Symmetrical Archaeology: archaeological time - *** THIS FORUM IS ARCHIVED ***

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This is not Geoff Bailey's notion of archaeological time as "entropic time" rather it is archaeological time as percolating time.

Chris Witmore: I have an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper with a timeline representing Argolid history. The Neolithic period spans over 3 millennia from approximately 6850 to 3600 BC, the "Bronze" age fills in the years between 3600 amd 1000 BC, the early "Iron" age stretches up to the Archaic period at 700 BC, the Classical begins at 480 BC, etc. History sorts out the chaos of time through imposing linearity. The timeline is the modernists' image of time par excellence. The locus of the modern is always poised upon the end, beyond everything that has come before. As good moderns, archaeologists have been in service to this image of time from the inception of the discipline. After all how else could it be?

I now have a tightly crumpled ball of paper in my hand. No longer planar, the 8 1/2 by 11 inch sheet of paper on which the timeline is inscribed is now folded, twisted and turned into itself. Points in time once separated by great distances now touch one another. (Examples forthcoming...)This folded, nonlinear, temporal net is representative of archaeological time. Why must we work out the creases and folds? Why do we fill in the gaps?

I will offer an example through new media. I.D. magazine recently published an article on one of the XFR: eXperiments in the Future of Reading exibits, The Reading Wall. The medium of The Reading Wall was explicitly connected to particular ancient contexts of reading such as that of Egyptian heiraglyphic wall inscriptions. I also recently attended a presentation by Anne Balsamo in Stanford's Critical Studies in New Media workshop where she connected the Reading Wall more specifically to community reading contexts in the Athenian agora. The point is that a material context from the 5th Century B.C. folds into the design 21st century media. This is the nature of material connection.

I will continue to muse over this...

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