ABSTRACT
Prehistoric predecessors are known to us through their enduring creations. As externalized knowledge, their artefacts and art open for us windows on their relation to the time matters of impermanence, finitude and the realm beyond the lived present. Creating and representing the impermanent world in SOLID form means the reality thus created appears as if it were immutable. As such it facilitates reflective knowledge and with it time-binding and time-distanciation practices that far exceed the capacity of spoken symbolic language. New modes of thought and expression are made possible through the visual. Importantly, it opens up the realm beyond the present and allows for the free movement in time. This chapter focuses on the human face as an exemplar of such externalized knowledge in relation to temporality and to notions of time and space as integral. Animated, the created face looks back at its maker. Endowed with life it becomes an interlocutor, another putative living entity through which reality can be probed and the temporal givens transcended. Through an investigation of the face in relation to these key temporal challenges the chapter critically discusses existing approaches to time and history.
