Figure One. St Peter’s church Southern Façade (Image: Author)
In this two-part piece I want to think about time and how it relates to public sites. In Part One I will discuss time and how it relates to public sites, and in Part Two I will contextualize these ideas through my work at St. Peter’s church in Bermuda. To begin, I want to emphasize several points. First, that time at public sites needs to be flattened (following Lucas 2008) in order to abandon notions of hierarchical and linear time. Second that time at public sites needs to be understood in terms of multiple trajectories and temporalities that simultaneously occur in the present. Third, following the work of Olivier (2001; 2004), the past only exists in the form of material memory that can be temporary and fleeting. Finally, archaeological and social memory practices are avenues to make the material memory of the past durable for the future as well as for public consumption. As such, we must take special care when working with time at public sites in order to make it accessible to larger, non-academic, audiences.

Public sites provide a rare opportunity to explore both the ways that heterogeneous materials have persisted into the “now-time” (using Olivier’s terminology, 2004; 2008) as well as the various ways that these materials are made durable through acts of social memory and archaeology. For this discussion, public sites are defined both as sites of common use, such as churches, parks, and streets (following Giles 2005) as well as sites of heritage that are visited by general and specialized publics. To think about these issues I will use my own work at St. Peter’s church in St. George’s Bermuda as a case study throughout this discussion (see Fortenberry et al 2008; forthcoming for more on this work).
First, let’s reflect on the nature of public sites, and in this case churches. Churches are ‘gatherings’ of heterogeneous people and materials (following Witmore 2007), where multiple trajectories and temporalities overlap, run parallel, and interact. They are places where extensive ritualized and habitual actions take place, as well as moments of improvisation and spontaneity. These practices channel their way through public sites (see Tsing 2000 for a discussion of channeling), sometimes leaving traces and sometimes not. Churches are in constant motion, being remade with every action and event in a constant process of placemaking (see Aldred 2010).
Different temporal concepts collide at churches. On the one hand notions of cosmological time, ideas of creation, eschatology, and rapture, are present (see J.R. Lucas 2002). There is also generational time, with churches that link one generation to another. Further, individual life cycles, from baptisms to marriages and funerals, take place within the bounds of these spaces.
We could simply construct a linear timeline for public sites that mark ‘key moments and people’. In early 2010 I was given the seemingly innocuous task of commenting on a timeline for St. Peter’s church produced by the Vestry council (St. Peter’s Vestry 2010). The document listed the site’s ‘key’ events. It identified the church based on documentary evidence as being first constructed in 1612. It charted the subsequent architectural renovations of the buildings in the 18th and 19th centuries (Stow 1954). In between these larger moments of structural change it noted the first court of assize met in the church in 1618. It highlighted the presence of several important governors who were laid to rest in the churchyard, as well as the several attempts in the 19th century to abandon the structure in favor of a larger church nearby. Finally, my own archaeological work and the site’s upcoming 400th anniversary concluded the list. These events presented St. Peter’s past in uniform succession from its origins in the 17th century to its use today along a single (linear) timescale. This would be the series of events presented to the public in order to convey the history of this building and its environs.
Recent discussions of chronologies and timelines highlight their faults and presumptions (Lucas 2005: 9–ff; Hodge 2008). They assume that time runs one-way from beginning to middle to end, with no room for backtracking. They imply the definitive answer to our understanding of a place, and clearly present the ‘important moments’. As Christina Hodge notes, “Timelines are interdisciplinary and ubiquitous. Their superficial simplicity makes them a popular method of mediating engagement with the past and distilling complex processes for public consumption” (2008). She goes on to rightly discuss the way that timelines often leave out subaltern narratives and events of the past (2008). Furthermore, timelines essentialize all moments in the presumed life history of a site: its origins, its use, and dis-use. In this way, using Olivier’s terminology (2004; 2008), timelines attempt to fill the ‘dark abyss’ of past time, from the perspective of the “now time”. In historical archaeology in particular, timelines feed the chronological dominance of our sub-discipline, further reinforcing period-oriented labels such as 1500–present, post-medieval, modern, industrial, and contemporary. By thinking of archaeology this way we have to fill in the past with something in order to stock these categories and time periods, connecting them through a string of events from their origins to the present.
For public sites, timelines connect the visitor through a single narrative to the site by presenting these key moments. They are often static and permanent, and are set into a site’s literature and distributed for public consumption. None of these criticisms should come as surprise. As Gavin Lucas urges us, we must move past chronology, and toward newer forms of mediation for time (Lucas 2005: 114). While he puts forth ideas of genealogical and biographical approaches (Lucas 2006:39–42), often these frameworks leave little room for broader durations of time because they focus on an individual life.
The biggest challenge to moving away from chronology at public sites is the fact that chronological time is easily accessible to public audiences, we are taught these concepts in primary school and popular culture appropriates them. As such, I do not feel that introducing ideas of non-liner time and other theoretical notions into the public sphere would be a worthwhile pursuit. Instead, we can take the notion of a timeline and work away from it to begin to break free from its linear ideas of the way that time operates at public sites. In order to do this we (the archaeologists) must first begin by flattening time (via Lucas and STS) and then think about issues of material memory and duration (via Olivier).
Instead of thinking about time hierarchically, perhaps we should flatten time, as argued by Lucas, working off of ideas borrowed from Latour (2005) and STS. By flattening time, it is posited that all matter and individuals are on the same temporal and scalar plane. As a result there are no broad stroke processes that rule the ether. Still too objects are not confined to one period or another, they persist for periods of time. Flattening time (and space) focuses our attention on actual materials and allows us to circumvent issues of abstraction. Instead we concentrate on trajectories and the duration of materials that are in the contemporary landscape. From here we can move to issues of material memory.
The ideas of material memory and duration provide a useful starting point when trying to break free of chronological paradigms for public sites. Laurent Olivier argues that archaeology can no longer use time that can be cut up into individual events and slices, constructing time back from the present (Olivier 2004: 208). Instead, archaeology should only be concerned with the past in the present. The present is not a discrete and isolated period but rather composed of the material of the past that has endured from its original creation into the present (Olivier 2004: 206). He argues, “..in reality it [the past] has never gone away; it was lying low, lying in wait in the folds of present time” (Olivier 2004: 209). He goes on to say that the ‘now-time’ is saturated with a fusion of the things created in the past that have endured. Because of this fusion we can no longer separate the past from the present because that are inextricably amalgamated (Olivier 2004: 210). The past is only embedded within the material objects that archaeologists study in the form of memory that are linked not to time but to duration (Olivier 2001: 66). And so, “The current state of the present–as it is physically–basically consists of a palimpsest of all the durations of the past that have been recorded in matter” (Olivier 2001: 66). As a result, we are no longer pushed to fill the dark void of time in the past from the present, we are instead encouraged to look around us and below us to the material that has endured into the ‘now time’. This approach relies heavily on the visual aspects of this material, whether they are on the surface or below the ground, or discovered through the practice of archaeology. This means that our encounters with the past are not apart of a holistic picture but rather encounters with fragments of the past that are often shifting and temporary.
Acknowledgements
This submission is an adaptation of a paper given at the 2010 Theoretical Archaeology Group USA Conference at Brown University in a session entitled ‘Time Warps’ convened by Shannon Dawdy and Sarah Kautz (Chicago University).
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