ABSTRACT
You can’t really talk about time scales in archaeology or history without invoking the name of Braudel in the same breath. Braudel’s famous distinctions of historical time into three scales or tempos – the event, conjuncture and longue durée – are surely so well-known I don’t need to elaborate on them here. 1 They were adopted and used by many archaeologists in the 1990s and remain powerful ways still for some to deal with the complexity of an archaeological record that can capture both moments and millennia. 2 But there are also a set of problems entrained by them that archaeologists have never quite resolved, not least how to mediate between these scales. 3
