ABSTRACT
Archaeology concerns itself with the changing character of human societies through time as it is manifested in material culture. This enterprise has proved possible because we in the modern West conceive of time as linear and irreversible, and understand particular aspects of human existence to be temporally variable. Moreover, it is conventional to imagine the linear process of human development to have issued from an origin at some point in the distant past, where history and culture emerged out of nature. Yet this picture is complicated, and to some extent compromised, by the way that nature itself has been for the past century and a half understood as dynamic and changing. It is arguable that without this particular configuration of ideas archaeology would never have developed, and moreover it is evident that until comparatively recently the notions of history and nature were viewed in quite different ways. For the early Greeks, for instance, nature was not the object of science but a colossal living being, with its own intelligence (Collingwood 1945: 111). Similarly, while Lucretius and Hesiod both presented human history as divisible into stages or phases, it was with the early Christians that the conception of an epoch defined by a critical event or process was first considered (Collingwood 1961: 51). Nonetheless, the events and processes that were central to this vision of history were those of divine purpose, and throughout the Middle Ages the principal diachronic process that was generally imagined to be taking place was the coming of the Last Judgement. Human acts were only understood to bring about decisive change where they enacted the will of God, through grace. By contrast, a preoccupation with time and temporal change has been identified as one of the defining characteristics of modernity, arguably replaced by the domination of space over a post-modern epoch ( Jameson 1984: 64).
