out from the whole’.

4. Taskscapes do not involve labour, but ‘dwelling activities’, emerging through rhythmic, patterned social interaction. They reveal neither form nor ‘final product’ as ‘an object of contemplation’ but performance, process and ‘the actual work’. Whereas ‘the currency of labour…is time of a very peculiar sort, one that must be wholly indifferent to the modulations of human experience’, in contrast taskscapes operate like orchestral performances, existing ‘only so long as people are actually engaged in the activities of dwelling, despite the attempts of anthropologists to translate it into something rather equivalent to a score’.²

The definition of each keyword – landscape, temporality, dwelling, and taskscape – relied on a further overarching dichotomy: between modern Western and non-Western or counter-modern thought. The ‘ancient inclination in Western thought to prioritise form over process’ represented for Ingold ‘a systematic bias’, grounded in ‘an insistent dualism, between object and subject, the material and the ideal, operational and cognized, “etic” and “emic”’, etc. Ingold put forward accounts of performance drawn from Howard Morphy’s discussions of Yolngu painting in Australia’s Northern Territory and from Keith Basso’s studies of story-telling, ‘names, places and moral narratives among the Western Apache’. ‘In many non-Western societies’, Ingold argued, ‘what is essential is the act of painting itself, of which the products may be relatively short-lived’. By ‘temporalizing the landscape’, archaeologists could avoid neglecting the primary significance of such enactments, he suggested, as distinct from their products.

The argument was illustrated not with reference to an archaeological site or landscape, but through an extended discussion of one of the earliest examples of European landscape painting – Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Harvesters (1565) (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Harvesters (1565). (OASC on www.metmuseum.org)

The discussion was part thick description, part ekphrasis – that rhetorical technique of presenting a highly detailed, vivid account of a painting in which ‘the mental image conjured up is almost equal to the actual embodied visual and physical apprehension of the artefact…transcend[ing] scales of time and geography’ (Buchli 2016, pp. 84–85). ‘Imagine yourself set down in the very landscape depicted, on a sultry August day in 1565’, Ingold wrote, revealing a strange ideational geography: hills and valley emerging through James Gibson’s Ecological Approach; paths and tracks leading to Bachelard’s Poetics of Space; a tree evoking duration, perhaps Durkheimian, perhaps Bergsonian; the wheat field representing Johannes Fabian’s account of coevalness; the church an index of the Bakhtinian chronotope. When, where and what is this landscape? What are the connections between the passage of time and the condition of archaeological knowledge?

III

The Temporality of the Landscape. When we revisit Ingold’s paper, The Harvesters is neither a landscape nor a representation of a landscape. Four hundred and fifty years after the 40-year-old Bruegel layered oil paint on the wood, the summertime rural idyll hangs, some 6000km from Antwerp, in the European Paintings galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where the museum curators describe its rich pigments as ‘a timeless study of man in nature’: ‘the first modern landscape’.³ But the image that is in front of me this afternoon as I type at my desk, this representation of a representation, is lit up in greyscale: a pixilated, rasterized digital bitmap matrix within a JSTOR pdf file, pushed to both extremes of the tonal range: whitened, blackened, and shot through with dotted diagonal rows and columns of halftone pixels (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Reproduction of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Harvesters (1565), from Ingold (1993).

‘Imagine yourself set down in the very landscape depicted.’ Is this Antwerp 1565, Manchester 1993, or Manhattan 2016? At my desk in Oxford still, or maybe drifting much further afield? The invitation self-consciously reaches back along bookshelves of the anthropological library to the opening pages of the foundational text of the modern ethnography, Bronislaw Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific:

Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away out of sight. Since you take up your abode in the compound of some neighbouring white man, trader or missionary, you have nothing to do, but start at once on your ethnographic work. (Malinowski 1922, p. 4)

Argonauts represented of course anthropology’s reinvention through the idea of ethnography. Not so much a paradigm shift, the metaphor of a watershed – those lines blotted across the landscape through catching rainfall where it will drain through the soils – perhaps better captures the lasting effect of Malinowski’s interwar Pacific text. The idea sought to take anthropology outdoors, away from objects, museums or archives into the vividness of the moment evoked through detailed description of the mise-en-scène – a picturesque and self-consciously ‘imaginative’ narrative style that, half a century before Geertzian ‘thick description’, Malinowski arguably learned from James Frazer (who wrote the preface to Argonauts) and from Joseph Conrad (whose Tales of Unrest he took with him into the field) (Thornton 1985, pp. 8, 11–12). As disciplinary ur-trope the ‘imaginary first visit ashore’ (Malinowski 1922, p. 55) catalysed a century of thinking in which descriptions of the ethnographer’s own body set down far away percolated and persisted, largely substituting the idea of momentary human experience (what came to be called the ‘ethnographic present’) for material collecting as the primary device for creating anthropological knowledge (Hicks 2007, 2010). Just as anthropology sought to translate such fleeting moments of encounter into ideas of function and institution in the new social anthropology, so too inter-war archaeology made a long-term turn towards spectral abstractions the lasting effects of which still haunt us today: culture, process, context, post-process.

Seventy years after the publication of Arg-onauts, ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’ pushed this Malinowskian thinking about time, experience, fieldwork and imagination to the limit, in that it presented archaeology (quite unlike anthropology) as a kind of indigenous knowledge:

The practice of archaeology is itself a form of dwelling. The knowledge born of this practice is thus on a par with that which comes from the practical activity of the native dweller and which the anthropologist, through participation, seeks to learn and understand. For both the archaeologist and the native dweller, the landscape tells – or rather is – a story. (Ingold 1993, p. 152).

The ‘necessary unity’ of archaeology and anthropology was revealed as a wholly asymmetric alliance. Ingold’s paper presented the archaeologist as a kind of native hunter: alert, journeying through the landscape with special knowledge of the terrain. Archaeological practice was identified with excavation, so that hunting merged with ‘discovery’ – archaeologists ‘probing ever more deeply’, since ‘every feature is a potential clue’. ‘Like the Western Apache’ they are ‘truly “at home” in the world’.⁴ Amid the extended analogy of hunting, practices of archaeological gathering, which would direct us back to a consideration of objects and museums, went unmentioned. We are reminded of an observation by Joan Gero who, in a different context, noticed

certain strong parallels between the male who populates the archaeological record – public, visible, physically active, exploratory, dominant, and rugged, the stereotypical hunter – and the practicing field archaeologist who himself conquers the landscape, brings home the goodies, and takes his data raw! (Gero 1985, p. 344)

These lone figures had long populated landscape Romanticism when they colonized the newly phenomenological environment of archaeological theory in the early 1990s, which was the very atmosphere in which Ingold’s paper was developed. There was no ‘base-camp laboratory or museum’ here (Gero 1985, p. 344.). On the contrary, some kind of alternative approach to landscape and time was presented. This was grounded in the idea that the distinction between ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ attitudes to ‘work, time and industry’ are implicit in ‘the temporal dynamic of industrial society itself’ (Ingold 1995, p. 27), and that ‘in reality…reified clock time has not replaced the intrinsic temporality of lived, social experience; it has only changed its meaning’ (Ingold 1994, p. 338). The suggestion was that archaeology could resist modern conceptions of time and space. Perhaps even that it must.

In such a view, the archaeological excavation represents, to borrow the terminology of 1960s counter-culture, a kind of ‘happening’ – standing somehow outside disembodied technologies such as clocks, or radiocarbon dating, or labour as commodity. Indeed, Ingold’s more recent writing, in parallel with the explicitly ‘counter-modern archaeology’ developed by Julian Thomas (Thomas 2004), has expanded on this view of the experience of time and place through a scepticism about the kind of knowledge that develops from modern devices. Malinowskian encounters give way to an ideal of the counter-cultural, counter-modern beyond the interfering mediation of technology. Taking a cue from Heidegger, Ingold suggests that the typewriter ‘severs the link between gesture and trace’ (Ingold 2011, p. 190). He distinguishes between ‘descriptive endeavours’ that make use of ‘the pen or pencil’ on the one hand, and ‘the camera or keyboard’ on the other, glossing the latter as ‘studying of’ rather than ‘studying with’ (Ingold 2011, p. 226). And, just as for the hand the typewriter ‘breaks up the flow of manual gesture’, so for the eye ‘the still camera arrests a moment…and effects an instantaneous capture’ (Ingold 2013, p. 140). Cartography and photography are intimately connected, in Ingold’s view, with the identification of ‘landscape’ with ‘an art of description that would see the world spread out on a canvas…projected onto a plate or screen, or the pages of an atlas’ (2011, p. 127). One of photography’s antecedents, he suggests, is a commitment in landscape painting to ‘composition and totalization’, in which ‘the world is played back to the viewer’ – something which he suggests it shares with ethnographic thick description (Ingold 2010, p. 310). Such technologies include not just the camera, but also the museum, where we are forced to ‘confront things as objects’, since in museums ‘there seem to exist just persons like ourselves and objects on display’ (Ingold 2007a, p. 313).

‘Truly at home in the world.’ How did such an influential account of archaeology come to confuse a modern western academic discipline with some imagined ideal pristine nonwestern indigenous culture? How did an anthropologist come to mistake his archaeologist colleagues as hunter-excavators dwelling in an endless series of first-contact moments as the premodern past meets the western present, standing quite outside modern techniques of knowledge production?

The answer relates to the dominant kind of English landscape archaeology with which the paper was in dialogue at the time – which was no doubt inspired by, but totally failed adequately to represent, the environmentalist movements with which the practice of British salvage archaeology was so closely bound up at the time (see Macinnes and Wickham-Jones 1992). ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’ was written for a session on ‘Place, time and experience: interpreting prehistoric landscapes’ at the Theoretical Archaeology Group conference at Leicester in December 1991. This was the beginning of a high tide for archaeological phenomenology in the study of English prehistory in the early 1990s. Books like Chris Tilley’s A phenomenology of landscape: places, paths and monuments (1993), Julian Thomas’ Time, culture and identity: an interpretive archaeology (1993), and Chris Gosden’s Social being and time (1994) sought to move beyond Eurocentric, modern, ‘ideological’ notions of landscape. Archaeological phenomenology relied on a conception of the body in the landscape that used Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty to try to re-introduce to archaeology a sense of life and inhabitation that captured ‘activities’ rather than just ‘representations’. ‘Who said’, the most articulate and challenging voice to emerge from this literature asked, ‘romance was dead?’ (Edmonds 2006).

Of course, the conception of the multi-temporal nature of archaeological remains in the landscape was already a central element of modernist archaeological thought and practice in the English landscape. The idea of the juxtapositions of the fragmentary traces of multiple time periods in contemporary topography was a central notion in landscape archaeology even before W. G. Hoskins’ evocation of the English landscape as a ‘palimpsest’, as he railed against modern development (Hoskins 1955). This idea of the presence of the past was at the heart of the 20th-century archaeological English landscape imaginary that David Matless (1998) has called ‘planner-preservationism’. It was also at the heart of the emergence of modern conceptions of ‘heritage’, and all that has resulted from that. These developments reveal the intimately modern character of this kind of landscape thinking, rather than its standing somehow outside it.

‘The Temporality of the Landscape’ has been criticized as failing to consider power, inequality and the historical specificity of social relations (Bender 2001); as evoking an ‘overall tone of harmonious coherence, in part because of his human-centred focus on a quotidian taskscape’, which risks the ‘human and often individualistic self-absorption’ of mere performativity (Massey 2006, p. 41). But its most puzzling incoherence lies in its presentation of archaeology as somehow the opposite of a modern Western discipline, without its intimate and ambivalent connections with the Western colonial project, the European landscape tradition, the development of state control of the past, modernist regimes of urban and rural planning and the industrialized construction industry. Archaeologists document the landscape through writing, drawing, photography and collecting, transforming material traces into the archaeological record. We draw maps and survey the landscape; define sites and features as fixed forms. Our work is not inhabitation but labour. Our taskscape can be loudly heard, in the roar of the 360 excavator engine, the click of the camera shutter or the sound of steel tools striking stone. We engage not in wayfinding or dwelling but in creative destruction, or the mitigation of erasure through roads or housing estates yet to be built. We understand environments not as always ongoing, but as subject sometimes to interruption, intervention and loss. Time for us is not an inherent quality of landscape, but a creation that makes periodization, sequence and understanding of the past possible. Less a non-Western hunter, the archaeologist is a kind of modern gatherer.

Where do these observations lead? Alongside The Harvesters, let us consider a photograph (Fig. 3)

Fig. 3. Photograph of open area archaeological excavations for the A435 Alcester-Evesham Bypass, Warwickshire, August 1993 (photograph: Dan Hicks).

of one part of the English landscape, taken during rescue archaeology in advance of the construction of the A435 bypass (now A38) between Alcester and Evesham in rural Warwickshire. I took the photograph in in the summer of 1993, just as ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’ was going to press, and came across it again in spring 2014 in Warwickshire Museum’s stores. As we return to this photograph, Ingold’s four keywords flip into reverse:

1. The archaeologist’s ‘Landscape’ is a place revisited. Documentation re-enacts ideas of land, nature, space, like a picture in the imagination. The road has been built, and the time and place of excavation is gone. It is no longer ‘under construction’, ‘a living process’ or ‘a work in progress’ that ‘becomes part of us, just as we are part of it’. What has outlived that time and place is the archive, built to mitigate loss, where fragmented remains have been separated off from the past ‘human perceiver’. Building and unbuilding is artificially stopped in these fragments, each of which has become ‘an object…to be understood’. The secondary landscape of the museum storeroom, conservation laboratory, objects, archives, databases and grey literature has been ordered as a provisional totality. It is this second landscape that is now ‘constituted as an enduring record of…the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within it, and in doing so, have left something of themselves’. Together, the actions of the archaeologist and the road-builder have ‘transformed the world’.

2. There is no generalized primary essence of Temporality in the archive, but the inherited times of chronology and history. The archaeological archive is constituted through the documentation of past events as ‘isolated happenings, succeeding one another frame by frame, …strung out in time like beads on a thread’, as the horizons on the stratigraphic matrix are drawn out in sequence, and rendered as phases in the post-excavation process. Here, archaeological time is not ‘immanent in the passage of events’: it is measured rather than experienced, as each object, layer, horizon or context number is distinguished as ‘chronological barriers’. There is no crystal ball.

3. The proxy landscape of archaeological knowledge is constituted not through Dwelling but through cartography, surveying and representation; with inscription not ‘incorporating’. Archaeological records mark sites and locations, not centres with no boundaries; they cut fixed forms out from the whole.

4. Archaeological knowledge is not a Taskscape or a document of a ‘Taskscape’ as rhythmic dwelling; it is the product of the archaeologist’s labour. The archive is wholly indifferent to the modulations of the human experience of the excavator. There is nothing but relics of form and ‘final product’ – objects for contemplation or knowledge. The performance and process that might appear to be ‘the actual work’ is gone.

The problem for ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’ lay with the unreliability of Ingold’s archaeological informants. Archaeology in the landscape is engaged in the work of chorography not the taskscapes of choreography. And this work exists long after the performance of tasks is over, through the technologies of the archive and the museum. The irony is that phenomenological archaeology relied not only on an ideal of the detached, sole, disinterested viewer, but also on the modern history of the preservation of scheduled ancient monuments – Stonehenge, Cranborne Chase, Hambledon Hill, etc. – at which these apparently unmediated, noninterventionist, momentary and timeless encounters with the prehistoric present took place.⁵

The failure of these counter-modern modern archaeologies was their thin and banal assertion that archaeology takes place in the present – wholly neglecting how archaeological knowledge is constituted not from ‘real’ human experience in the field, but from retrospect upon what is created through practices of documentation. This failure is shared with the post-processual archaeologies more generally (pace Hodder 2004), through the misguided privileging of the fleeting experiences of archaeological practice, inspired by the reflexive idea that as a method interpretation is ‘always momentary’ (Hodder 1997, p. 694). In other words, when archaeological theorists suggested that ‘material culture is not a product of a past social world, it is a part of that world which intrudes into the present’ (Thomas 1996, p. 10), what was missed out was that archaeological material culture must always be the product of archaeological practice.

What are the implications? The primary connection between archaeology and anthropology is not simply temporality and landscape, but the creation of knowledge in the form of proxies for time and place. Our two disciplines share the central legacy of the idea of salvage, from which their allochronic impulses towards the spatialization of time emerged. They are technologies for enacting finitude in the face of constant change – for trying to make provisional stoppages of time and place. This much has been obscured by the obdurate and yet ephemeral presentism of the idea of the ethnographic: something captured by the opening lines of the forward to Argonauts:

Ethnology is in the sadly ludicrous, not to say tragic, position, that at the very moment when it begins to put its workshop in order, to forge its proper tools, to start ready for work on its appointed task, the material of its study melts away with hopeless rapidity. (Malinowski 1922, p. xv)

A persistent functionalism obscures how, while moments of fieldwork may be transitory, our museums and libraries are filled with their detritus, forming secondary indoor landscapes. Anthropological and archaeological knowledge can be constituted only through what is left behind. And what is left is never stable, even when the work of the curator serves to give that appearance. When do we know the archaeological past? What are the connections between the passage of time and the condition of archaeological knowledge?

IV

The Temporality of the Landscape. In seeking to move beyond processual and interpretive definitions of archaeological knowledge, the paper anticipated by two decades the present radical questioning of archaeology as a representational practice that is associated with the shift in emphasis from epistemological to ontological concerns. Today there is the prospect of an Archaeology after Interpretation (Alberti et al. 2013), of rekindling The Archaeological Imagination (Shanks 2012), of new ways of Understanding the Archaeological Record (Lucas 2012), of an archaeology that operates In Defence of Things (Olsen 2010), engages with The Dark Abyss of Time (Olivier 2011) and explores the status of archaeology as The Discipline of Things (Olsen et al. 2012). Taken together, in different ways these works represent the first clear indications of a fundamental reorientation of archaeology that is just getting under way, focused on a revaluation of the material dimensions of archaeological knowledge (Hicks 2010). How can our return to ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’ contribute to this endeavour? Time has passed, and there are new conceptions of archaeology that we can make use of. Let us put an alternative vision of archaeology – neither phenomenological nor interpretive – into dialogue with Ingold’s thinking, engaged not so much in an ‘ontological turn’ as in a kind of archival return.

Ingold has recently expressed concerns about describing anthropologists’ encounters with informants in the field as ‘ethnography’, since this relies on a ‘temporal distortion that contrives to render the aftermath of our meetings with people as their anterior condition’ (Ingold 2014, p. 386). His argument recalls Johannes Fabian’s critique of the denial of ‘coevalness’ between the ethnographer as subject and others as the object of enquiry, which showed how anthropology contrived ‘to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of the anthropological discourse’ (Fabian 1983, p. 31). But the danger for anthropology, Fabian indicated, was its ability not just to collapse distant places into the remote past, but to relegate others to a timeless now through the literary conceit of the ethnographic present (Fabian 1983, p. 80). In this light, Ingold’s account of fieldwork, as distinct from ‘ethnographization’ in which ‘experience is schizochronically put behind us, even as it is lived’ (Ingold 2014, p. 393), is surely inoperable in the field of archaeology. It would represent an unconvincing attempt to distinguish between artifice and reality. The objective of archaeologists is not the direct experience of the past in the present – outdoors in the landscape in ‘the same elements that, through the ages, have battered, eroded and smothered the monuments to past activity they seek to recover’, ‘bathed in the light of the open air, infused by its scents, blown by its currents or immersed in its pulses of sound’ (Ingold 2005, p. 122). Instead, it is knowledge of the past through what can be left. This is not a question of taphonomy, or residuality (Lucas 2010); instead our question must be: what does archaeology produce?

The archaeological archive has been treated as epiphenomenal. For Ingold, it is the epitome of the conceit of the ‘finished product’ that denies a more real ‘process’:

The more that objects are removed from the contexts of life activity in which they are produced and used – the more they appear as static objects of disinterested contemplation (as in museums and galleries) – the more, too, the process disappears or is hidden behind the product, the finished object. (Ingold 2000, p. 346)

But, for the archaeologist, the archive is a method through which landscape and time are connected. Ingold suggested that the temporal quality of his taskscape is like an orchestra’s performance, but the archaeologist might recall Lévi-Strauss’s observation about the commonality between music and myth. Both serve to ‘immobilize the passage of time’, thus ‘overcoming the antinomy of historical and elapsed time’ (Lévi-Strauss 1966, p. 61). The technologies of the museum and the archive – the museum label, the ziplock bag, the conservation lab – are analogous interventions. They are forms of notation: dal segno (go back to the mark). Enaction gives way to re-enactions. Among the outcomes of these technologies are provisional and contingent stoppages in time, rendering fragments as objects, which are wrought as cadences. A form of secondary deposition emerges in the new spaces of the museum and laboratory, like curtain calls or encores. So, while Ingold (2014) is undoubtedly correct to interrogate the temporal conceits of ethnography, the pressing challenge for archaeology is to dismiss the idea of the unmediated, pristine, archaeological present. We must rethink the assumption that archaeology is an ‘outdoor science’ that should resist ‘retreating indoors to the safety and seclusion of the laboratory, library or study’ (Ingold 2005, p. 122) – an idea that eschews end product in favour of the ‘original’ performance, as if that were somehow more real because it was longer ago.

Recent developments in performance scholarship and curatorship provide some important ideas for this rethinking. In this field, a generation ago ephemerality and disappearance were seen as central attributes of liveness, while documentation was nothing but a vain effort at ‘saving’. Thus, Peggy Phelan’s influential account of the ‘ontology of performance’ argued that:

Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does, it becomes something other than performance. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology. Performance’s being…becomes itself through disappearance. (Phelan 1993, p. 146)

In this approach, which had much in common with that of ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’, the idea of ‘being there’ was central. There was the sense that theatre is ‘the art of the present’, from which ‘the ontology of subjectivity’ emerged through the ‘undocumentable moment of performance’ (Phelan 1993, pp. 146, 148).

The challenge raised by the ontological claims of performance for writing is to re-mark again the performative possibilities of writing itself. The act of writing toward disappearance, rather than the act of writing toward preservation, must remember that the after-effect of disappearance is the experience of subjectivity itself. (Phelan 1993, p. 149)

In contrast, Philip Auslander suggested that performance and mediatization are more entangled, since ‘the very concept of live performance presupposes that of reproduction’ (Auslander 1997, p. 55). Matthew Reason has gone further, understanding the archive not as representation or mimesis, but as ‘detritus’: the ‘fragments and echoes of the performance’ (Reason 2003, 2006, p. 3). In this view, far from being an authoritative archive of the past, the archive is partial. For Reason the researcher’s task is to ‘examine what impressions the representations leave on our understanding of performance’ (Reason 2006, p. 5). Documents made during performance ‘often assert themselves to be the true record of what really happened’, or else have that capacity ascribed to them (Pearson 2010, pp. 191–192), but gradually in performance studies the idea of performance as ‘original’ or more ‘real’ than its documentation has started to break down. Jane Blocker has imagined ‘a history that does not save in any sense of the word’, since ‘we need a history that performs’ (Blocker 1999, p. 134). And, most recently, Heike Roms has defined an ‘archival turn’ in performance studies, in which documentation is redefined as ‘constituted through a continual performance of collaborative practices of care’ (Roms 2013, p. 48).

What might such a shift from a privileging of ‘being there’ in the moment (something by definition no longer possible), to a sense of the unfolding of performance ‘beyond the confines of the single live event’ (Roms 2013, p. 37) through an ongoing performativity of the archive look like in archaeology? Unlike dance, perhaps, archaeology can self-evidently never be an art of the present. Indeed, far from generating documents through which the events of fieldwork can be reconstructed, which are then made to last in archives, archaeological practice is wholly archival in character. In archaeology, the documents are the performance. They are part of the destruction of a place: not a representation of the landscape, but fragments of it. Archaeology is a kind of ‘craft’ for sure, as Michael Shanks and Randy McGuire have argued, but to understand craft we cannot just focus on its secondary ‘cultural productions’ – which they described as ‘reports, papers, books, museum displays, TV programs, whatever’ (1996, p. 76), but which are not just outcomes but archival refractions. To understand the condition of archaeological knowledge and to fashion its uses we must attend no longer to momentary process (whether method or interpretation), but to the aftershocks of scientific practice. For this reason, the purpose of this essay has been a form of revisitation – part restatement (where a theme, motif or hook can reignite a melody), part antanaclasis (that rhetorical device where repetition reshapes effect). What are the connections between the passage of time and the condition of archaeological knowledge?

V

The Temporality of the Landscape. We find ourselves a generation beyond Ingold’s attempt to dispel from archaeology the modern knowledge that comes from mapping, surveying, photographing and many other methods for treating things as objects and putting them in museums. And this present time and place in thought, in turn, is hardly a fixed or singular state of affairs. The ontological arguments that Ingold’s paper made about Western and non-Western times and places are still important. The present essay is not simply an alternative reading of Ingold’s paper, since time has passed. Archaeology is changed, and ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’ has changed as well. Re-reading, re-tracing, there are new directions in which we might take the paper’s arguments as archaeological questions. In letting go of the privileging of that most simplistic conception of the archaeological present that has dominated archaeological theory since Walter Taylor, and which reached its logical conclusions in the phenomenological-reflexive moment of the post-process 1990s, a new kind of ontological question can be addressed (compare Lucas 2015).

Consider Alfred Gell discussing the anthropology of time: ‘The illusion of time-travel engendered by the contemplation of ancient objects is a strong one, stronger perhaps than mere logic’ (Gell 1992, p. 28). Since this one field of our anthropological discipline relies so much on this illusion, we might not just follow Gell in studying how it is put to use, but also enquire into how the archaeologist’s trick is done. The most significant, and currently underexplored, element of the growing literature in anthropology’s ongoing ‘ontological turn’ is the unexpected relativizing of any given ontological constitution of the world, of humans, of material culture or indeed of landscape and time. For our purposes, the major implication of Philippe Descola’s presentation of four alternative ontologies, located in different regions and periods of time – animism, naturalism, totemism and analogism (Descola 2013) – is to reveal the inadequacy of seeking to see past one ontology (in this case modern Western ‘naturalism’) to another that is somehow more real. Instead a new, pressing question emerges: how to understand the place of archaeological practice in the material constitution of western ontologies of time and place.

The themes of ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’ remain central to the future of how we understand what archaeological knowledge can be. Its critique of our discipline’s conception of choosing between cultural ecology as either adaptation or symbolism (Ingold 2000, p. 154) remains important. It was influential in the growing awareness of the failure of the 20th-century experiment of defining archaeology and anthropology as a kind of ‘social science’ (Ingold 1992, p. 693). But, in dismissing the idea of landscape as a commodity, or a picture, or a disembodied representation, or an object, or chronology, or history, or inscription, or labour, or cartography, the paper fails archaeology today. Ingold was misinformed about what archaeological knowledge is. The yearning to look beyond Western conceptions of time and landscape seems now, a generation later, to be a period piece: a failed attempt to short-circuit archaeology’s central status as a Western form of making knowledge, through the same shortcomings that meant that phenomenological archaeology failed the ambitions of environmentalist archaeology. Ingold’s informants missed the point: rather than denying the existence of objects and subjects, or past and present, our challenge is to understand how such distinctions are enacted through the modern craft of archaeology.

How to proceed? By concluding that ‘Heidegger was not a very good anthropologist of science and technology’ (Latour 2004, p. 235)? That is for sure – but so what? Any critique of the ideas of a previous generation should be anathema to the anthropological archaeologist, for whom the past is the principal resource. Instead, let us suggest a handful of new definitions for how we understand what archaeological knowledge is, by updating Ingold’s four keywords to read: temporality, modernity, landscape and revisitation.

First, let us acknowledge that all we can know through archaeology comes through a form of collective Nachlass. The word Temporality is most confusing here. For exactly the same reasons as Ingold himself has pointed out in his critique of the phenomenologists’ use of the idea of ‘materiality’ rather than ‘materials’ (Ingold 2005, p. 124), we must be careful to avoid evoking with the term ‘temporality’ any false sense of a ‘fixed essence’ of unvarying time – something that characterized the longstanding mistaken archaeological conception of the present, by processualist, reflexivist and phenomenologist alike, as an unproblematically shared, coeval moment in time. On the contrary, the archaeological use of the term ‘temporality’ might be reclaimed to describe time as a highly varied, uneven material creation – an effect of (among other things) our modern craft, the consequence of which is to open up the conditions for incremental repetition. Archaeology is a mode of scientific production (Lucas 2012, pp. 231–234) for sure – but what comes next? The passage of time transforms archaeological knowledge.

Second, archaeology must reclaim and embrace its Modernity as a principal object of enquiry, rather than trying to escape or shortcut Western modes of knowledge to access some more real vision of the past. If archaeology is to treat its scientific objects ontologically, since the epistemological game is up, then it must understand them anthropologically. Archaeology can never be a form of knowledge that stands wholly outside Western thought and science: it is a means of re-enacting distinctions between past and present, objects and subjects. Archaeology is interventionist (Lucas 2001a, p. 40, 2001b) for sure – but what comes next? Archaeological knowledge transforms the passage of time.

Third, we need a new kind of documentary archaeology, which can fulfil the potential of our discipline’s long overdue archival return. Our Landscapes are at once indoors in the museums and libraries and outdoors at sites and monuments and at the lay-bys of 20-year-old trunk roads. Could a new kind of archaeological thinking awaken from a ‘long hibernation in the basements of museology’ (Ingold 2007b, p. 5)? Perhaps it will, since archaeological knowledge does not exist outside the secondary, proxy landscapes of the archive. Archaeology involves Acts of Discovery (Edgeworth 2003) for sure – but what comes next? An archaeological landscape is an object that is known through remapping.

Fourth, all archaeological knowledge must be made through Revisiting. Archaeology is a method for going back. This essay has returned to some of the Romantic dimensions of Ingold’s classic paper, as both an idea and a place. As we conclude, we might quite without irony recall Wordsworth’s observation, when revisiting Tintern Abbey, that, when ‘we see into the life of things’ through recollection, memory itself is ‘as a dwelling place’ (Wordsworth 1798). The museum and archive are not end products. Rather, there is no archaeological knowledge that lies outside some kind of product of our craft. For this reason, archaeological knowledge must always start with a return – to a place, an idea, an object. That is how the connection between landscape and time is made by the archaeologist. Archaeology is a craft (Shanks and McGuire 1996) for sure – but what comes next? Archaeological knowledge is what we leave behind.

***

Concluding his paper, Tim Ingold asked, ‘What is archaeology the study of?’ His answer was: ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’. But as we learned at the start of this essay, archaeologists do not interpret the past only in terms of the present (Sherratt). Archaeology shows us how to think through change (Leone). And archaeological knowledge emerges through a kind of ‘intervening period’ (Deetz). So let me the question for a second time. ‘What is archaeology the study of?’ It is the study of the temporality of the landscape revisited.

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to audiences at the European Association of Archaeologists meeting in Glasgow in September 2015, and at Gothenburg University in October 2015 for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Thanks are also due to Angela Piccini and Saini Manninen for some conversations about performance archives, and to two anonymous referees. This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (grant reference number ES/M500355/1).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Medical Research Council: [Grant Number xxxx, xxxx].

Notes

¹ Here, Ingold follows Alfred Gell’s use of John McTaggart’s (1908) idea of ‘A-series’ and ‘B-series’ time (Gell 1992, p. 165). For Ingold, temporality is distinct from the B-series, which ‘reflects the temporal relationships between events as they really are, out there’, but is identified with the A-series of subjective perception, which Gell explores through Husserl’s phenomenology of time consciousness.

² Ingold distinguishes between landscape and taskscape through an analogy with the difference between painting and music, but ultimately collapses the opposition.

³ Thomas Campbell and Keith Christiansen interview. http:www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/19.164

⁴ In a later note on this point, Ingold reflected that, ‘unlike native dwellers, archaeologists do not incorporate into their own practice the modes of environmental engagement of the characters of whom they tell. That is to say, the peoples of the past whose lives are revealed through excavation were not themselves excavators’ (Ingold 2000, p. 428). This is an odd suggestion, since so much archaeological excavation quite precisely re-enacts and re-traces past practices of excavation and construction.

⁵ As Kathleen Jamie has observed, similar problems face the new nature writing today: ‘What’s that coming over the hill? A white, middle-class Englishman! A Lone Enraptured Male! From Cambridge! Here to boldly go, “discovering”, then quelling our harsh and lovely and sometimes difficult land with his civilised lyrical words’ (Jamie 2008).