Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of the book. The book focuses on an anthropological study of the relationship between feeling and thinking in the conceptualisation of time in archaeology and related disciplines. It expresses that feeling and conceiving time are inseparable in the study of the past, in that both are interwoven as practitioners appropriate their gravitational environments through movement. The book also focuses on languaging alternative corporeal realities by looking at how time in archaeology materialises through the movements of the trowel. It examines how the various forms of conceptualisation are used in current archaeological argumentation. The book explores how some of the ways that archaeologists position themselves with respect to other disciplines parallel the ways that early modern geoscientists engaged in theoretical debates through humour.