ABSTRACT
My discussion so far has been about the complexity, not to say messiness, of existence, as seen in what constitutes daily routines, the characterisation of individuals and their relationships to larger groupings, the moral community framed by values and intentions, and the ties between people and animals. In exploring what carries life forward, I have so far said little about one important dimension: the past. The argument of this chapter is that looking back is a central part of the identities of people in the period examined in this book. Looking back is present in the routines of daily life as well as in the special times and places to which archaeologists have given most attention; indeed what is remembered at special times of heightened, often collective, self-awareness may often (though far from always) draw on the central features of daily life. Memory can perhaps better be thought of as an openended series of rememberings, which resist neat classification. In all spheres, remembering is as likely to be fluid, dynamic and creative as fixed, static and closed. Different ways of remembering may help us, perhaps uniquely, to understand different scales of interaction among people and varying dimensions of selfconsciousness. The pervasive presence of the past in the present may have created a history of histories, whose power is relevant to what I see as the slow development of long-term change.
