Human geography and archaeology

I Introduction

As both geographer and archaeologist, I am often surprised as to the lack of interaction and dialogue between archaeology and human geography – particularly when it comes to theoretical debate. Yet there are many commonalities shared by these disciplines. An ancestry rooted in Renaissance exploration, chorography and antiquarianism helped to establish their credentials as important field sciences. But it was advances in evolutionary theory and geology during the 19th century that laid the foundations for the development of archaeology and geography as academic disciplines. Following the ground-breaking work of Darwin (1859) and Lyell (1863), scholars had at their disposal the theories necessary to understand the origins of humanity and the processes of landscape formation.

As disciplines with common roots, archaeology and human geography have also converged in terms of theoretical stance. Since the middle of the 20th century, those working in human geography and archaeology have adopted broadly similar theoretical frameworks: from empiricist traditions in the 1960s, which focused on regionalism and territory – to the positivist and functionalist approaches of ‘new’ geography and ‘new’ or ‘processual’ archaeology, which emphasized objective, scientific perspectives, quantification and modelling. As Tilley (1994) notes, Clarke’s Models in Archaeology (1972) was modelled on Chorley and Haggett’s Models in Geography (1967), while Harvey’s Explanation in Geography (1969) found its archaeological counterpart in Explanation in Archaeology (Watson et al., 1971). Similarly, both disciplines have strong traditions in Marxism, structuralism and more recently poststructuralism. Yet despite these common interests, instances of cross-disciplinary conversation are still relatively rare. ¹ Archaeologists have traditionally turned to the field of anthropology for engagement in contemporary theoretical debate, while geographers with an interest in the past, in matter or materials – the bread-and-butter stuff of archaeology – have rarely looked to the field of archaeology for inspiration. Indeed, the bringing together of geography and archaeology under one unit of assessment within the UK’s 2013 Research Excellence Framework (REF) appears to have come as a surprise to many within both disciplines. This is particularly so for a number of colleagues in human geography, for whom archaeology, it seems, is often caricatured as a limited set of technical practices that has little to offer in terms of theoretical debate. Yet I would like to suggest that the time is now ripe for dialogue between the two. A renewed interest in matter, materiality and the immaterial within human geography means that it is, often unwittingly, straying into the realms of the archaeological. At the same time, the emerging field of ‘contemporary archaeology’ offers a direct link into matters of current geographical concern. Examples include: research at the margins of society (e.g. Buchli and Lucas, 2001b, an archaeological study of an abandoned council house; Kiddey and Schofield, 2011, on archaeology and homelessness); work in recent conflict zones, on military dictatorships and on the aftermath of civil war (e.g. Crossland, 2000, on Argentina’s ‘disappeared’, people who were abducted and murdered under military governments of the 1970–1980s; González-Ruibal, 2007, 2011, 2012, on archaeologies of the Spanish civil war; González-Ruibal et al., 2011, on colonial warfare in Ethiopia; Moshenska, 2008a, 2008b, 2009, 2010a, 2010b, 2010c, on archaeologies of the Second World War); studies of post-industrial landscapes (e.g. Penrose, 2010, on the former car industry in Cowley, Oxford; an edited volume on Reanimating Industrial Spaces – Orange, 2013); research on sport and pastimes (e.g. the 2012 special edition of World Archaeology, especially Penrose, 2012, on the London 1948 austerity Olympics, and Peterson and Robinson, 2012, on the afterlife of a professional football stadium); and work on spheres of the domestic (e.g. Ulin, 2009).

A review such as this must necessarily be selective and limited in its scope. While human geography is categorized into subdisciplines dictated largely by virtue of their subject-matter, archaeology is organized into specialisms according to time period, from prehistory to contemporary. Although at times I will take a broader tack, my main focus will be on contemporary archaeology and cultural geography. Contemporary archaeology is significant in this context for its shared methodology with human geography and its temporal proximity to matters of geographical concern. At the same time, cultural geography is notable for its recent engagement in matters archaeological, in ‘heritage’, materiality and landscape, including Crang and Tolia-Kelly (2010), DeSilvey (2006, 2007), DeSilvey and Edensor (2013), Edensor (2005a, 2005b, 2005c), Harvey and Riley (2005a, 2005b), Hill (2013a), Nesbitt and Tolia-Kelly (2009), Riley and Harvey (2005), Tolia-Kelly (2011) and Witcher et al. (2010). Within these subfields, it could be argued that there is the start of a dialogue already taking shape. There is also an interesting, albeit largely unrecognized, common ground in theoretical approach associated with poststructuralist thought, particularly around the notion of relational ontologies. It is for this very reason that I foreground non-representational theory, which without doubt has had far-reaching implications for human geography, and later go on to highlight research in the field of ‘symmetrical archaeology’, even though it has had a fairly limited impact on the archaeological discipline as a whole.

In terms of subject, this review takes as its focus matter and time. Two of archaeology’s most enduring areas of interest, matter and time, have recently received much greater attention within human geography. Matter, materiality and material culture are central to the very premise of archaeology as the study of human artifacts. At the same time, geography has in recent years experienced something of a ‘materialist turn’ (Anderson and Wylie, 2009; Kirsch, 2013; Whatmore, 2006), with a proliferation of new research on matter, materiality and the immaterial – from consumption and waste to emotion and affect.

Like matter and materiality, time remains central to archaeological endeavour, particularly the dating of artifacts. Nevertheless, time has often been treated uncritically, as a given. Despite a growing interest in memory within both archaeology and cultural geography, time itself has received much less attention. However, archaeologists are beginning to explore a broader conception of time, with contemporary archaeologists in particular starting to consider the role of the past in the present. I wish to argue that a new space for collaboration is opened up by this shift in emphasis: on the nature of time and our temporality, how time is implicated in events and happenings, and the manner by which it operates in unexpected ways, often to evoke and unsettle.

If the truth be told, there are many areas of shared interest between archaeology and human geography. Landscape, for instance, is a topic and term that has persisted within both disciplines: from Sauer’s ‘The morphology of landscape’ (1925) to Wylie’s Landscape (2007b), from W.G. Hoskins’ The Making of the English Landscape (1955) to Matthew Johnson’s Ideas of Landscape (2007). While Wylie starts to make some of these connections in his 2007 volume, with a chapter focusing on phenomenology and landscape, a great deal more could be brought to the fore. Equally, I could have explored issues of feminism, gender and sexuality (for example, see Alberti, 2001, 2002; Gilchrist, 1999, 2013; Joyce, 1996, 1999, 2001a, 2001b, 2002, 2003a, 2003b; Marshall, 2008; Meskell, 1999; see also Bolger, 2013). These are, however, topics for other essays.

I begin by outlining the development of contemporary archaeology, which seeks to explore many matters of concern shared by human geographers, often utilizing techniques more familiar to human geography than archaeology. In the following sections, I go on to trace the influence of poststructuralism, and what might be described as non-representational thinking within the field of archaeology. Starting from the once comfortable notion of ‘material culture’ and the definitive nature of dating techniques, I examine the changing role of matter and time within the field of archaeology. In doing so, I reflect on the opportunities for dialogue that are opened up, as archaeologists rethink a series of categorizations and approaches that have for many years remained fundamental to archaeological endeavour. As I mean to demonstrate, opportunities for conversation and collaboration abound. I conclude by exploring the ‘archaeological imagination’, and what geographers might gain from broader engagements with archaeologists, and with archaeological thought and practice.

II Contemporary archaeology

Archaeology is a discipline that has traditionally been concerned with a distant and ancient past. Historical periods, such as Medieval Europe or Colonial America, were originally the preserve of historians, and well beyond the purview of archaeology. However, since the 1960s there has been a growing interest in ‘historical archaeology’, as the utility of archaeological methods and modes of thought has been demonstrated to provide a rich and complementary source of evidence about the historical past (for a now classic example, see Deetz, 1977). But it is only in the last few decades that this expanding chronological range has started to include archaeologies of the ‘contemporary’ past. One of the most important and successful of the early contemporary studies was William Rathje’s ‘garbage project’, which began in 1973. In Modern Material Culture: The Archaeology of Us, a collection edited by Gould and Schiffer (1981), Rathje declared that archaeology had been redefined as ‘a focus on the interaction between material culture and human behaviour, regardless of time or space’ (Rathje, 1981: 52). However, this considerably broader conceptualization of archaeology has been relatively slow to take hold. Archaeologies of the Contemporary Past, edited by Buchli and Lucas (2001a), was arguably the first real attempt at pulling together a volume of work in contemporary archaeology – for Gould and Schiffer’s 1981 volume focused more on contemporary archaeology as a tool (as ethnoarchaeology, for example) than as an end in itself. Indeed, it was not until 2003 that Dan Hicks was able to proclaim archaeology’s ‘loss of antiquity’ (Hicks, 2003). That same year marked the inaugural ‘Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory’ or ‘CHAT’ conference, which brings together on an annual basis a growing number of those working on archaeologies of the contemporary past. Since then there has been a proliferation of work in the area (see, for example, recent edited collections by Holtorf and Piccini (2009a), Graves-Brown et al. (2013), a dedicated volume from Schofield and Harrison (2010), and countless journal articles), while 2013 marked the launch of the first journal dedicated to contemporary archaeology. ²

Yet there is a sense in which archaeology is always-already contemporary, for ‘although archaeologists can do work about other periods they cannot work in other periods’ (Holtorf and Piccini, 2009b: 14, original emphasis). At the same time, it has been argued that the existence of archaeology is itself a reflection of the contemporary world and our often nostalgic preoccupation with the past (see, for example, Holtorf, 2005; Thomas, 2004). Paradoxically, one could suggest that the past has never been as important as it is today. The past is ubiquitous, pervasive, in museums and monuments, castles and country houses, popular films and fiction, period drama, documentaries and literature, heritage trusts and preservation movements, re-enactment societies, and even in hotels and theme parks (see, for example, Holtorf, 2005, 2007).

Contemporary archaeology is not just about the recent past, but about how we engage with the past from the perspective of the present. As Hodder (2001: 189–190) suggests, ‘when archaeology is used to excavate the present we see that the discipline need not be confined to the past but that it can be defined as a particular mode of inquiry into the present’. This mode of inquiry is specified, in part, by those methodological approaches and field techniques that define the discipline itself, but it is also a mode of thought, a way of engaging with the past from the unique perspective of the present – what might be described as the ‘archaeological imagination’ (Shanks, 2012). Yet, as contemporary archaeology rubs up against and jostles with a whole series of other disciplines, it is somewhat inevitable that archaeologists should ask what is distinctive about contemporary archaeology that sets it apart from historical or cultural geography, for instance. As Holtorf and Piccini (2009b: 11) suggest, ‘materiality and material evidence usually are the starting point and focus of archaeological research, and the same applies to archaeologies of the contemporary period’, yet matter and materiality are of interest to anthropology, sociology and human geography. As a methodological approach, it could be argued that archaeology remains distinct in its processes of artifact retrieval and cataloguing, in excavation, surveying and analysis, yet contemporary archaeology less frequently engages in such practices, utilizing a whole range of sources and techniques familiar to geography, history and anthropology – from archival records to ethnography. For example, Mcatackney’s (2007) work on the highly contentious Long Kesh/Maze Prison site in Northern Ireland used oral history and documentary evidence to create a narrative about the site’s many pasts, presents and possible futures.

By its very nature then, contemporary archaeology pushes at the boundaries of other disciplines. But this is no bad thing, for in doing so it opens up a new space for dialogue on matter, material and the immaterial, the past, and the role of the past in the present, and future. As such, I would like to suggest that the dawning of contemporary archaeology provides an opportune moment to explore the potential afforded by theoretical and methodological advances in archaeology’s sister disciplines – including what is perhaps human geography’s most exciting and controversial development in recent decades: non-representational theory.

III Material culture, matter and the immaterial

Although archaeology deals with artifacts – with things, materials and matter – it was traditionally the people behind these objects – their ideas and belief systems – that were the focus of archaeological endeavour. Early evolutionist and ‘culture-historical’ approaches drew heavily on private and museum collections amassed by explorers or those in military service overseas to make claims about the diffusion of ideas. For instance, the famous Victorian archaeologist General Pitt Rivers, who gave his name to Oxford’s treasure of ethnographic curios, the Pitt Rivers Museum, believed that the ideas of prehistoric people were conveyed in their material culture. He writes, for example, of ‘human ideas, as represented by the various products of human industry’ (Pitt Rivers, 1906: 18) and ‘ideas embodied in material forms’ (p. 13). Similarly, the Australian-born archaeologist Gordon Childe, widely regarded as one of the most important archaeologists and prehistorians of his generation, later argued that culture finds its expression in material remains, as it is maintained and transmitted through actions that create material culture (Childe, 1951). In other words, artifacts were ultimately representative of something else – be it ideas, thoughts or ‘culture’ – while behaviour, practices and objects were derived from ideas (Lucas, 2001: 171). During the 1960s, the American archaeologist Lewis Binford, considered among the most influential archaeologists of the later 20th century, developed a critique of this ‘culture-historical’ approach to archaeology, which focused on behaviour rather than typology (Binford, 1962; see also Hicks, 2010: 39–40). Binford argued that material culture was evidence of human behaviour, operating from the practical to the social, to the ideational. This ‘New’ or ‘Processual’ approach to archaeology paid little attention to the realm of ideas per se, but adopted a functional interpretation of material culture, which analysed the archaeological record for behavioural traces, and ‘extinct’ cultural systems. Behaviour was no longer an expression of beliefs or ideas; rather, it was indicative of the activities required to maintain daily life and social systems. In particular, the variability in forms of material culture was no longer interpreted in terms of ideas, but was instead understood in behavioural terms as expressing different activities (Lucas, 2001: 172).

Failure of the functional interpretation of material culture to address the mental representations of culture later generated a ‘post-processual’ reaction. Led by the British-born archaeologist Ian Hodder, pioneer of post-processual theory, the post-processual stance sought to reassert the significance of idealism (see, for example, Hodder, 1985). For Binford, beliefs were part of a subsystem of material culture, but for Hodder ideas and beliefs are integral to behaviour and material culture. In other words, the beliefs surrounding action – such as preparing food, making pots or growing crops – affect how that action is performed and its outcomes. However, Hodder does not view material culture or behaviour as expressive or derivative of beliefs, but each as constitutive of the other. While new or processual archaeology focused upon behaviour at the macro-level, post-processualism emphasized the active nature of individuals and agency.

Despite these considerable shifts in emphasis during the 1980s and 1990s towards a more relational stance, Hicks (2010: 27) suggests that there are three lingering problems with the concept of ‘material culture’, which remains central to archaeological thought and practice. First, there is the somewhat essentialist concept of ‘culture’, which has been undermined by a range of postcolonial and feminist critiques (see, for example, Conkey and Spector, 1984; Gero and Conkey, 1991; Gosden, 2001). Second, there is the utility of a separate category of the ‘material’, which has been called into question, particularly with regard to the possibility, or indeed desirability, of defining some form of culture that is not materially enacted (see, for example, Olsen, 2006, 2007). Finally, there has been a persistent tendency to reduce interpretation or explanation to the ‘human’ or the ‘non-human’ elements of this unhyphenated term, ‘material culture’ (Miller, 2007: 24); as Thomas suggests, ‘archaeology … has long been bedevilled by this opposition between the mental and the material’ (Thomas, 1996: 11). Indeed, Lucas (2001) suggests that there is still a sense that ‘material culture’ is supplemental to ‘culture’, that the subject is the origin of meaning and agency, ‘the absent presence in the archaeological record’ (p. 176).

As such, archaeology, once ‘the discipline of things par excellence’ (Olsen, 2003: 89; see also Olsen et al., 2012) has witnessed in the last decade or so something of a rematerialization, a return to things – a reaction to what has been described as an ‘increasing discomfort … with the dominant anti-material conception of culture and society … but also with the way archaeology and the “new” material-culture studies (including landscape studies) … have moved away from thing’s materiality’ (Olsen, 2003: 87–88). Such a rematerialization thus stands in opposition to those ‘archaeological studies from the mid-1990s onwards [that] seem to be founded more on people’s practical being-in-the-world’ (Olsen, 2003: 91). From the obdurate to the ephemeral, from material fetish to material culture, from ‘entanglement’ to ‘enactment’, there are many materialities at play (see, for example, edited volumes by Buchli, 2002; Graves-Brown, 2000; Hicks and Beaudry, 2010; Knappett and Malafouris, 2008; Tilley et al., 2006; Meskell, 2008; see also Gosden, 2005; Gosden and Knowles, 2001; Gosden and Marshall, 1999; Hodder, 2011; Knappett, 2005; Olsen, 2010; Tilley, 1999, 2007).

Of course, this rematerializing trend has not been confined to archaeology. Since Jackson’s (2000) call to rematerialize social and cultural geography, a growing number of geographers have sought to bring the material back into play. As Anderson and Wylie (2009) note, calls to rematerialize human geography have of late become widespread – so much so that it is now possible to speak of a ‘materialist turn’ (see also Kirsch, 2013; Whatmore, 2006). Materialist literature has focused on, for example, urban geographies (e.g. Latham and McCormack, 2004; Lees, 2002); science, technology and nature (e.g. Anderson et al., 2007; Bingham and Hinchliffe, 2008; Hitchings, 2003; Whatmore, 1997, 1999, 2002, 2006); geographies of consumption and waste (e.g. Gregson et al., 2010, on ship-breaking, recycling and the production of ‘chocky-chocky’ furniture in Bangladesh); encounters with objects and environments (e.g. DeSilvey, 2006, 2007, on a homestead in Montana; Edensor, 2005a, 2005b, on industrial ruins; Hill, 2007, on the museum); emotion and affect (e.g. McCormack, 2003; Wylie, 2005, 2006). However, as Latham and McCormack (2004: 702) suggest, ‘the distinction between the ‘material’ and the ‘immaterial’ is not so straightforward, [and] any effort to articulate a “rematerialized” geography [or indeed archaeology], will of necessity not be realized until the complexities of this relation are addressed’. A growing number of cultural geographers have thus argued for a notion of the material that incorporates the immaterial, not as something defined in opposition to the material but as that which ‘gives it an expressive life and liveliness independent of the human subject’ (Latham and McCormack, 2004: 703); for example, see Anderson and Wylie (2009); Kearns (2003); Latham and McCormack (2004); McCormack (2010). As Latham and McCormack (2004: 718) argue, ‘we cannot simply take the “material” and add “culture” (or the “symbolic” or whatever) and arrive at a neat balance between the two’. ‘It is meaningless to interrogate the relation of the human to the non-human if the non-human is only a construct of human culture’ (Massumi, 2002: 39). Instead, ‘non-representational approaches locate the making of meaning and signification in the “manifold of actions and interactions” rather than in a supplementary dimension such as … discourse, ideology or symbolic order’ (Anderson and Harrison, 2010: 2).

The idea that the world is ontologically flat is now old news to many within the archaeological discipline, for as suggested above archaeologists have been grappling with the idealist-materialist debate for some time. As such, threads of what might be described as non-representational thought can be discerned – utilizing phenomenological philosophy within prehistory (see Thomas, 1996; Tilley, 1994, 2004) and actor-network theory (ANT) within symmetrical archaeology, for instance (see González-Ruibal, 2006, 2008; Hicks, 2005; Olsen, 2007, 2010; Olsen et al., 2012; Shanks, 2007; Webmoor, 2007; Webmoor and Witmore, 2005, 2008; Witmore, 2006, 2007), as well as Alberti and Marshall’s (2009) work drawing in particular on the writing of Barad (2003, 2007). However, these approaches are not without their problems.

What might be described as the ‘phenomenological turn’ in archaeology developed in the 1990s following the publication of Chris Tilley’s A Phenomenology of Landscape (1994) and Julian Thomas’ Time, Culture and Identity (1996). Deployed within archaeology in two ways – as a source of critique on Cartesian dualisms, and as a hermeneutic tool in the interpretation of material remains – phenomenological philosophy had its most significant impact in British prehistory. In particular, Tilley’s phenomenological approach points towards an embodied methodology and means of interpretation for landscapes of the past. In A Phenomenology of Landscape, Tilley roams the landscape as an empirical exercise designed to explore the relationships between sites of Mesolithic habitation and the location of Neolithic monuments. He suggests that a ‘phenomenological approach’ allows archaeologists to access past experiences, and even the symbolic meanings ascribed to materials, monuments and places in the past. Yet it is widely accepted that the experiences and thoughts of past peoples will never be accessible in the here and now. It is for this very reason that A Phenomenology of Landscape, and the many subsequent studies it inspired (e.g. Cummings, 2002a, 2002b; Cummings and Whittle, 2003) have attracted sustained criticism (see Brück, 2005). At the same time, there is a sense in which Tilley’s work perpetuates an essentialist understanding of materiality and landscape.

Taking a somewhat different tack, ‘symmetrical archaeology’ has developed primarily out of Michael Shanks’s ‘Metamedia’ studio and laboratory at Stanford. Borrowing heavily from ANT, symmetrical archaeologists have more recently drawn on the work of an eclectic range of writers, from Alfred North Whitehead to Graham Harman. Based on the premise that human and non-human entities should not be treated as ontologically discrete, symmetrical archaeology seeks to move beyond the ‘asymmetric dualisms’ that characterize modern western thought, those of ‘thought and action, ideas and materials, past and present’ (Witmore, 2007: 546). By offering a definition of ‘symmetrical archaeology’, Witmore describes ‘a new “ecology” packed with things, mixed with humans and companion species (Haraway, 2003) … which prioritizes the multi-temporal and multi-sensual qualities … of the world’ (p. 547). For those committed to symmetrical archaeology, the ‘return to things’ is also a return to questions of ontology (Olsen et al., 2012). Archaeology is less the practice of a transcendent and detached observer, but becomes the activity of one who is immanent and immersed in the world (Olsen et al., 2012). At the same time, it is recognized that things cannot be reduced to relations or to their intrinsic qualities (Webmoor, 2012). Instead, our world and the things within it exceed our ability to come to terms with them: ‘a fortress, a ruined aqueduct, a hearth or a perfume jar will always hold something in reserve, something that will not be brought forward in a given set of relations (Harman, 2005; Olsen, 2010)’ (Olsen et al., 2012: 13). Yet, despite the rhetoric, the focus in this work is almost exclusively on matter and the material – the immaterial and its relation to the material is rarely explored, either theoretically or empirically.

While prehistorians probe the limits of phenomenology, symmetrical archaeologists turn to Harman’s ‘object-oriented ontology’ (see Harman, 2002, 2005, 2010) and Deleuze remains the philosopher of choice for cultural geographers, these communities of scholars are reading much of the same literature – from Heidegger to Merleau-Ponty, Bennett (2001, 2010) to Latour (1993, 1999, 2005), Stengers (2011), Whitehead (1970 [1925], 1978 [1929], 2006 [1920]) and Deleuze and Guattari (2004 [1988]) – to tackle the same mind-matter divide, albeit from somewhat different standpoints. There is much that archaeologists, especially contemporary archaeologists, could take from non-representational thought. The always already affective nature of matter and the material opens up opportunities to think through the role of past in the present from an entirely novel perspective, to embrace the immaterial as part of the material, and to reanimate the past. At the same time, I would suggest that archaeology’s longstanding fascination with the traces of human activity, from ritual sites to the humble beer can, offers rich ground for cultural and historical geographers interested in affect.

IV Time

Time is central to archaeology. ³ Yet it is often understood as a self-evident, taken-for-granted, established and measurable concern. Ask one of your archaeological colleagues about time, and she will almost certainly tell you about chronology and dating. In other words, the conception of time within archaeology has traditionally been limited. This is especially the case when one considers its influence on archaeological interpretation and the nature of ‘cultural change’. Chronology, or the science of computing dates, is central to archaeology. It tends to define one’s specialism as an archaeologist – from the palaeolithic to the Neolithic, Bronze Age to Iron Age, medieval to post-medieval, historical to contemporary – and archaeologists rarely stray beyond one or two such periods. At the same time, dating is crucial to the archaeological record, from absolute dating (i.e. based upon calendar years using radiocarbon dating, dendrochronology or historical documents) to relative dating (i.e. defined by stratigraphy or typology). However, whether absolute or relative, chronology is theoretically problematic, for it presents time as a linear, uniform model. By the same token, traditional chronological systems carried with them a series of evolutionary implications underlying theories of cultural change. In Ancient Society (1877), for example, US anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan grouped societies into three basic stages: savagery, barbarism and civilization, presenting a universal or totalizing view of history. Despite its racial and colonial undertones, cultural evolution remains an important concept within archaeology.

Nevertheless, this linear view of change has been challenged. For example, during the 1980s–1990s a number of scholars borrowed from Annales school French historical theory to demonstrate different rates of change and the influence of different temporalities (see, for example, Hodder, 1987; Knapp, 1992). Particularly influential were the writings of Braudel (1972, 1980). The Annales school was critical of traditional approaches to history as a sequence of events, problematizing the notion of history as both continuity and change. Braudel developed three timescales over which history unfolded: the long term or longue durée referred to slow-moving processes occurring over long periods, such as environmental change; the medium term covered social or structural history, such as agrarianism; and the short term was linked to particular events or individuals, such as the Battle of Trafalgar. Under Braudel’s schema, these processes and events are all interlinked, tangled together to give a richer and more complex notion of history and historical change.

Later approaches have developed from advancements in the natural sciences, from chaos theory and the ideas of Prigogine (see Prigogine and Stengers, 1984). Such models of social transformation are based upon social structures as complex systems, with associated instabilities and thresholds. Manuel De Landa’s A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997) provides a useful and interesting non-archaeological example of such work, applying dynamical systems theory to evolutionary history. Examples from archaeology include Beekman and Baden (2005), Bintliff (1997), McGlade (1999) and Van der Leeuw and McGlade (1997).

Still, discussion of the concept of time itself within archaeology has been limited. The American neo-Marxist archaeologist Mark Leone was one of the first archaeologists to critically examine archaeological approaches to time (see Leone, 1978). Leone argued that archaeologists rarely explored how past societies viewed time, or how our modern conceptions of time affect our interpretations of the past (see also Bailey, 1981, 1983). In 1987, Cambridge archaeologists Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley presented a more radical, post-processual perspective on time, which associates traditional archaeological concepts of time (chronology) with modern, capitalist world-views. In the following decade a series of critiques emerged, challenging some of the most basic assumptions about the archaeological record. For example, in Time, Culture and Identity (1996), the British archaeologist and Neolithic expert Julian Thomas draws upon the work of Martin Heidegger (e.g. Heidegger, 2010 [1927]) to consider how time is used and perceived within archaeology, and how time influences the construction of identities – both individual and material. Exploring Dasein’s temporality, Thomas outlines an ‘existential time’ in contrast to a ‘pragmatic’ or measured time, in which Dasein is fundamentally temporal and must accept a heritage of possibilities drawn from Dasein’s own past that contribute to a sense of self-identity. As such, archaeological remains are, for Thomas, evidence of past Being; they are part of our Being-in-the-world.

Within contemporary archaeology it is recognized that the past is always already present. This way of thinking about the past is common to symmetrical archaeology, which seeks in particular to overcome the duality of past and present. Following Serres (1995), and Serres with Latour (1995), time within symmetrical archaeology is better understood as ‘fluid’ turbulent and chaotic (Witmore, 2006, 2007; see also González-Ruibal, 2006; Olsen et al., 2012). In other words, time both passes and does not pass, and in symmetrical archaeology pasts are regarded as not exclusively past. Instead, symmetrical archaeology seeks to uncover pleats and folds in the fabric of time. For example, Witmore (2007: 556–557) discusses London’s Oxford Street as a Roman Road, and Webmoor (2007: 573–575) traces the associations formed through the performance of an ‘Aztec bailador’ or dancer at the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Teotihuacan, Mexico. Seeking to place writing on time in symmetrical archaeology within a wider theoretical context, Olsen (2010) presents an analysis of time that draws together Bergson’s duration with writing on memory – from Proust to Benjamin – to argue that the material world is central to memory, and that memory itself is material. Yet, in seeking to overcome the separation of past and present via (human) memory, there is a sense in which Olsen reinstates the other great dualism that symmetrical archaeology seeks to overcome: between human and thing, the mental and the material.

It is interesting to note, within both archaeology and human geography (particularly cultural geography), that writing on memory is much more common than writing on time. Indeed, there seems to have been a growing interest in memory. While some accounts offer personal recollections (see, for example, Jones, 2005; Pearson, 2006), others have focused on re-presenting the memories of others (see, for example, Hill, 2013a; Lorimer, 2003, 2006; Wylie, 2009). A number of scholars have also sought to explore the more material aspects of memory (see, for example, DeSilvey, 2006, 2007; Edensor, 2005b, 2005c; Till, 2005, 2012; Tolia-Kelly, 2004). See also the edited volume Geography and Memory (Jones and Garde-Hansen, 2012). And for an overview of writing on memory within archaeology, see Holtorf and Williams (2006); see also, for example, Jones, 2007; Moshenska, 2010b. Indeed, it would seem that there are a great many opportunities for conversation and collaboration between archaeologists and geographers on the topic of memory. However, while memory occupies centre stage, both disciplines have, in recent years, tended to shy away from time. For example, Rose (2010) laments human geography’s lack of engagement with the temporality of Deleuzian ontology, suggesting that geographical encounters with Deleuze have tended to focus almost exclusively upon the spatial implications of his work (but see Hill, 2013b). Yet I would argue that both theoretical and practical conceptions of time remain peripheral to research within human geography more broadly. Of course, it is difficult to think of time and geography without recourse to Hägerstand’s time-geography. As human geography’s two main preoccupations, it is not surprising that space and time have often been thought together in ‘space-time’, or ‘space and time’. Space-time is best exemplified in the diagrams, statistics and geometries of quantitative time geography, and can be associated with spatial theorists such as Torsten Hägerstand, Walter Christaller and Peter Haggett. In tracing the history of space-time geography, Merriman (2012) argues that the influence of these thinkers can be seen in the later work of scholars such as Nigel Thrift and Doreen Massey, who continue to explore processes of change and the manner in which events unfold. During the 1960s and 1970s, quantitative geographers started to include dimensions of time within their spatial models. As the state-of-the-art developed, modellers started to appreciate the role of social cultural and experiential influences in space-time geography. For example, Hägerstand (1970, 1973) gradually moved away from early stochastic models of diffusion processes in space and time to consider the role of people in spatiotemporal situations, events and environments, highlighting the importance of ‘behavioural spaces’ for urban research and planning (Merriman, 2012). Hägerstand’s work was to prove influential to the fields of behavioural and later humanistic geography, particularly the writings of Buttimer and Seamon (e.g. Buttimer, 1976; Buttimer and Seamon, 1980; Seamon, 1979). Drawing on phenomenological philosophy, Buttimer and Seamon developed an experiential and embodied approach to space and time, which incorporated social, cultural and environmental influences on both individual and collective geographies. Time geography was later developed by a new generation of geographers, in the work of Derek Gregory, Allan Pred and Nigel Thrift (e.g. Gregory, 1984; Pred, 1981; Thrift, 1977a, 1977b, 1983), which laid the foundations for poststructuralist and non-representational thinking on time, place and practice in human geography (Thrift, 1996; see also Merriman, 2012). In parallel, theories of space-time have been developed within neo-Marxist geography. For example, David Harvey integrates the relational approaches of Leibniz and Whitehead with his historical-geographical materialism to rethink geographies of social justice (see Harvey, 1996; Merriman, 2012). Similarly, Massey brings together the spatial with the political, as well as the temporal (see Massey, 1992, 2005).

Nevertheless, as might be expected, time has held a much less prominent role in human geography than space, and, as suggested above, this has especially been the case in recent years. Merriman (2012) argues for a human geography without ‘space’ or ‘time’, suggesting that space and time are ‘still awarded special status, even [though they have been] rethought as dynamic, open, in process and becoming’ (p. 19). While I am inclined to agree that there is an underlying Cartesianism in modern western thinking that leads us to cling to categories such as space and time, there is no denying that we humans are temporal creatures. We look back upon our achievements and our failures, the good times and the bad, and we look forward to our future, making plans for that which is yet to come. Contrary to Merriman (2012), I would argue that human geographers should pay greater attention to time and the complex temporalities of our world. Indeed, I would suggest that the influence of poststructuralist and non-representational thinking offers a real opportunity to reengage in theoretical debate about geographical approaches to time. Whether adopting an approach to time informed by the temporality of Deleuzian ontology, or exploring other poststructuralist or non-representational thinking, there are clear opportunities for discussion between archaeologists and cultural geographers, and human geographers more broadly: on the nature of time and our temporality, how time is implicated in events and happenings, and the manner by which it operates in unexpected ways, often to evoke and unsettle. As outlined above, contemporary and symmetrical archaeologists are already starting to think through some of these issues. The time is ripe for dialogue.

V Absence-presence

Finally, I wish to bring these approaches to matter and time together, to think about absence and presence. As contemporary archaeology becomes more mainstream, the gap between past and present is ‘contested and collapsed’ (Buchli and Lucas, 2001c: 9). In traditional archaeology there has long been a comfortable separation between archaeologists and their objects of study, but for contemporary archaeologists working with the remains of the present – from ‘garbology’ to forensic archaeology – this alterity is lost. Instead, it is argued that traditional archaeological methods go some way towards reinstating this otherness, rendering the familiar unfamiliar. The archaeological method sanitizes what might be described as difficult objects, making them easier to deal with, less distressing. From the corporeal decay of fleshy remains to the rotting excess of modern consumer society, the meticulous recording and cataloguing of ‘artifacts’ renders the ‘abject’ (Kristeva, 1997) other. ‘The excremental culture of archaeology, which may wish to avoid the nausea of loss,’ writes Michael Shanks, ‘finds gratification in a purifying perhaps neurotic desire … to order’, which is ‘allied with the marginalization of feeling and of heterogeneity’ (Shanks, 1992: 75).

At the same time, however, there is a sense in which the archaeological method also distances us to such an extent that the familiar becomes the uncanny or unheimlich. The power of the uncanny is arrived at not by an encounter with anything strikingly odd or unknown; rather, it is held within something that has a familiarity about it. Often related to the notion of ‘haunting’, the unheimlich unsettles. Buchli and Lucas (2001c: 12) argue that the idea of haunting is ‘very close to the archaeological imagination: the disappeared, the past and how such spectres enthral us, at once horrifying and comforting’. Yet it is interesting to note that archaeological writing on haunting, ghosts, phantasms and the spectral has been limited. Conversely, a growing interest in spectrality has recently emerged within human geography, as scholars begin to rethink the manner in which different spaces, events and practices disrupt our ideas of presence and absence (e.g. Hill, 2013a; McCormack, 2010; Till, 2005; Wylie, 2007a). The concept of the spectral has value, it is argued, because it suggests that our experience of the world is haunted by a space-time in which past and future co-exist, and interact, in uncertain and unpredictable ways. Understood in these terms, the spectral is not a ghostly spirit hovering over a concrete world of real objects and living bodies. Instead, the spectral is integral to our experience of the world; it is the enduring and unsettling capacity of place to haunt (McCormack, 2010: 642).

Importantly, the spectral unsettles any linear understanding of time, disturbing our sense of place and self through the arrival of haunting memories. According to Derrida (1994: 70), as long as we perceive time as ‘a historical temporality made up of the successive linking of presents identical to themselves and contemporary with themselves’, we are unable to grasp the true nature of history and memory. Spectrality leads us ‘to doubt [the] reassuring order of presents and, especially, the border between the present … and everything that can be opposed to it: absence, non-presence, non-effectivity, inactuality, virtuality’ (p. 39). It is interesting to note that Derrida’s spectrality has a strong ethical dimension. ‘If I am getting ready to speak at length about ghosts, inheritance, and generations, generations of ghosts, which is to say about certain others who are not present, nor presently living, either to us, in us, or outside us’, writes Derrida, ‘it is in the name of justice’ (p. xix, original emphasis). Derrida’s concept of justice is intergenerational; it is a justice for those no longer, or not yet, ‘present’. As such, the spectral would not only complement existing approaches to absence and presence for archaeologists, but attune to the ethical dimensions and dilemmas associated with their work. Indeed, in a collaborative piece of work between a philosopher and a geographer, Jonker and Till (2009) examine controversies surrounding excavations at Prestwich Place, Cape Town, an informal burial ground for colonial underclasses that was unearthed when construction began for an upscale apartment and office complex. In doing so, they explore how spectral traces at places marked by acts of violence and injustice allow residents to come into contact with past and future inhabitants of the postcolonial city. Rather than offering a biography of the site, they develop the concept of ‘haunted archaeologies’ to represent terrains that remain invisible to Cartesian mappings. This work has great resonance with Crossland (2000) on the ‘disappeared’ in Argentina and González-Ruibal (2007) on archaeologies of the Spanish civil war, examples around which public opinion is bitterly divided between remembering and forgetting. An engagement with ghosts from the past, and active recognition of the need for intergenerational justice, is perhaps one way to deal with such sites.

Understood as the impossibility of the fullness of presence, spectrality complicates and unsettles our understanding of the world as taken-for-granted, obdurate and concrete. As such, there are opportunities to rethink all manner of sites and spaces where archaeologists and geographers have a shared interest; from a haunting sense of loss associated with post-industrial areas to the hope and faith engendered in sites of spirituality, from the church to the stone circle.

VI Concluding remarks: the archaeological imagination

Throughout this essay I have been advocating greater cross-disciplinary collaboration. However, I do not wish to do so uncritically. Disciplinary boundaries are important. They are constantly drawn and redrawn, and continue to be understood differently. Geography and archaeology are both ‘colonizing’ disciplines. As such, there is a geography of almost everything, in the same way that there is, increasingly, an archaeology of almost anything. But a breadth of research interests, theoretical approaches and methodologies is both something to be celebrated and a cause for concern. A number of articles have in recent years sought to debate the ‘fragmentation’ or ‘unity’ of geography as a discipline, particularly in the context of the growing schism between human and physical geography (see Johnston, 2003; Massey, 1999; Thrift, 2002). Counter to cries of fragmentation, it is often argued that while geography comprises a broad spectrum of research topics a sense of unity is provided by an overarching theme: ‘environment’, ‘space’ or ‘place’. However, there is no denying that for scholars who maintain links with other disciplines those links are sometimes just as strong, if not stronger, than any links they forge within geography itself. Many geographers are part of several, often overlapping communities, attending conferences and meetings, and contributing to literatures, beyond geography. But geography does not differ from other disciplines in this regard, and, in terms of research and intellectual development, I would argue that engagement with such communities can generate stimulating new ideas.

In recent years there has been little cross-fertilization in theoretical debate between cultural geography and contemporary archaeology, and geography and archaeology more broadly, yet, as I have sought to demonstrate, genuine opportunities for conversation and creativity are to be found. A manifesto for joint research might include:

The always-already affective nature of materials and matter, and the manner by which they enliven the past.

Yet, beyond the realms of theoretical advancement, archaeological ways of doing offer an exciting opportunity to reflect upon our experiences and encounters in the world. It might be argued that geographers have a distinct spatial perspective and ‘geographical sensibility’ towards the world. I would like to suggest that this can be complemented by what has been described as an ‘archaeological sensibility’ or ‘imagination’:

To recreate the world behind the ruin in the land, to reanimate the people behind the sherd of antique pottery … this is the work of the archaeological imagination, a creative impulse and faculty at the heart of archaeology. The archaeological imagination is rooted in a sensibility, a pervasive set of attitudes towards traces and remains, towards memory, time and temporality, the fabric of history. (Shanks, 2012: 25)

Archaeology is almost always an intervention in the world – from excavation to archaeological drawing, the making of maps and the production of collections – the archaeological imagination is ‘creative and constitutive’ (Shanks, 2012). Even contemporary archaeologists are trained to dig, draw, analyse and amass. For cultural geographers interested in new ways of doing, in knowledge-as-practice, archaeology offers a rich ground for collaboration and research. At the same time, processes of archaeological ‘interpretation’ are themselves inherently creative. Often operating in the absence of human witness – whether by design or necessity – archaeologists must draw together material evidence to tell ‘stories’ about the past.

As such, archaeologists have long worked with artists and in performance art settings. Indeed, geographers are relative latecomers in terms of their collaboration with the arts. For example, renowned prehistorian Colin Renfrew has collaborated with artists Richard Long and Antony Gormley. In Renfrew’s Figuring It Out (2003), he argues that the basic urge to make our mark in the world links Upper Palaeolithic cave art with the world of modern art, and that contemporary visual art offers fresh insights into the human past. Elsewhere, collaborations with artists offer novel approaches to the interpretation of archaeological remains and the notion of display. In Substance, Memory and Display (DeMarrais et al., 2004), prehistorian Josh Pollard explores the ‘art of decay’ through the art of Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy, British landscape painter Simon Callery explains how his encounter with archaeology changed his approach to artistic practice during the excavation of an Iron Age hill fort in Oxfordshire, and historical archaeologist Nick Saunders probes the making of memory in trench art from the Great War, for example. At the same time, Pearson and Shanks’ Theatre/Archaeology (2001) emerges out of a collaboration extending back to the early 1990s, exploring the connections between performance and archaeology (Pearson himself trained as an archaeologist). Together, they think through how models of theatre and performance help generate interpretative knowledge of archaeological sites and artifacts, and how archaeology provides methods for generating site-specific, temporally dissonant performances. One might draw parallels here with work by Angela Piccini, an archaeologist by training based in a department of drama (see, for example, Piccini, 2009, 2012).

Many of these trends are echoed in cultural geography, in a more recent but growing interest in artistic collaboration (see Hawkins, 2013) and experiments in creative writing (e.g. Lorimer, 2006; Wylie, 2005). The AHRC’s Landscape and Environment Programme has, under the direction of Stephen Daniels, done much to promote these commonalities. However, many new research directions could be opened up for geographers via the archaeological imagination, particularly for those interested in making a creative response to the world.

Returning to the question posed in the title of this article, it is my contention that archaeology and human geography are not strange bedfellows; they may in some instances be strangers to each other, but this need not be so.