Archaeology, process and time: beyond history versus memory

ABSTRACT

In this paper I seek to explore how a particular aspect of process philosophy can offer us new ways of thinking through time in archaeology. In contrast to current archaeological debates, which counterpose a model of archaeology as driven primarily by history and sequence with one of memory and contemporaneity, the process approach taken here develops a different account. Drawing on the three syntheses of time set out by Gilles Deleuze, the paper explores how habit, memory and difference allow us to think about time in new ways from both passive and active perspectives. Explored through the work of the Ardnamurchan Transitions Project, the paper sets out how these syntheses allow for a multiplicity of times situated within a consistent ontological approach, one that lets us understand the processes by which narratives of both history and memory emerge.

KEYWORDS:

• Process philosophy
• time
• habit
• memory
• difference
• Gilles Deleuze

Introduction

Take an arbitrary archaeological landscape, say one in western Scotland, on the north coast of the Ardnamurchan peninsula (Figure 1). It is a landscape that is clearly multitemporal. There is the form of the land itself, shaped by geological processes over millions of years, as well as more recent actions of the sea, the isostatic rebound of the land after glaciers retreated, and more. There are archaeological monuments dating from thousands of years ago and later burials that took materials from those sites to repurpose them. There are traces of small-scale industrial activity in lime kilns, and evidence for processes of the forced eviction and dislocation of people in the abandoned and demolished homes from the 19th century. One way of conceptualising this is as a form of historical sequence, first one thing then another, moving unidirectionally from past to present. But at the same time none of the elements of the landscape ever stop changing or disappear, they are always and forever in process, or what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze (2006) would call ‘becoming’. As well as sequence then, we can think about how all these pasts are co-present, contemporary and overlapping, mixing and melding with each other outside of any clear linear sequence. A Neolithic tomb is as present in the Viking era as it is was in the Neolithic and as it is today (cf. Holtorf 1998). Whether we think about time as overlapping co-presents or as a linear sequence, both depend on process, and both have their archaeological adherents. Are there ways we can think about them together, rather than opposed? Are there ways in which a more critical engagement with process philosophy can help us resolve the tensions between the two? Are there perhaps deeper processes at play upon which both these other forms of time depend?

Figure 1. Swordle Bay, Ardnamurchan. Photo by Dan Addison, reproduced with permission.

Time and archaeology

Time has always been of critical importance to archaeologists, from sequence and succession, through the constant search for refined dating techniques, to theoretical issues of scale and change (Shanks and Tilley 1987; Knapp 1992; Gosden 1994; Thomas 1996; Lucas 2005, 2021; Bailey 2007; Rowley-Conwy 2007; Robb and Pauketat 2013; Harris 2017; Whittle 2018; Crellin 2020).¹ As such it is never far from the debates archaeologists revel in conducting. Time can be seen as linear or cyclical, as multiscalar or uniform. It can be understood through analogies with geology or history, physics or philosophy. Excellent summaries and critiques have been set out by Gavin Lucas (e.g. 2005, 2015, 2021), Rachel Crellin (2020) and others (e.g. Souvatzi, Baysal, and Baysal 2019). But one distinction, drawn by Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley (1987), is worth emphasising: that between abstract and experiential time. The former is the time of clocks, linear and uniform, measurable and quantifiable. The latter is the time of human experience, with its varied relational rhythms and tempos. This opposition, one with significant antiquity across academia (Canales 2015), continues in different ways in our contemporary discussions. Today, some claim archaeology should be a form of history, one governed by ever more accurate chronologies, but this clashes with others who see memory as the defining mode of time for our discipline. In this paper I suggest that process philosophy can offer us an important set of tools for escaping this long-running impasse. Building on the discussions of time in process philosophy outlined by Chris Gosden and Lambros Malafouris (2015; see also Hamilakis and Labanyi 2008; Hamilakis 2013; Knight and McFadyen 2020; Thomas 2020), this paper explores how a process approach to time can offer us the means to understand both the emergence of memory and the emergence of history; how to embrace temporal multiplicity in other words. To do so, I will draw explicitly on Deleuze (2004). Deleuze’s work, as an example of process philosophy, can show us how archaeology can move between multiple conceptions of time without reduction and, in so doing, allow us to explore both memory and history (Harris 2021). Before doing so, however, I will set out these two competing modes of time in archaeology in a little more detail. The first sees time as a linear sequence and represents a fairly traditional approach to archaeological narrative – we can refer to this as archaeology-as-history. The second treats the past as contemporary with the present, and as a realm of multiple overlapping temporalities. We can refer to this as archaeology-as-memory. We begin with the latter.

Archaeology-as-memory

The understanding of archaeology-as-memory has grown from both a desire to attend to material things more directly, and in response to the emergence of contemporary archaeology, which asks us to focus on the here and now, and thus inevitably on the multitemporal nature of the present (e.g. Blaising et al. 2017). Þóra Pétursdóttir (2012), for example, has written evocatively of her encounter with an abandoned herring factory in Iceland. Faced with the overwhelming silence and volume of material objects, she suggests that an attempt to talk of history does an injustice to the material present and runs the risk of assimilating things to a human project (Pétursdóttir 2012, 578). In contrast, she argues that archaeological temporalities have more in common with memory. In a similar fashion, Bjørnar Olsen (2012) has argued that archaeology has been limited by the demands of history, and that we would be better off conceptualising things unchained from such linear narratives. We can place these approaches, and others, broadly under the banner of ‘symmetrical archaeology’ (Olsen et al. 2012; cf. Harris and Cipolla 2017). Symmetrical archaeology also emphasises the non-linear and emergent qualities of time, the way it ‘percolates’ in Christopher Witmore’s (2006) evocative phrase. Looking at Oxford Street in London, Witmore (2007, 557; cf. Blaising 2017, 64) points out that it is difficult to see it as solely the product of one time, instead its route remains structured by a Roman road. Similarly, Tim Webmoor and Witmore (2008, 64) explore how an object like a pair of glasses is the enfolding of multiple forms of time within a single thing. Finally, perhaps the most extended discussion of archaeology-as-memory has come from Laurent Olivier (e.g. 2004, 2011) who explores at length the complex interplay of multiple temporalities at any one moment, or in any one landscape. Archaeologists ‘reactivate’ the past for Olivier (2011, 61), opening up the complex intersections of multiple temporalities. Archaeology, Olivier (2011, 34) declares, is about the ‘material memory of the past that escapes historical consciousness’, and new tools are required with which to access this (Olivier 2019, 22). The rejection of history, here, allows archaeology to approach its ‘true object’ (Witmore 2017, 232)

Such approaches to time are enormously productive, they help us realise that any point in time is made up of multiple intersections of temporality, what Deleuze (2015, 167) calls ‘the coiling up of relative presents’. They have broadened and complicated how archaeologists have written about temporality by resisting the call to place sequence, order and linear time at the heart of everything we do. They open up the possibility of considering the time inherent in non-humans, in the depth and richness of the moment of archaeological encounter, and how so much of what we do as archaeologists demands a recognition of our materials’ complexity, unknowability and ambiguity (Gero 2007; Sørensen 2016). They address many of the critiques of archaeology as overly dependent on human beings, that is they are non-anthropocentric (c.f. Crellin et al. 2021). There can be little doubt that multiple pasts coalesce in any present, and these are pasts that always exceed the parts of them that are human.

Yet at the same time, such approaches present a fundamental challenge in their claim that archaeology should separate its long-standing relationship with history. Olsen puts this most bluntly in his call for archaeology to escape ‘the imperatives of history’ (2012, 25; cf. Olivier 2015, 29, 2019; Pétursdóttir 2012, 587). Is this really something that archaeologists should aspire to? When Pétursdóttir and Olsen (2018) write evocatively of the accumulated waste floating in a Norwegian fjord, they deliberately avoid discussions of how it got there, or what the historical processes are that have resulted in this kind of environmental damage. In their case this is quite reasonable – historical explanation is not their project. As a discipline however, should archaeology remove itself from such discussions? Much of the story of our subject has wrestled with big historical questions – the origins of agriculture, the development of monumentality, the evolution of our species. Many of these questions are not amenable to study through written records, meaning a declaration that archaeology should avoid them would in effect render them unavailable for any form of investigation. Furthermore, are the linear sequences we have written about definitively less real than the contemporary pasts that archaeology-as-memory presupposes? Indeed, archaeology is in the process of developing a suite of new approaches to understanding the past, from aDNA and isotopic analysis to precisely modelled dating sequences, which may presage dramatic new abilities to construct historical narratives. Is this really the time to turn away from history?

Archaeology-as-history

In contrast to those archaeologists arguing that memory offers the best metaphor for our subject, other voices have argued that now, more than ever, is the moment to emphasise history as key touchstone for the discipline. Although historical sequence has long been a critical component of archaeology, going back to the development of the three-age system (Rowley-Conwy 2007), recent developments and new dating techniques have returned the notion of archaeology-as-history to the foreground. Central here has been the development of Bayesian modelling of radiocarbon dates (Bayliss 2009; Whittle, Healy, and Bayliss 2011; Whittle 2018). Bayesian modelling works by combining prior information, for example about stratigraphic sequence, with radiocarbon dates, in order to combat the inherent scatter in the latter. This has resulted in extraordinary sequences being developed both for specific sites (e.g. Mercer and Healy 2008; Richards et al. 2016) and for whole periods (Whittle, Healy, and Bayliss 2011). Whereas previously certain types of monuments in the Early Neolithic of Britain, for example, were understood as being in use for centuries, we can now map their growth and decline far more precisely. We can trace the emergence of causewayed enclosures, particular forms of monument made up of interrupted ditches, as they swell in popularity and fade in the centuries from 3700 cal BCE onwards (Whittle, Healy, and Bayliss 2011, 703). In one extraordinary example, Alex Bayliss and Alasdair Whittle (2019) lead their reader though awalk across the chalk downlands of Wessex in the 3630s cal BCE, past the construction of specific sections of enclosure, the burning of mortuary sites and more. Far from the generic picture of an ‘Early Neolithic’ life way understood as operating over centuries, Bayliss and Whittle lead us into the intimacy of lives lived thousands of years ago and visit events that could easily have been witnessed by the same individual.

Such possibilities have led Whittle (e. g. 2018) to call specifically for archaeology to return to history as its primary focus. In direct opposition to the emphasis on multiple and non-linear temporality, or the escape from history, for which the archaeologists we saw above have called, Whittle argues that we have an astonishing opportunity to write the deep past as history for the first time. Why give that up? It is clear that archaeology has contributed enormously to our understanding of the human past through an emphasis on sequence and through an understanding of time as linear. Our new ability to refine and improve past chronologies presages ever more intimate narratives of past worlds. Whittle (2018, 15) is explicit that his view represents one that is ‘diametrically opposed’ to what Olsen and others have called for.

Yet questions remain here. Whilst such accounts have explored historical specificity in ever more detailed ways, they have little answer to the broader theoretical critiques raised above. Our ability to sequence time does not mean it is not multiple in both past and present. Witmore’s (2007) example of Oxford Street demonstrates quite clearly how in any one moment multiple temporalities are always present. Nor do such engagements with time, by themselves, offer us insight into how time was understood in the past, as Richard Bradley (2020) argues.

Two other concerns with archaeology-as-history can be foregrounded here. The first is that the scales of time it focuses on tend towards that of human lives and human generations (Crellin 2020, 90). Time is always multiscalar, however, and we need archaeological approaches that can engage with this complexity (Robb and Harris 2013; cf. Lucas 2021, chapter 3). Whilst Bayesian models draw our attention to human-scales of time, these are not the only ones at which archaeologists can, and should, write (Robb and Pauketat 2013; Crellin 2020). An emphasis on human scales of time means the role of non-humans, from material things, to monuments to landscapes, is inevitably downplayed. Second, there may be broader political consequences from elevating one particular mode of time over others. Whilst Olsen (2012) has argued for a political attention to be paid to non-humans (cf. Carter and Harris 2020), of more concern may be the way linear time has played a critical role in Western settler-colonist projects. Mark Rifkin (2017) has set out how imposing linear, quantifiable, forms of time remains a central part of settler-colonist politics in the United States. In contrast, he examines how an approach to different modes of time, and the potential for what he terms ‘temporal sovereignty’ can allow space for more complex Indigenous worlds to exist (Rifkin 2017). The notion of universal time, into which Indigenous people can be slotted, sustains a singular conception of the world, one founded on a dominant Western ontology. Singular, linear, and universal time alone, therefore, has no space within it for Indigenous self-determination. Thus, if an obsession with linear, controlled, measurable time has significant political consequences, including providing legitimacy for a view of time that denies power to Indigenous communities around the world (Rifkin 2017), can we hold it as the singular aim of archaeology? Is archaeology-as-history a means of extending what Rifkin calls ‘settler time’ into the deep past of Europe and elsewhere?

Deleuze and the three syntheses

The two approaches to time in archaeology here, as memory or history, are by themselves both insufficient. The former removes our ability to craft historical explanations and to deal with change through time. The latter presents a linear approach that denies the complexities of temporality, leads us to writing only at specific scales of analysis, and risks imposing a form of time that, by itself, has serious political implications. Their opposition, explicit in the writings of both sides (e.g. Olivier 2015; Whittle 2018) is, as Lucas (2015, 36) has argued, very problematic. However, nothing so simple as merely combining the two will suffice either. The two approaches have contrasting philosophical underpinnings: time-as-memory resting upon non-anthropocentric approaches, increasingly those associated with Object-Oriented Ontology (Harman 2011; Witmore 2017; cf. Harris and Cipolla 2017); time-as-history upon a human-centred approach to the past (Whittle 2018). Whilst both capture elements of what archaeology needs to be able to do, we will require a different starting point, one with sufficient ontological flexibility and sophistication to handle multiple versions of time simultaneously.

It is here we can turn to process philosophy to provide us with a more robust underpinning (Gosden and Malafouris 2015). Process philosophy in different forms has already had an impact on multiple forms of archaeological thinking, including those influenced by new materialism and assemblage theory amongst others (e.g. Conneller 2011; Jones 2012; Lucas 2012; Fowler 2013; Cipolla 2018; Crellin 2020), although space prevents a detailed exploration of these important contributions. When it comes to time, process philosophy, with its emphasis on becoming over being, on the constant change and emergence of the world, and on new connections and new potentials constantly forming, clearly has much to offer us (Hamilakis 2013; Gosden and Malafouris 2015). Rather than attempt to cover this ground in its entirety, I will instead turn to a specific area of process philosophy and look at what Deleuze’s approach to time has to offer.

Deleuze’s work has proven to be increasingly influential across the humanities and social sciences in the last 20 years, playing a vital role in the development of new materialism (e.g. Coole and Frost 2010), the ontological turn (e.g. Viveiros de Castro 2014) and non-representational approaches (e.g. Thrift 2008). In archaeology his work has provided critical inspiration in developing new concepts of materials (Conneller 2011), the senses (Hamilakis 2013), change (Crellin 2020) and the archaeological record itself (Lucas 2012; Fowler 2013). Often associated with assemblage theory (Jervis 2019), his work has wider ramifications. Deleuze’s thought has many elements to it, but critical emphases include the importance of becoming over being (e.g. Deleuze 2006), the nature of relations (Deleuze and Parnet 2002), and the central role of difference as a productive force (Deleuze 2004). His thinking offers an important reorientation for archaeology, allowing us to reposition the discipline in the light of the intellectual challenges it currently faces, as well as to offer new narratives about the past (for a fuller exploration of these ideas see Harris 2021).

Deleuze offered several different engagements with time, including his work on cinema (Deleuze 1986, 1989; cf. Thomas 2020) and his development of the philosophy of the Stoics (Deleuze 2015). In this he drew on and developed essential work by Henri Bergson, David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche,² arguing that the typical vision people have of time – running in a straight line from past, present to future – was insufficient. In its place Deleuze developed a relational and emergent view of time, rooted in process. Here I am going to work specifically with version of time Deleuze develops in Difference and Repetition. This work forms the key central element of Deleuze’s ontology and underpins the later and more famous work he conducted with the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari (2004, 2013).³ Deleuze proposes that time emerges through three acts of synthesis, each building on and relying on the next. Whilst initially obscure, this approach offers us an opportunity to rethink time in archaeology from a process-focused perspective, and to reposition our understanding of both archaeology-as-memory and archaeology-as-history.

In what follows then, I aim to introduce the reader to the three syntheses. However, this is an article on archaeology not philosophy. Materials will also be required, therefore, and so we return to our opening vignette from Scotland. Here I draw on the ongoing work of the Ardnamurchan Transitions Project. The project, a collaborative effort between the Universities of Leicester and Manchester and Archaeology Scotland, examines how people have occupied the landscape of Swordle Bay, on the north coast of the Ardnamurchan peninsula, from its first occupation, at least 5700 years ago, through to the present day. It offers geographical containment but temporal depth, and with that the possibility for thinking through the nature of time in archaeology. The sites excavated include Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments, Bronze Age and Iron Age occupation, a Viking boat burial and settlements emptied during the Highland Clearances, the process by which rural communities were removed from the land in Scotland in the 19th century (Casella et al. 2013; Harris et al. 2014; Harris 2016; Harris et al. 2017; Harris, Cobb, and Richardson 2018). These sites offer a rich resource for thinking about the complex forms of temporality, and their emerging synthesis.

The first synthesis: habit, or past and future as dimensions of the present

As noted, Deleuze develops three syntheses of time designed to reveal both the processes through which time emerges, and their ontological underpinnings. The first of these, drawing especially on Hume, is what Deleuze calls habit: the repetitive sequences out of which a notion of time emerges (Deleuze 2004, 91–101; cf.1991a). Linear time emerges here as the sequence of actions that give rise to habits, in the routines that structure daily life, in the rise and fall of the sun, in the changing of the seasons. Each action within habit depends on a previous one, and anticipates one that follows, creating a sense of directionality. Deleuze’s work is non-representational, and this means that the first synthesis of time is primarily what he calls a passive synthesis. When referring to human beings, this means that rather than actively deciding to form habits, principally it is our habits that form us, that habits are not something that emerge through the actions of subjects, but rather the sequence of actions that give rise to subjects: ‘these thousand habits of which we are composed’ (Deleuze 2004, 100). Daily life emerges from these sequences of habits that form sense of routine, order and sequence. Think of the meals that shape the events of the day repetitively, or the demands of children or animals for particular forms of attention at particular moments of time. Habits create linear time because they rest, fundamentally, on the notion that any individual event will happen again and has happened before, they gain meaning through this repetition. A one-off event is not a habit.

Habit, of course, has long been an important element in how archaeologists have conceptualised patterns of daily life, not least through Pierre Bourdieu’s (1990) notion of habitus (e.g. Barrett 1994). What marks this out as different? First, as noted, Deleuze’s approach to habit does not treat it as something that subjects have – or societies or anything else has. Subjects are formed through habits not the other way around. Second, Deleuze’s work is non-anthropocentric, and thus this approach is broadened because habits here are not related here to human beings necessarily; non-humans including objects have their own habits, the sequences of occurrences that bring them into being and sustain them. A river is formed from the habitual flow of water which defines, yet wears away at, its boundaries, just as your morning routine is defined through brushing your teeth, wearing away at them in similar (though hopefully not too vigorous) fashion. The sun and the earth are locked in their own habits in relation to one another. The present emerges here, Deleuze (2004, 97) argues, as the contraction of past and future, the latter two emerging as dimensions of the former. Habit creates the notion of sequence, it creates the potential for relations to be formed created between occurrences in a series, between the tick and the anticipated tock of the clock (Deleuze 2004, 97).⁴

How does this synthesis of time help regarding archaeology? As a landscape, Swordle Bay, Ardnamurchan, emerges through the countless habits of its human and non-human constituents. The habits of the burn running down to the sea slowly carves different paths through its movement, leaving scars, occasionally flooding its banks. The habits of grass synthesise energy from sunlight and soil, providing energy for grazing animals, a set of habits that have taken place here for more than 5000 years. Within this broad sequence we can detect moments of habit that are more temporarily contained. In one part of the bay around 1650 cal BCE, in the shelter of a prominent ridge, pits and postholes were regularly dug (Figure 2). Perhaps related to patterns of roundhouses – later habits of ploughs and people have muddled the relationships – we can still detect 38 occasions on which holes were dug and used in a pattern of occupation that would have constructed a sense of place. The infilling of these pits, both through backfilling and silting – habits of humans and non-humans – would have allowed sequences of time to emerge as the occupation moved and shifted around. Any one moment at this site would have been characterised by evidence of older pits, half-silted pits, empty pits awaiting fills and pits being dug – a sequence emerging through the habits of place making. The ceramics people made and used here pulled together past and future into the present, the history of pottery making, the habits of the clay, its ability to hold temper, and the future use of the pottery in eating and drinking (cf. Gosden and Malafouris 2015, 704–5). Time does not contain these events, the radiocarbon date for the site, 1687–1612 cal BCE (at 68.2% likelihood), does not exhaust our capacity to discuss them. Instead, this synthesis of time emerges from the routines, rhythms and repetitions at the site. Each act of digging and filling made a difference, in the landscape, in the place, and their synthesis together forms time. As Deleuze (2004, 91) points out, the first synthesis of time is what imparts ‘direction to the arrow of time’. In other words, the seeming linear flow of time emerges from habit, it does not prefigure it.

Figure 2. Bronze Age features revealed through the actions of archaeologists, Swordle Bay, Ardnamurchan. Photo by author.

We have stressed that this is a passive synthesis of time here, and that the direction of time emerges through the future and past coming together in the present through the relations generated by habit. Deleuze identifies active versions of his syntheses too, however. The active version of the first synthesis is secondary to its passive counterpart but is no less real for that. The active synthesis here emerges in the work we can do to understand sequence, to put things in order so as to create a sense of flow. As archaeologists work to place the past in sequence, we too act to synthesise time. The attempt to sequence events in the history of a place like Swordle Bay places the particular site we have discussed here at the end of the Early Bronze Age, a particular moment within others that run back to the Neolithic and on to the 19th century. An active synthesis of time by archaeologists can produce this local ordering of parts of the landscape. This is archaeology-as-history; not as the be-all and end-all of our disciplinary aims, but as an essential element of how time emerges. This is an active synthesis that draws deliberately and explicitly on how temporality can flow from the actions and habits of humans and non-humans. Habit, Deleuze argues, allows us to understand how the present passes, and in attempting to create specific and ever more detailed histories, this process is mimicked in the actions of this particular mode of archaeological time creation.

The second synthesis: memory, or the present and future as dimensions of the past

If Hume is Deleuze’s key thinker when it comes to a consideration of habit, for the second synthesis of time it is Bergson whose work, especially on memory, comes to the fore (Deleuze 1991b). The version of memory Deleuze works with here, is quite different, however, from any notion of deliberate recall. Rather than a purposeful act, like trying to recall where you were last Tuesday, it is primarily once again a passive synthesis, through which, Deleuze argues, the present emerges from the past that surrounds us. In common parlance we often speak of things being closer, or further away, in time. Bergson and Deleuze were very critical of this spatial metaphor, however (cf. Lucas 2021, 18).⁵ Think about novels you have read; with some you will be easily able to recall every twist and turn of the plot no matter how long ago you encountered it, others fade from recall far more quickly. Some places you have not visited in ages return to mind at a moment’s notice, others remain stubbornly intransigent to memory. In what sense – outside of a linear and spatial notion of time – does a place you lived in as a child, that shaped almost everything about you, lie ‘further away’ than a railway station you passed through yesterday? The past here is not shaped by distance, or by extensive qualities, but rather by the intensity of our interaction with it. The past here is what Deleuze, following Bergson, calls virtual, and it is actualised in the present (Harris 2021, 233; cf. Hamilakis 2013, 119ff).

The present, in this mode, is what Bergson would call the past at its most contracted, or its most specific. Bergson’s (1991, 162) famous image of this is a cone, of which the widest level represents the whole – or pure – past. This then contracts down through different levels of specificity until it meets the present, where the past is at its most concentrated. Proust’s Madeline is an example of this, a moment of consumption that contracts the virtual potentials of the past, and actualises the specific memories of the narrator’s youth, an intensive engagement with the specific differences that made the town of Combray what it was, ‘the in-itself of Combray’ as Deleuze (2004, 107) puts it.

Deleuze’s emphasis on the passive synthesis means that whilst deliberate recall is real and important, it is a secondary mode of memory to how time is brought together in this synthesis. There is, Bergson (1991, 33) remarks, ‘no perception that is not full of memory’. In keeping with Deleuze’s non-anthropocentric account, the passive synthesis of memory is not limited to human beings. We can conceptualise the manner in which objects contain their histories as an example of this kind of material memory (Gosden and Malafouris 2015, 703; Harris 2021, chapter 4). A single broken axe can tell us about the places it came from, the relations in which it was caught up, and the histories of actions in which it was involved (see Tsoraki et al. 2020). A mark on an axe revealing it was used to process bone is a contraction of the past of that material into a particular moment in the present; it is an act of memory.

If we turn to Ardnamurchan, we can explore a single example of a how memory works in this manner by looking at the Viking boat burial excavated in 2011, which dates to the early 10th century CE (Harris et al. 2017, 192; Figure 3). The site is made up of a boat shaped grave, 5.2 m by 1.7 m in length into which was placed a boat, the body of a Viking, and a wide range of grave goods. The latter included a sword, a shield, a spear, a whetstone, a copper-alloy ringed pin, a wide bladed axe, metalworking tools and more. The past here is contracted into these objects. Histories of journeys are made manifest in the material memories of the objects and human remains. Isotopic analysis of the two surviving human teeth show that the person buried here was potentially born in coastal Norway. The copper alloy ringed pin comes from Dublin. The boat too speaks to journeys and movements now contracted into a single place, a single present. Other times are present too. The grave was filled with stones most likely taken from the nearby Neolithic cairn. Other pasts are made manifest in the boat burial, contracted alongside the stories of movement of the early Medieval period. The multiple grave goods also draw on technologies, from metal working to processing animal skins, that themselves go back millennia (cf. Webmoor and Witmore 2008); more pasts made present in this moment of memory making. At the bottom of the boat two flint strike alights were recovered, a technology in Europe that goes back 50,000 years at least (Sorensen, Claud, and Soressi 2018). The boat burial is Viking in one sense, but it also actualises pasts that reach back to the Iron Age, the Neolithic and more. The sets of relations emergent here are overwhelming (cf. Crellin et al. 2021, chapter 2). There is no way of cataloguing them all; multiple temporalities emerge from a grave that is both one thing – a Viking boat burial – and so much more (Hamilakis and Labanyi 2008, 5–6). Within this hide potential futures too – materials that would be displayed at the British Museum, that would form part of this publication and others. The second synthesis of time captures all these temporalities; both present and future are dimensions of the past here (Deleuze 2004, 103).

Figure 3. Pre-excavation shot of the Swordle Bay Viking boat burial. Photo by author.

Yet this act of laying out the memories of the materials of the Viking grave which I have undertaken is quite different from the involuntary memories of the passive version of the second synthesis of time. This is no Combray, no Swordle-Bay-in-itself. Instead, this emphasis on archaeology-as-memory, as the collapse of multiple non-linear temporalities, represents the active version of the second synthesis. Thus, just as archaeology-as-history represents the active version of the first synthesis of time, so approaches that set out archaeology-as-memory in fact represent the active version of the second synthesis, bringing these memories actively into being once again (cf. Olivier 2011, 61; Lucas 2015, 11). Neither version of archaeological approaches to time, by itself, therefore, captures all the wonderful complexity which our material has to offer; both reveal important, but partial, windows.

The third synthesis: the eternal return, or the past and present as dimensions of the future

The final synthesis of time does not yet have an easy archaeological equivalent. It is also the hardest of the three to grasp. Yet it provides the ground for both habit and memory (Deleuze 2004, 111). If Hume and Bergson present the key inspirations for the first two syntheses, here Nietzsche is critical. Deleuze (2004, 50–1) begins with Nietzsche’s famous example of the ‘eternal return’. This puzzle asks: how would you react if a demon came to you and told you that you would need to live your life, making precisely the same choices, over and over again? Would you be devastated, or would you laugh? The traditional version of this puzzle is seen as a morality tale. Have you been a good person, and lived a good life, or not? However, Deleuze (2006, 46) and Nietzsche see rather a different message, because they argue what is returning is not ‘the same’ but instead difference. Difference, as we touched on above, is critical to Deleuze’s philosophy. Rather than seeing the world as made of up entities with predefined identities, Deleuze argues the world is driven by intensive processes of difference making, or what he calls ‘difference in itself’ (2004, chapter 1; cf. Bickle 2020; Harris 2021). Thus, for Deleuze, what comes back in an eternal return could never be the same, because what returns is the creative force of difference. Rather than a morality tale, your response to the demon is thus based on your understanding of the world – is it driven by a ‘logic of identity’, in which the same person lives the same life, or by difference, which means new and creative conjunctions are always forming? Repetition here, as the title of Deleuze’s book gives away, is always the repetition of difference.

How does this lead to a third synthesis of time? Deleuze (2004, 140) argues that it is the return of difference that makes events possible, and with that the resources that allow both habit and memory to form. Let us take a (somewhat) concrete example of weather patterns. It is the return of intensive differences in pressure allows weather events, say rainfall or storms, to happen again and again, but to happen differently each time. Without the creative potential of this difference, we would not be able to understand the repetitive qualities of weather. The repetition or return of difference allows us to grasp the habits of a certain landscape and its tendencies to rain or sunshine. These weather patterns, shaped in turn by the differential histories of gravity that drive the relationship of the earth and the sun, allow other differences – seasonal ones – to return. Here multiple differences combine to create the resources out of which the other forms of time emerge. These times can be understood as linear, from one perspective. If we take the example of seasons, the return of differences that drive weather patterns allow humans to recognise last summer, the one before that and so on (the first synthesis). Alternatively, these differences can be synthesised as co-present: the quality of summer itself (the second synthesis). Both depend on the prior differences that drive them. Thus, any sense of linear time, one central to archaeology-as-history, or one of co-presence, as in archaeology-as-memory, depend upon something prior to them both, the return of difference in itself. This is prior to both human experience and to any sense of linear time: it is an ontological or metaphysical claim.

So far, so philosophical. In Swordle Bay we can explore the flow and flux of difference in the manner in which the Neolithic chambered cairn, Cladh Aindreis, returns as difference again and again (Harris 2016; Figure 4)

Figure 4. The main chamber of Cladh Aindreis Neolithic chambered tomb, Swordle Bay, Ardnamurchan. Photo by author.

. Rather than a constant presence, the cairn fluctuates in intensity in its relations with the humans, and many of the non-humans, that have dwelt in the landscape. The cairn carries within it differential potentials, the capacity to mark places out, to make time, to create events. These events do not depend upon a prior flow of time, rather they create the capacity for time itself to emerge or be synthesised.

Take any number of examples this monument offers us. At one moment at the very start of the Iron Age people employed the cairn to differentiate a particular architectural space against which they built a structure and dug a hearth (cf. Hingley 1996). Between 1717 and 1616 cal BC, the cairn created a resource where memories and histories could be built and connected in the making of a Bronze Age kerb cairn built alongside it. At the end of the first millennium AD the site offered a resource from which stones could be gathered to fill a Viking burial, forging links through time, and claims over history and landscape. Around 3700 cal BC the cairn was a circular monument, a place where bodies could be differentiated, and brought together, the dead and the different times their bodies captured, mixed and matched in the dark recesses of its central chamber. A few hundred years later, a tail was added to the monument, changing its shape, size and orientation. It was now c. 60 m in length. A ditch was dug around the front of the monument in c. 3500 cal BCE, potentially at the same time as the tail was added. In 2006, the cairn acted to differentiate a new archaeological time, as a group of archaeologists began a long-running excavation of the site. Towards the end of the third millennium cal BC the chambers at the front of the monument were sealed, the capacity of the tomb to be entered and engaged with closed off, and Beaker pottery inserted within the layers capping the site. In each of these moments the potential of the cairn itself drives its eruption, its emergence as a particular point in time. At other points Cladh Aindreis creates the potential for other patterns and sequences to emerge by providing the material resources for the habits of lichen, rainfall and gravity – the latter causing stones to tumble. The differential potential of the cairn remains here even when it is not incorporated into the habits and memories generated by people.

I have deliberately set out the events here in random order, so as to avoid the implication that they are either co-present, and thus primarily about memory, or that they form a predetermined sequence, one where history and habit are primary. The dates provided merely offer archaeological context for the reader. We can take these moments and put them together in order: construction of the cairn; architectural alterations; Beaker blocking; Bronze Age construction; Iron Age architecture; Viking extraction; archaeological excavation – this is a story of linear sequence, habit and history. Or we can look at how all of these elements are co-present and think of the cairn as the contraction of different periods together, as a virtual past actualised as memory in a particular present. Neither of these are primary, however. Instead in each moment it is the ability of the cairn to differentiate potentials, for burials, for architecture, for archaeology, that creates the possibility for memory and history to emerge. These differences, and their return, that is to say the third synthesis of time, are primary. It is not a simple linear story but a pattern of punctuated re-occurrence, of a monument that emerges and re-emerges in different ways, one that ‘happens again’ (cf. Stengers 2011).⁶ Like the latent power of a storm before the lightning strikes, the power of the cairn lurks as potential, as what Deleuze (2004, 145) calls a ‘dark precursor’ in the moments between its dynamic revelation of the flow of time.

There is more here though. At the heart of the third synthesis are specific kinds of events that represent radical ruptures that create new possibilities for the flow and flux of time, for difference to emerge and return in new ways. These are moments which create a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, they are a ‘caesura’ in Deleuze’s (2004, 112) terms, they render time asymmetrical (Williams 2011, 94). Two such moments present themselves in the archaeology of Swordle Bay. The first is the construction of the cairn itself. The long history of Swordle Bay since the Neolithic cannot be understood outside of the monument’s centrifugal force. Whilst the bay has considerable agricultural potential, flat terraces and building resources, other parts of the peninsula do too. It is the presence of the cairn that calls a specific history into existence again and again, that creates a before – Swordle with no cairn – and an after – Swordle with cairn – in the history of this place. The possibility for linear time to exist, depends upon there being differences to return, on the third synthesis of time, which allows for sequence, or habit, to emerge. One other clear caesura should be noted here, especially in the context of the earlier claim that our relationship with time has political consequences. In the 1850s Swordle Bay went through the process we gloss as the Highland Clearances (Casella et al. 2013; Harris 2016). Our work has shown that this would have been a well populated locale in the run up to this period, with as many as 90 people living here, compared to five or so today. Whilst our excavations suggest considerable differences between the three townships that were present in the study area, their abandonment – and deliberate destruction – represents another clear moment of radical change, a break in the potential for time to return as it had done previously. The history of Swordle is divided here again, once more into unequal parts, a world prior to and after the Clearances, a world in which different events become possible and new histories can be mapped. The act of Clearance effects not only the world after this point, but echoes back before it, changing the way in which histories of the 17th, 18th and 19th Centuries are written.

Conclusion

The potential power of difference, which returns in the third synthesis of time thus creates the possibility for time to be synthesised in different ways. The resources of memory depend upon this difference, just as habit emerges from the flows of memory. The three syntheses of time offer us a non-anthropocentric and non-linear process driven account of time. This non-anthropocentric approach is important for a number of reasons. First, it builds towards a posthumanist approach to the past. As detailed elsewhere (e.g. Crellin 2020; Cipolla 2021; Cipolla, Crellin, and Harris 2021; Crellin and Harris 2021; Crellin et al. 2021; Harris 2021) posthumanism is a vital move for archaeology not because it takes attention away from human beings, but because it opens up a much more radical vision of what it means to be human. This means that a non-anthropocentric approach to time creates room for emergent temporal concepts that have space for forms of humanity beyond those allowed for within our standard conceptions (cf. Rifkin 2017). Thus, even if we want to write about say, the human experience of time, the range of ways of doing this is greatly broadened by a non-anthropocentric account. This is a fundamentally affirmative move, therefore, creating the capacity for narratives that enable greater space for differences between past and present. Second, it allows us to clearly resolve the issues with which we started the article, as to whether archaeology is really about history or memory. Both versions of the discipline privilege particular ways of synthesising time. They draw on the resources that archaeological materials offer us and put them together in different ways. The benefit of the approach to time outlined here is that it allows for both approaches to be placed alongside one another within an account that celebrates a multiplicity of times.

Finally, it forces us to attend to both the passive process of emergence of time and our work as archaeologists in actively helping different temporalities to emerge. We need both chronology, and co-presence, as Lucas (2021, 19) rightly argues, but we also need a way of understanding how they relate. There can be no doubt that archaeologists need to recognise that time cannot always be easily divided up into different eras or sections, that it flows and swirls and seeks different levels of intensity; we need to attend to its duration as Bergson (1911) called it (cf. Knight and McFadyen 2020, 64). Yet we also have to recognise that it is precisely in quantifying and sequencing time that we are able to recognise what makes different qualities of ‘co-existing and overlapping durations’ come to the fore (Thomas 2020, 130). In Swordle Bay we can tack between this and a historical account of Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age. We can use high precision dating, or Bayesian analysis, to define this more accurately, without demanding this be the sole arbiter of the scale at which archaeologists should write.

The order of history need not, therefore, be the limit of what we can achieve as archaeologists when it comes to time. Process philosophy can help us think about the patterns and connections that go beyond the traditions of history, to speculative statements and explorations about alternative forms of relationships between events. Here Deleuze’s insistence on the primary nature of difference is key. This can allow us to go beyond exploring how a particular event happened, what its specific causes were, or how it could have been different. We can attend as well to the prior world of differences that give rise to events in the first place (cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 110). Such an approach also allows us to think about how time emerges in sets of relations that compose humans, non-humans, landscapes and more. This brings a freedom to explore the multiplicity of times that categorises any moment, and with that the freedom to foreground forms of time that deny overarching political domination (Rifkin 2017). Deleuze’s three syntheses give us tools to map the emergence of both qualitative and quantitative of modes of time, both memory and history, the time of duration and the time of science. As part of a broader turn to process philosophy in archaeology, they open up new ways to make time, and to make time matter.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Amy Bogaard, Chris Gosden and Lambros Malafouris for the initial suggestion I submit something to this edition of World Archaeology. The paper was immeasurably improved by the comments from two peer reviewers, and from Rachel Crellin, which have left me with much to ponder. My work in Ardnamurchan depends upon a whole host of people, but especially my brilliant co-directors Hannah Cobb and Phil Richardson. Parts of the thinking for this article were done while supported by a Philip Leverhulme Prize (PLP-2016-109) and thanks to the them for that.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust [PLP-2016-109].

Notes on contributors

Oliver J. T. Harris

Oliver J. T. Harris is Associate Professor of Archaeology at the University of Leicester, UK. His research interests focus on the Neolithic and Bronze Age of Britain and Europe and archaeological theory. He co-directs multi-period fieldwork on the west coast of Scotland and his books include Archaeological Theory in the New Millennium, Archaeological Theory in Dialogue and Assembling Past Worlds.

Notes

1. Gavin Lucas’ (2021) new book came out after this article was submitted, and so has not been incorporated into the text as fully as it deserves.

2. James Williams (2011) provides an excellent and accessible discussion of Deleuze’s philosophy of time.

3. Indeed, the three syntheses re-emerge, if in somewhat reworked form, in Deleuze’s first book with Guattari (Deleuze and Guattari 2013, 86–128).

4. Habit, or the first synthesis of time, thus depends on memory, the second synthesis (Deleuze 2004, 101).

5. See Canales (2015) on the tensions this caused in Bergson’s famous debate with Albert Einstein in Paris in 1922.

6. There are certainly similarities here between this and Olivier's (2020, 162) discussion of post-history, and we can certainly agree with Olivier (2019) that time is ‘filled with returns’. But where Olivier sees this as replacing the need for chronology and history, the argument in this article positions this as the fundamental source from which both memory and history emerge, and thus not as a dismissal of the latter. As Olivier (2019) makes clear, his approach sees archaeology as dealing with things and not past societies. This is not a dualism I see as helpful.