Introduction: Time, Materiality, and the Work of Memory

One of us (Yannis Hamilakis) recently returned from a field season of ethnographic work, as part of a large archaeological project in Greece related to the excavation of the Sanctuary of Poseidon on the island of Poros (ancient Kalaureia) in the Saronic Gulf. Amid the ruins of the sanctuary there is an ancient stone block, part of the wall of one of the public buildings that used to surround the temple in ancient times (figure 1). The block has been in place since antiquity, but at the beginning of the twentieth century a large extended family settled amid the ruins, making the site their home until they were evicted by the archaeological service in 1978. The children of the family, who would play amongst the stones, inscribed their initials on this block (as they did on others at the site), often noting their age and the date—graffiti that are now clearly visible to visitors.¹ Not far away, at a much more celebrated locale, the Athenian Acropolis, there is another interesting architectural fragment (figure 2): a piece from the classical temple of Erechtheion, onto which an inscription in Arabic script was carved in 1805, when the Acropolis was under Ottoman rule and used as a fortress; the block was then embedded in one of the vaulted entrances to the Acropolis. The inscription praises the Ottoman governor of Athens and his achievement in fortifying the Acropolis.² These two artefacts can be examined from many different standpoints, but here we are primarily interested in their ability to invoke some of our central concerns in this issue, relating to memory, time, materiality and practice.

Henri Bergson has taught us that a fundamental property of material is its duration, its ability to defy linear, modernist conceptions of time, seen as irreversible movement and progression.³ His ideas find much more efficacy and acquire greater relevance when dealing with objects that were created at a certain point in time but have subsequently been reworked, reengaged with and reactivated through human social practice, like our examples here. These objects defy easy attempts at dating and chronological arrangement; they are, rather, multi-temporal, enacting and evoking different times simultaneously. They speak of time as coexistence rather than succession. And they embody, materially and physically, memory as duration. In the two cases cited above, this is memory of the classical past as invoked and recalled by post-classical human practices—be they antiquarian, archaeological or those of the nation-state in its attempt to produce national memory. But it is also the memory of the Ottoman presence, inscribed on the Acropolis, a memory that has resisted later attempts at erasure and ritual purification, and the memory of the children of the family that built its home amongst the ruins, inscribed on the fragment from the sanctuary of Poseidon. These more recent material memories can be also seen as mnemonic evocations and citations of the classical presence—after all, the Ottomans had transformed the temple of Parthenon on the Acropolis into a mosque, thus evoking its ancient character as a place of worship,⁴ and in the case of the graffiti at the sanctuary of Poseidon, the children who inscribed their initials and ages in the mid-twentieth century would have seen, only a few meters away, other blocks with ancient inscriptions on them. How do we date these two pieces, using our conventions of chronological, successive time? Is the fragment from the Acropolis classical or early-nineteenth-century? Is the fragment from Kalaureia classical or twentieth-century?

These examples illustrate how the concept of memory can make a fundamental contribution to historical study, through its ability to help us reconceptualize time, understand the multi-temporal character of human life and appreciate the capacity of matter and of materiality to embody this multi-temporal process. But it is human social practices—in this case, practices of inscription and recontextualization—that enable these multiple temporalities to find physical expression.⁵ And it is through other social practices, such as archaeological and scholarly work, that these multiple temporalities are disseminated to...