This chapter considers Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books (1894; 1895) and Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) alongside E. Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet (1906) to advance an argument about the archaeological imagination and the symbolically interwoven strata of land, time and identity. Both authors use time-slip narratives and the motif of archaeology to develop a complex sense of time and history, as well as to prompt coming of age. As excavation uncovers layers of the past, it reveals history, but also simultaneously a new understanding of time as at once sequential and synchronic. Together, this time sense and the archaeological imagination expose the strata of the self, the self at the end of and in the midst of history and also the self as a site of excavation.