ABSTRACT
As so often happens, I find myself ending a book where one should just be starting. The last chapter was an attempt to explore the way time is materialized, the way the different archaeological media articulate and constitute their own special forms of time. It was a celebration of the multiplicity of time, as indeed the whole book has been, but also especially, a recognition that such multiplicity is based on the heterogeneous materialities that make up the world. Such an acknowledgement means we avoid the binaries that I discussed in the first chapter, especially between objective and subjective time, physical and felt time. Time is, what time does – that is to say, what things do. In Chapter 2, I explored the idea of an absolute chronology in archaeology as an achievement, a construction, something that involves a great deal of work to synchronize different temporalities expressed in different things: radioactive decay, tree ring growth, the movement of celestial bodies. From this work, we have created a marvellous tool, a measuring stick for time. But it is a construction, a composite of multiple times stitched together to create a co-ordinated whole we call chronology.
