ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the playful character of conceptualisation to unveil other important strategies for debating time in science. With particular attention to humour in nineteenth-century geosciences, the chapter explores how vertical conceptualisations of time are articulated with regards to evolutionary discourses as they are expressed in historical and contemporary understandings of the brain and the body as a whole. The chapter analyses some of the ways that archaeologists skilfully play with modern narratives of progress to invert their stratified values and, at the same time, accommodate their disciplinary postures with regards to adjacent disciplines. It also explores how archaeologists and other scientists manage to play skilfully with vertical chronologies by expanding the meaning of concepts, which allows them to politically enact a corporeal position within larger academic discourse, particularly modern narratives of progress. The chapter emphases the ecological and open-ended nature of sentient conceptualisations.
