Prologue

Fifteen years ago I published a book called the Archaeology of Time. ¹ It was, in part, a spin-off from my doctoral studies ten years earlier which grappled with the concept of time in archaeology but through a detailed case study on the later prehistory of an area of northern England. ² Truth be told, I did not plan to do my doctoral research on the topic of time but rather on ethnographic analogy; it was a topic that had really grabbed my attention as an undergraduate but in my first meeting with my doctoral supervisor, a gentle suggestion was made that maybe analogy was no longer a hot topic (this was 1991 after all), whereas the concept of time was ripe for exploration. No doubt this was sage advice and as a result, time seems to have stuck to me – or I have stuck with it. It helped that the environment in which I was working during my doctoral studies was in many ways ideal; at Cambridge in the early 1990s, Sander van der Leeuw was working on time and complexity theory along with his PhD student James McGlade, while another of his doctoral students, Laurent Olivier developed his own unique approach to time. My own supervisor, Ian Hodder, was exploring time in a very different way, in relation to narrative, while my advisor was Geoff Bailey who pioneered the theory of time perspectivism. Michael Shanks was also around completing his PhD in my first years there and later, Tim Murray was regularly coming through Cambridge. How could I fail in such excellent company?