ABSTRACT
Archaeology is fundamentally connected to notions of time, origins and history. The history of archaeology as an academic discipline is closely tied to the establishment of the geological antiquity of the world and, subsequently, the antiquity of humanity. This well-known history also establishes the close connections between archaeology and the establishment of modern ideological, discursive, economic and political structures in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The study of human origins is also fundamentally connected to modernist notions of time, which impacts similarly on the construction of long-term and short-term processes in the deep past. However, these aspects also have a colonial dimension to them as they reflect colonial ideologies and processes of control and exploitation. In archaeology, these dimensions seem to be preserved in the universal understanding of time and teleological narratives of human history. It is necessary to critically and reflexively engage with these aspects to create temporally more diverse and inclusive versions of the deep human past.
