ABSTRACT
This chapter traces some of the ramifications by examining the historical development of visual language in disciplines such as biology, archaeology, linguistics, psychology, anthropology and history. The analysis shows once again that the understanding of time inherited from geology is far from universal and is not in perfect harmony with adjacent notions of time. Based on the multiple trajectories within vertical understandings of time, the chapter expresses that disciplines are not bounded things as the notion of interdisciplinarity would suggest, but rather open conversations relying on concepts that are congruous with sentient experience and are never entirely post-sensory. The stratigraphic view of time emerged from the need to understand the mutual connection between land and sea. The new perspectives on biological evolution coincide with a generalised shift of focus within the anthropological discipline from human exceptionality to what Donna Haraway calls companion species in the understanding of sociality, where, according to Anna Tsing, 'human nature is as an interspecies relationship'.
