ADVENTURES IN TIMELAND

Abstract

One of the more significant issues to have emerged from the discourse surrounding the Anthropocene has concerned the apparent incommensurability of human and natural history and the vastly different timescales involved. More generally, such discourse raises critical questions about the very different way time is conceptualized in the natural sciences as opposed to in the social sciences and humanities. In this article, I draw on my own disciplinary background in archaeology in order to contribute to these differences and build bridges between the two disciplinary domains by foregrounding the materiality of time. I use a partly allegorical approach inspired by Edwin Abbott's nineteenth-century novel Flatland to investigate a notion of three-dimensional of time, which I compare with Gilles Deleuze's three temporal syntheses. The article argues for the concept of Thick Time, which emphasizes the importance of time as constituted by things, whereby things make time rather than exist within it. A material time is one that foregrounds time as a mode of transmission, a “passing on,” and of the persistence of the past in the present.