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136 Archaeologists tend to regard time as linear. It is along the timeline, the modernist image of time par excellence, that “time” is ordered into a succession of events or laminar phases. Most archaeologists take it for granted that the Iron Age commences with the end of the Bronze Age; that the Bronze Age brings about the end of the Neolithic. This image of a series of successions and replacements, where one era is irrevocably lost and supplanted by a new one, runs to the heart of the discipline. Mortimer Wheeler offers an archetypical image of this linear time. In drawing a distinction between a timescale produced by vertical excavation and a specific phase generated through extensive horizontal excavation , Wheeler enlists the metaphor of the railway timetable and train (1954, 126–27). Vertical excavation (synonymous with a “culture-scale” for Wheeler) allows one to deal with an area in depth, but, deployed without recourse to the horizontal, it is a “timetable without a train.” Likewise, any horizontal excavation bereft of a deeply excavated stratigraphic profile is a “train without a timetable.” Emphasizing the complementarity of these practices, Wheeler sought a properly running train system with a clear timetable whereby we might know when the trains were running,“where they started,”“their intermediate stopping-places,” and “their destination.” Set in motion along its track with the measured precision of timetable, Wheeler’s locomotive metaphor is exemplary of linear time and its chronology. chapter 7 Timely Things From Argos to Mycenae and Beyond From Argos to Mycenae and Beyond | 137 Of course, we readily accept that the things around us do not all share the same temporality. It is long been recognized that entities may transform at different rates or have different life spans with respect to temporal duration (Lucas 2005). Consider some features and places from the Argive Plain of Greece: a limestone escarpment erodes over the course of hundreds of millennia; an olive tree lower down the flank of this ridge persists for several centuries; the late Byzantine church of the Panaghia in Aghia Triada continues to stand, while, not sixty meters distant from the church’s northern door, the exposed mud-brick walls of a nineteenthcentury farmhouse wash away with every rainstorm (Bailey 1981, 1983, 2007; Ingold 1993; Lucas 2005; Olivier 2001, 2008). Whether the life of a tree or the perishing of a building, these processes are often situated within a unidirectional passage temporality. Here the “arrow of time” subsumes the more chaotic relations of time per se. Modernist thought introduces a radical gap between past and present . As if splayed out upon the butcher’s block, time is cleaved apart at supposed interruptions. Whether clock time or processual time, the present , as the locus of the modern, is forever advancing along the track, leaving behind all that has come before. Historical events, previous eras, all are safely situated at a distance.The powers of archaeology are focused upon seemingly remote pasts; pasts that have forever passed; pasts that are assumed to be separate from those living today. This image of linear successions vastly oversimplifies time (the notion that time passes results in a complacent attitude toward the abolition of the past; see Olivier 2008). Indeed, it would be more precise to regard this image as a particular form of historicity. Archaeologists may have paid homage to this form of historicism from the inception of the discipline (Lucas 2005; also see McGlade 1999), but it is thankfully beginning to break down. We are beginning to recognize that time is much more complex and chaotic , and that archaeology has a major role to play in this complexity. All around us the things of the past defy the presumably unbridgeable distances held firm by the rigidity of a unidirectional line and the seemingly unbridgeable chasms left in the wake of revolutionary gestures. Here, in the northeastern Peloponnesus, a Hellenistic route follows the line of a Bronze Age road; there, a Geometric cemetery (strengthened with the aid of governmental legislation and the perseverance of Ephoria archaeologists) bars a homeowner from adding a room for his inlaws in 1986; here, thirteenth-century Frankish fortifications play a role in a desperate battle during the Greek War of Independence six centuries 138 | Timely Things later, contributing to the birth of the modern nation-state; there, the wall of a fourth-century b.c.e. temenos, or sacred precinct, provides a backdrop for a tool shed in Hermion. Time passes and doesn’t pass. In...

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