World Archaeology

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Archaeology, process and time: beyond history

versus memory

Oliver J. T. Harris

To cite this article: Oliver J. T. Harris (2021) Archaeology, process and time: beyond history
versus memory, World Archaeology, 53:1, 104-121, DOI: 10.1080/00438243.2021.1963833

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2021.1963833

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WORLD ARCHAEOLOGY
2021, VOL. 53, NO. 1, 104–121
https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2021.1963833

ARTICLE

Archaeology, process and time: beyond history versus memory

Oliver J. T. Harris
School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
In this paper I seek to explore how a particular aspect of process philosophy can Process philosophy; time;
offer us new ways of thinking through time in archaeology. In contrast to current habit; memory; difference;
archaeological debates, which counterpose a model of archaeology as driven Gilles Deleuze
primarily by history and sequence with one of memory and contemporaneity,
the process approach taken here develops a different account. Drawing on the
three syntheses of time set out by Gilles Deleuze, the paper explores how habit,
memory and difference allow us to think about time in new ways from both
passive and active perspectives. Explored through the work of the Ardnamurchan
Transitions Project, the paper sets out how these syntheses allow for a multiplicity
of times situated within a consistent ontological approach, one that lets us under­
stand the processes by which narratives of both history and memory emerge.

Introduction
Take an arbitrary archaeological landscape, say one in western Scotland, on the north coast of
the Ardnamurchan peninsula (Figure 1). It is a landscape that is clearly multitemporal. There is
the form of the land itself, shaped by geological processes over millions of years, as well as more
recent actions of the sea, the isostatic rebound of the land after glaciers retreated, and more.
There are archaeological monuments dating from thousands of years ago and later burials that
took materials from those sites to repurpose them. There are traces of small-scale industrial
activity in lime kilns, and evidence for processes of the forced eviction and dislocation of people
in the abandoned and demolished homes from the 19th century. One way of conceptualising
this is as a form of historical sequence, first one thing then another, moving unidirectionally
from past to present. But at the same time none of the elements of the landscape ever stop
changing or disappear, they are always and forever in process, or what the philosopher Gilles
Deleuze (2006) would call ‘becoming’. As well as sequence then, we can think about how all
these pasts are co-present, contemporary and overlapping, mixing and melding with each other
outside of any clear linear sequence. A Neolithic tomb is as present in the Viking era as it is was in
the Neolithic and as it is today (cf. Holtorf 1998). Whether we think about time as overlapping co-
presents or as a linear sequence, both depend on process, and both have their archaeological
adherents. Are there ways we can think about them together, rather than opposed? Are there
ways in which a more critical engagement with process philosophy can help us resolve the
tensions between the two? Are there perhaps deeper processes at play upon which both these
other forms of time depend?

CONTACT Oliver J. T. Harris ojth1@leicester.ac.uk Oliver Harris School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of
Leicester, Leicester, UK
© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creative
commons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is
properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
 WORLD ARCHAEOLOGY 105

Figure 1. Swordle Bay, Ardnamurchan. Photo by Dan Addison, reproduced with permission.

Time and archaeology

Time has always been of critical importance to archaeologists, from sequence and succession, through
the constant search for refined dating techniques, to theoretical issues of scale and change (Shanks and
Tilley 1987; Knapp 1992; Gosden 1994; Thomas 1996; Lucas 2005, 2021; Bailey 2007; Rowley-Conwy 2007;
Robb and Pauketat 2013; Harris 2017; Whittle 2018; Crellin 2020).1 As such it is never far from the debates
archaeologists revel in conducting. Time can be seen as linear or cyclical, as multiscalar or uniform. It can
be understood through analogies with geology or history, physics or philosophy. Excellent summaries
and critiques have been set out by Gavin Lucas (e.g. 2005, 2015, 2021), Rachel Crellin (2020) and others
(e.g. Souvatzi, Baysal, and Baysal 2019). But one distinction, drawn by Michael Shanks and Christopher
Tilley (1987), is worth emphasising: that between abstract and experiential time. The former is the time of
clocks, linear and uniform, measurable and quantifiable. The latter is the time of human experience, with
its varied relational rhythms and tempos. This opposition, one with significant antiquity across academia
(Canales 2015), continues in different ways in our contemporary discussions. Today, some claim archae­
ology should be a form of history, one governed by ever more accurate chronologies, but this clashes
with others who see memory as the defining mode of time for our discipline. In this paper I suggest that
process philosophy can offer us an important set of tools for escaping this long-running impasse. Building
on the discussions of time in process philosophy outlined by Chris Gosden and Lambros Malafouris (2015;
see also Hamilakis and Labanyi 2008; Hamilakis 2013; Knight and McFadyen 2020; Thomas 2020), this
paper explores how a process approach to time can offer us the means to understand both the
emergence of memory and the emergence of history; how to embrace temporal multiplicity in other
words. To do so, I will draw explicitly on Deleuze (2004). Deleuze’s work, as an example of process
philosophy, can show us how archaeology can move between multiple conceptions of time without
reduction and, in so doing, allow us to explore both memory and history (Harris 2021). Before doing so,
 106 O. J. T. HARRIS

however, I will set out these two competing modes of time in archaeology in a little more detail. The first
sees time as a linear sequence and represents a fairly traditional approach to archaeological narrative – we
can refer to this as archaeology-as-history. The second treats the past as contemporary with the present,
and as a realm of multiple overlapping temporalities. We can refer to this as archaeology-as-memory. We
begin with the latter.

Archaeology-as-memory
The understanding of archaeology-as-memory has grown from both a desire to attend to material things
more directly, and in response to the emergence of contemporary archaeology, which asks us to focus on
the here and now, and thus inevitably on the multitemporal nature of the present (e.g. Blaising et al.
2017). Þóra Pétursdóttir (2012), for example, has written evocatively of her encounter with an abandoned
herring factory in Iceland. Faced with the overwhelming silence and volume of material objects, she
suggests that an attempt to talk of history does an injustice to the material present and runs the risk of
assimilating things to a human project (Pétursdóttir 2012, 578). In contrast, she argues that archaeological
temporalities have more in common with memory. In a similar fashion, Bjørnar Olsen (2012) has argued
that archaeology has been limited by the demands of history, and that we would be better off
conceptualising things unchained from such linear narratives. We can place these approaches, and
others, broadly under the banner of ‘symmetrical archaeology’ (Olsen et al. 2012; cf. Harris and Cipolla
2017). Symmetrical archaeology also emphasises the non-linear and emergent qualities of time, the way it
‘percolates’ in Christopher Witmore’s (2006) evocative phrase. Looking at Oxford Street in London,
Witmore (2007, 557; cf. Blaising 2017, 64) points out that it is difficult to see it as solely the product of
one time, instead its route remains structured by a Roman road. Similarly, Tim Webmoor and Witmore
(2008, 64) explore how an object like a pair of glasses is the enfolding of multiple forms of time within
a single thing. Finally, perhaps the most extended discussion of archaeology-as-memory has come from
Laurent Olivier (e.g. 2004, 2011) who explores at length the complex interplay of multiple temporalities at
any one moment, or in any one landscape. Archaeologists ‘reactivate’ the past for Olivier (2011, 61),
opening up the complex intersections of multiple temporalities. Archaeology, Olivier (2011, 34) declares,
is about the ‘material memory of the past that escapes historical consciousness’, and new tools are
required with which to access this (Olivier 2019, 22). The rejection of history, here, allows archaeology to
approach its ‘true object’ (Witmore 2017, 232)
Such approaches to time are enormously productive, they help us realise that any point in time is
made up of multiple intersections of temporality, what Deleuze (2015, 167) calls ‘the coiling up of relative
presents’. They have broadened and complicated how archaeologists have written about temporality by
resisting the call to place sequence, order and linear time at the heart of everything we do. They open up
the possibility of considering the time inherent in non-humans, in the depth and richness of the moment
of archaeological encounter, and how so much of what we do as archaeologists demands a recognition of
our materials’ complexity, unknowability and ambiguity (Gero 2007; Sørensen 2016). They address many
of the critiques of archaeology as overly dependent on human beings, that is they are non-
anthropocentric (c.f. Crellin et al. 2021). There can be little doubt that multiple pasts coalesce in any
present, and these are pasts that always exceed the parts of them that are human.
Is it possible? Yet at the same time, such approaches present a fundamental challenge in their claim that
archaeology should separate its long-standing relationship with history. Olsen puts this most bluntly
in his call for archaeology to escape ‘the imperatives of history’ (2012, 25; cf. Olivier 2015, 29, 2019;
Pétursdóttir 2012, 587). Is this really something that archaeologists should aspire to? When
Pétursdóttir and Olsen (2018) write evocatively of the accumulated waste floating in a Norwegian
 WORLD ARCHAEOLOGY 107

fjord, they deliberately avoid discussions of how it got there, or what the historical processes are that
have resulted in this kind of environmental damage. In their case this is quite reasonable – historical
explanation is not their project. As a discipline however, should archaeology remove itself from such
discussions? Much of the story of our subject has wrestled with big historical questions – the origins
of agriculture, the development of monumentality, the evolution of our species. Many of these
questions are not amenable to study through written records, meaning a declaration that archae­
ology should avoid them would in effect render them unavailable for any form of investigation.
Furthermore, are the linear sequences we have written about definitively less real than the con­
temporary pasts that archaeology-as-memory presupposes? Indeed, archaeology is in the process of
developing a suite of new approaches to understanding the past, from aDNA and isotopic analysis
to precisely modelled dating sequences, which may presage dramatic new abilities to construct
historical narratives. Is this really the time to turn away from history?

Archaeology-as-history
In contrast to those archaeologists arguing that memory offers the best metaphor for our subject, other
voices have argued that now, more than ever, is the moment to emphasise history as key touchstone for
the discipline. Although historical sequence has long been a critical component of archaeology, going
back to the development of the three-age system (Rowley-Conwy 2007), recent developments and new
dating techniques have returned the notion of archaeology-as-history to the foreground. Central here has
been the development of Bayesian modelling of radiocarbon dates (Bayliss 2009; Whittle, Healy, and
Bayliss 2011; Whittle 2018). Bayesian modelling works by combining prior information, for example about
stratigraphic sequence, with radiocarbon dates, in order to combat the inherent scatter in the latter. This
has resulted in extraordinary sequences being developed both for specific sites (e.g. Mercer and Healy
2008; Richards et al. 2016) and for whole periods (Whittle, Healy, and Bayliss 2011). Whereas previously
certain types of monuments in the Early Neolithic of Britain, for example, were understood as being in use
for centuries, we can now map their growth and decline far more precisely. We can trace the emergence
of causewayed enclosures, particular forms of monument made up of interrupted ditches, as they swell in
popularity and fade in the centuries from 3700 cal BCE onwards (Whittle, Healy, and Bayliss 2011, 703). In
one extraordinary example, Alex Bayliss and Alasdair Whittle (2019) lead their reader though awalk across
the chalk downlands of Wessex in the 3630s cal BCE, past the construction of specific sections of
enclosure, the burning of mortuary sites and more. Far from the generic picture of an ‘Early Neolithic’
life way understood as operating over centuries, Bayliss and Whittle lead us into the intimacy of lives lived
thousands of years ago and visit events that could easily have been witnessed by the same individual.
Such possibilities have led Whittle (e. g. 2018) to call specifically for archaeology to return to
history as its primary focus. In direct opposition to the emphasis on multiple and non-linear
temporality, or the escape from history, for which the archaeologists we saw above have called,
Whittle argues that we have an astonishing opportunity to write the deep past as history for the first
time. Why give that up? It is clear that archaeology has contributed enormously to our under­
standing of the human past through an emphasis on sequence and through an understanding of
time as linear. Our new ability to refine and improve past chronologies presages ever more intimate
narratives of past worlds. Whittle (2018, 15) is explicit that his view represents one that is ‘diame­
trically opposed’ to what Olsen and others have called for.
Yet questions remain here. Whilst such accounts have explored historical specificity in ever more
detailed ways, they have little answer to the broader theoretical critiques raised above. Our ability to
sequence time does not mean it is not multiple in both past and present. Witmore’s (2007) example of
108 O. J. T. HARRIS

Oxford Street demonstrates quite clearly how in any one moment multiple temporalities are always
present. Nor do such engagements with time, by themselves, offer us insight into how time was
understood in the past, as Richard Bradley (2020) argues.
Two other concerns with archaeology-as-history can be foregrounded here. The first is that the
scales of time it focuses on tend towards that of human lives and human generations (Crellin 2020,
90). Time is always multiscalar, however, and we need archaeological approaches that can engage
with this complexity (Robb and Harris 2013; cf. Lucas 2021, chapter 3). Whilst Bayesian models draw
our attention to human-scales of time, these are not the only ones at which archaeologists can, and
should, write (Robb and Pauketat 2013; Crellin 2020). An emphasis on human scales of time means
the role of non-humans, from material things, to monuments to landscapes, is inevitably down­
played. Second, there may be broader political consequences from elevating one particular mode of
time over others. Whilst Olsen (2012) has argued for a political attention to be paid to non-humans
(cf. Carter and Harris 2020), of more concern may be the way linear time has played a critical role in
Western settler-colonist projects. Mark Rifkin (2017) has set out how imposing linear, quantifiable,
forms of time remains a central part of settler-colonist politics in the United States. In contrast, he
examines how an approach to different modes of time, and the potential for what he terms
‘temporal sovereignty’ can allow space for more complex Indigenous worlds to exist (Rifkin 2017).
The notion of universal time, into which Indigenous people can be slotted, sustains a singular
conception of the world, one founded on a dominant Western ontology. Singular, linear, and
universal time alone, therefore, has no space within it for Indigenous self-determination. Thus, if
an obsession with linear, controlled, measurable time has significant political consequences, includ­
ing providing legitimacy for a view of time that denies power to Indigenous communities around
the world (Rifkin 2017), can we hold it as the singular aim of archaeology? Is archaeology-as-history
a means of extending what Rifkin calls ‘settler time’ into the deep past of Europe and elsewhere?

Deleuze and the three syntheses

The two approaches to time in archaeology here, as memory or history, are by themselves both
insufficient. The former removes our ability to craft historical explanations and to deal with change
through time. The latter presents a linear approach that denies the complexities of temporality, leads us
to writing only at specific scales of analysis, and risks imposing a form of time that, by itself, has serious
political implications. Their opposition, explicit in the writings of both sides (e.g. Olivier 2015; Whittle
2018) is, as Lucas (2015, 36) has argued, very problematic. However, nothing so simple as merely
combining the two will suffice either. The two approaches have contrasting philosophical underpinnings:
time-as-memory resting upon non-anthropocentric approaches, increasingly those associated with
Object-Oriented Ontology (Harman 2011; Witmore 2017; cf. Harris and Cipolla 2017); time-as-history
upon a human-centred approach to the past (Whittle 2018). Whilst both capture elements of what
archaeology needs to be able to do, we will require a different starting point, one with sufficient
ontological flexibility and sophistication to handle multiple versions of time simultaneously.
It is here we can turn to process philosophy to provide us with a more robust underpinning (Gosden
and Malafouris 2015). Process philosophy in different forms has already had an impact on multiple forms
of archaeological thinking, including those influenced by new materialism and assemblage theory
amongst others (e.g. Conneller 2011; Jones 2012; Lucas 2012; Fowler 2013; Cipolla 2018; Crellin 2020),
although space prevents a detailed exploration of these important contributions. When it comes to time,
process philosophy, with its emphasis on becoming over being, on the constant change and emergence
of the world, and on new connections and new potentials constantly forming, clearly has much to offer us
 WORLD ARCHAEOLOGY 109

(Hamilakis 2013; Gosden and Malafouris 2015). Rather than attempt to cover this ground in its entirety,
I will instead turn to a specific area of process philosophy and look at what Deleuze’s approach to time has
to offer.
Deleuze’s work has proven to be increasingly influential across the humanities and social sciences
in the last 20 years, playing a vital role in the development of new materialism (e.g. Coole and Frost
2010), the ontological turn (e.g. Viveiros de Castro 2014) and non-representational approaches (e.g.
Thrift 2008). In archaeology his work has provided critical inspiration in developing new concepts of
materials (Conneller 2011), the senses (Hamilakis 2013), change (Crellin 2020) and the archaeological
record itself (Lucas 2012; Fowler 2013). Often associated with assemblage theory (Jervis 2019), his
work has wider ramifications. Deleuze’s thought has many elements to it, but critical emphases
include the importance of becoming over being (e.g. Deleuze 2006), the nature of relations (Deleuze
and Parnet 2002), and the central role of difference as a productive force (Deleuze 2004). His
thinking offers an important reorientation for archaeology, allowing us to reposition the discipline
in the light of the intellectual challenges it currently faces, as well as to offer new narratives about
the past (for a fuller exploration of these ideas see Harris 2021).
Deleuze offered several different engagements with time, including his work on cinema (Deleuze
1986, 1989; cf. Thomas 2020) and his development of the philosophy of the Stoics (Deleuze 2015). In
this he drew on and developed essential work by Henri Bergson, David Hume and Friedrich
Nietzsche,2 arguing that the typical vision people have of time – running in a straight line from
past, present to future – was insufficient. In its place Deleuze developed a relational and emergent
view of time, rooted in process. Here I am going to work specifically with version of time Deleuze
develops in Difference and Repetition. This work forms the key central element of Deleuze’s ontology
and underpins the later and more famous work he conducted with the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari
(2004, 2013).3 Deleuze proposes that time emerges through three acts of synthesis, each building on
and relying on the next. Whilst initially obscure, this approach offers us an opportunity to rethink
time in archaeology from a process-focused perspective, and to reposition our understanding of
both archaeology-as-memory and archaeology-as-history.
In what follows then, I aim to introduce the reader to the three syntheses. However, this is an article on
archaeology not philosophy. Materials will also be required, therefore, and so we return to our opening
vignette from Scotland. Here I draw on the ongoing work of the Ardnamurchan Transitions Project. The
project, a collaborative effort between the Universities of Leicester and Manchester and Archaeology
Scotland, examines how people have occupied the landscape of Swordle Bay, on the north coast of the
Ardnamurchan peninsula, from its first occupation, at least 5700 years ago, through to the present day. It
offers geographical containment but temporal depth, and with that the possibility for thinking through
the nature of time in archaeology. The sites excavated include Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments,
Bronze Age and Iron Age occupation, a Viking boat burial and settlements emptied during the Highland
Clearances, the process by which rural communities were removed from the land in Scotland in the 19th
century (Casella et al. 2013; Harris et al. 2014; Harris 2016; Harris et al. 2017; Harris, Cobb, and Richardson
2018). These sites offer a rich resource for thinking about the complex forms of temporality, and their
emerging synthesis.

The first synthesis: habit, or past and future as dimensions of the present
As noted, Deleuze develops three syntheses of time designed to reveal both the processes through which
time emerges, and their ontological underpinnings. The first of these, drawing especially on Hume, is
what Deleuze calls habit: the repetitive sequences out of which a notion of time emerges (Deleuze 2004,
110 O. J. T. HARRIS

91–101; cf.1991a). Linear time emerges here as the sequence of actions that give rise to habits, in the
routines that structure daily life, in the rise and fall of the sun, in the changing of the seasons. Each action
within habit depends on a previous one, and anticipates one that follows, creating a sense of direction­
ality. Deleuze’s work is non-representational, and this means that the first synthesis of time is primarily
what he calls a passive synthesis. When referring to human beings, this means that rather than actively
deciding to form habits, principally it is our habits that form us, that habits are not something that emerge
through the actions of subjects, but rather the sequence of actions that give rise to subjects: ‘these
thousand habits of which we are composed’ (Deleuze 2004, 100). Daily life emerges from these sequences
of habits that form sense of routine, order and sequence. Think of the meals that shape the events of
the day repetitively, or the demands of children or animals for particular forms of attention at particular
moments of time. Habits create linear time because they rest, fundamentally, on the notion that any
individual event will happen again and has happened before, they gain meaning through this repetition.
A one-off event is not a habit.
Habit, of course, has long been an important element in how archaeologists have conceptualised
patterns of daily life, not least through Pierre Bourdieu’s (1990) notion of habitus (e.g. Barrett 1994).
What marks this out as different? First, as noted, Deleuze’s approach to habit does not treat it as
something that subjects have – or societies or anything else has. Subjects are formed through habits
not the other way around. Second, Deleuze’s work is non-anthropocentric, and thus this approach is
broadened because habits here are not related here to human beings necessarily; non-humans
including objects have their own habits, the sequences of occurrences that bring them into being
and sustain them. A river is formed from the habitual flow of water which defines, yet wears away at,
its boundaries, just as your morning routine is defined through brushing your teeth, wearing away at
them in similar (though hopefully not too vigorous) fashion. The sun and the earth are locked in
their own habits in relation to one another. The present emerges here, Deleuze (2004, 97) argues, as
the contraction of past and future, the latter two emerging as dimensions of the former. Habit
creates the notion of sequence, it creates the potential for relations to be formed created between
occurrences in a series, between the tick and the anticipated tock of the clock (Deleuze 2004, 97).4
How does this synthesis of time help regarding archaeology? As a landscape, Swordle Bay,
Ardnamurchan, emerges through the countless habits of its human and non-human constituents. The
habits of the burn running down to the sea slowly carves different paths through its movement, leaving
scars, occasionally flooding its banks. The habits of grass synthesise energy from sunlight and soil,
providing energy for grazing animals, a set of habits that have taken place here for more than
5000 years. Within this broad sequence we can detect moments of habit that are more temporarily
contained. In one part of the bay around 1650 cal BCE, in the shelter of a prominent ridge, pits and
postholes were regularly dug (Figure 2). Perhaps related to patterns of roundhouses – later habits of
ploughs and people have muddled the relationships – we can still detect 38 occasions on which holes
were dug and used in a pattern of occupation that would have constructed a sense of place. The infilling
of these pits, both through backfilling and silting – habits of humans and non-humans – would have
allowed sequences of time to emerge as the occupation moved and shifted around. Any one moment at
this site would have been characterised by evidence of older pits, half-silted pits, empty pits awaiting fills
and pits being dug – a sequence emerging through the habits of place making. The ceramics people
made and used here pulled together past and future into the present, the history of pottery making, the
habits of the clay, its ability to hold temper, and the future use of the pottery in eating and drinking (cf.
Gosden and Malafouris 2015, 704–5). Time does not contain these events, the radiocarbon date for the
site, 1687–1612 cal BCE (at 68.2% likelihood), does not exhaust our capacity to discuss them. Instead, this
synthesis of time emerges from the routines, rhythms and repetitions at the site. Each act of digging and
 WORLD ARCHAEOLOGY 111

Figure 2. Bronze Age features revealed through the actions of archaeologists, Swordle Bay, Ardnamurchan. Photo
by author.

filling made a difference, in the landscape, in the place, and their synthesis together forms time. As
Deleuze (2004, 91) points out, the first synthesis of time is what imparts ‘direction to the arrow of time’. In
other words, the seeming linear flow of time emerges from habit, it does not prefigure it.
We have stressed that this is a passive synthesis of time here, and that the direction of time emerges
through the future and past coming together in the present through the relations generated by habit.
Deleuze identifies active versions of his syntheses too, however. The active version of the first synthesis is
secondary to its passive counterpart but is no less real for that. The active synthesis here emerges in the
work we can do to understand sequence, to put things in order so as to create a sense of flow. As
archaeologists work to place the past in sequence, we too act to synthesise time. The attempt to
sequence events in the history of a place like Swordle Bay places the particular site we have discussed
here at the end of the Early Bronze Age, a particular moment within others that run back to the Neolithic
and on to the 19th century. An active synthesis of time by archaeologists can produce this local ordering
of parts of the landscape. This is archaeology-as-history; not as the be-all and end-all of our disciplinary
aims, but as an essential element of how time emerges. This is an active synthesis that draws deliberately
and explicitly on how temporality can flow from the actions and habits of humans and non-humans.
Habit, Deleuze argues, allows us to understand how the present passes, and in attempting to create
specific and ever more detailed histories, this process is mimicked in the actions of this particular mode of
archaeological time creation.

The second synthesis: memory, or the present and future as dimensions of the past
If Hume is Deleuze’s key thinker when it comes to a consideration of habit, for the second synthesis of
time it is Bergson whose work, especially on memory, comes to the fore (Deleuze 1991b). The version of
112 O. J. T. HARRIS

memory Deleuze works with here, is quite different, however, from any notion of deliberate recall. Rather
than a purposeful act, like trying to recall where you were last Tuesday, it is primarily once again a passive
synthesis, through which, Deleuze argues, the present emerges from the past that surrounds us. In
common parlance we often speak of things being closer, or further away, in time. Bergson and Deleuze
were very critical of this spatial metaphor, however (cf. Lucas 2021, 18).5 Think about novels you have
read; with some you will be easily able to recall every twist and turn of the plot no matter how long ago
you encountered it, others fade from recall far more quickly. Some places you have not visited in ages
return to mind at a moment’s notice, others remain stubbornly intransigent to memory. In what sense –
outside of a linear and spatial notion of time – does a place you lived in as a child, that shaped almost
everything about you, lie ‘further away’ than a railway station you passed through yesterday? The past
here is not shaped by distance, or by extensive qualities, but rather by the intensity of our interaction with
it. The past here is what Deleuze, following Bergson, calls virtual, and it is actualised in the present (Harris
2021, 233; cf. Hamilakis 2013, 119ff).
The present, in this mode, is what Bergson would call the past at its most contracted, or its most
specific. Bergson’s (1991, 162) famous image of this is a cone, of which the widest level represents
the whole – or pure – past. This then contracts down through different levels of specificity until it
meets the present, where the past is at its most concentrated. Proust’s Madeline is an example of
this, a moment of consumption that contracts the virtual potentials of the past, and actualises the
specific memories of the narrator’s youth, an intensive engagement with the specific differences
that made the town of Combray what it was, ‘the in-itself of Combray’ as Deleuze (2004, 107) puts it.
Deleuze’s emphasis on the passive synthesis means that whilst deliberate recall is real and important, it
is a secondary mode of memory to how time is brought together in this synthesis. There is, Bergson (1991,
33) remarks, ‘no perception that is not full of memory’. In keeping with Deleuze’s non-anthropocentric
account, the passive synthesis of memory is not limited to human beings. We can conceptualise the
manner in which objects contain their histories as an example of this kind of material memory (Gosden
and Malafouris 2015, 703; Harris 2021, chapter 4). A single broken axe can tell us about the places it came
from, the relations in which it was caught up, and the histories of actions in which it was involved (see
Tsoraki et al. 2020). A mark on an axe revealing it was used to process bone is a contraction of the past of
that material into a particular moment in the present; it is an act of memory.
If we turn to Ardnamurchan, we can explore a single example of a how memory works in this
manner by looking at the Viking boat burial excavated in 2011, which dates to the early 10th
century CE (Harris et al. 2017, 192; Figure 3). The site is made up of a boat shaped grave, 5.2 m by
1.7 m in length into which was placed a boat, the body of a Viking, and a wide range of grave
goods. The latter included a sword, a shield, a spear, a whetstone, a copper-alloy ringed pin,
a wide bladed axe, metalworking tools and more. The past here is contracted into these objects.
Histories of journeys are made manifest in the material memories of the objects and human
remains. Isotopic analysis of the two surviving human teeth show that the person buried here was
potentially born in coastal Norway. The copper alloy ringed pin comes from Dublin. The boat too
speaks to journeys and movements now contracted into a single place, a single present. Other
times are present too. The grave was filled with stones most likely taken from the nearby Neolithic
cairn. Other pasts are made manifest in the boat burial, contracted alongside the stories of
movement of the early Medieval period. The multiple grave goods also draw on technologies,
from metal working to processing animal skins, that themselves go back millennia (cf. Webmoor
and Witmore 2008); more pasts made present in this moment of memory making. At the bottom
of the boat two flint strike alights were recovered, a technology in Europe that goes back
50,000 years at least (Sorensen, Claud, and Soressi 2018). The boat burial is Viking in one sense,
 WORLD ARCHAEOLOGY 113

Figure 3. Pre-excavation shot of the Swordle Bay Viking boat burial. Photo by author.

but it also actualises pasts that reach back to the Iron Age, the Neolithic and more. The sets of
relations emergent here are overwhelming (cf. Crellin et al. 2021, chapter 2). There is no way of
cataloguing them all; multiple temporalities emerge from a grave that is both one thing – a Viking
boat burial – and so much more (Hamilakis and Labanyi 2008, 5–6). Within this hide potential
futures too – materials that would be displayed at the British Museum, that would form part of
this publication and others. The second synthesis of time captures all these temporalities; both
present and future are dimensions of the past here (Deleuze 2004, 103).
Yet this act of laying out the memories of the materials of the Viking grave which I have
undertaken is quite different from the involuntary memories of the passive version of the second
synthesis of time. This is no Combray, no Swordle-Bay-in-itself. Instead, this emphasis on archae­
ology-as-memory, as the collapse of multiple non-linear temporalities, represents the active version
of the second synthesis. Thus, just as archaeology-as-history represents the active version of the first
synthesis of time, so approaches that set out archaeology-as-memory in fact represent the active
version of the second synthesis, bringing these memories actively into being once again (cf. Olivier
2011, 61; Lucas 2015, 11). Neither version of archaeological approaches to time, by itself, therefore,
captures all the wonderful complexity which our material has to offer; both reveal important, but
partial, windows.

The third synthesis: the eternal return, or the past and present as dimensions of the future
The final synthesis of time does not yet have an easy archaeological equivalent. It is also the hardest of the
three to grasp. Yet it provides the ground for both habit and memory (Deleuze 2004, 111). If Hume and
Bergson present the key inspirations for the first two syntheses, here Nietzsche is critical. Deleuze (2004,
50–1) begins with Nietzsche’s famous example of the ‘eternal return’. This puzzle asks: how would you
114 O. J. T. HARRIS

react if a demon came to you and told you that you would need to live your life, making precisely the
same choices, over and over again? Would you be devastated, or would you laugh? The traditional
version of this puzzle is seen as a morality tale. Have you been a good person, and lived a good life, or not?
However, Deleuze (2006, 46) and Nietzsche see rather a different message, because they argue what is
returning is not ‘the same’ but instead difference. Difference, as we touched on above, is critical to
Deleuze’s philosophy. Rather than seeing the world as made of up entities with predefined identities,
Deleuze argues the world is driven by intensive processes of difference making, or what he calls
‘difference in itself’ (2004, chapter 1; cf. Bickle 2020; Harris 2021). Thus, for Deleuze, what comes back in
an eternal return could never be the same, because what returns is the creative force of difference. Rather
than a morality tale, your response to the demon is thus based on your understanding of the world – is it
driven by a ‘logic of identity’, in which the same person lives the same life, or by difference, which means
new and creative conjunctions are always forming? Repetition here, as the title of Deleuze’s book gives
away, is always the repetition of difference.
How does this lead to a third synthesis of time? Deleuze (2004, 140) argues that it is the return of
difference that makes events possible, and with that the resources that allow both habit and memory to
form. Let us take a (somewhat) concrete example of weather patterns. It is the return of intensive
differences in pressure allows weather events, say rainfall or storms, to happen again and again, but to
happen differently each time. Without the creative potential of this difference, we would not be able to
understand the repetitive qualities of weather. The repetition or return of difference allows us to grasp the
habits of a certain landscape and its tendencies to rain or sunshine. These weather patterns, shaped in
turn by the differential histories of gravity that drive the relationship of the earth and the sun, allow other
differences – seasonal ones – to return. Here multiple differences combine to create the resources out of
which the other forms of time emerge. These times can be understood as linear, from one perspective. If
we take the example of seasons, the return of differences that drive weather patterns allow humans to
recognise last summer, the one before that and so on (the first synthesis). Alternatively, these differences
can be synthesised as co-present: the quality of summer itself (the second synthesis). Both depend on the
prior differences that drive them. Thus, any sense of linear time, one central to archaeology-as-history, or
one of co-presence, as in archaeology-as-memory, depend upon something prior to them both, the
return of difference in itself. This is prior to both human experience and to any sense of linear time: it is an
ontological or metaphysical claim.
So far, so philosophical. In Swordle Bay we can explore the flow and flux of difference in the manner in
which the Neolithic chambered cairn, Cladh Aindreis, returns as difference again and again (Harris 2016;
Figure 4). Rather than a constant presence, the cairn fluctuates in intensity in its relations with the
humans, and many of the non-humans, that have dwelt in the landscape. The cairn carries within it
differential potentials, the capacity to mark places out, to make time, to create events. These events do
not depend upon a prior flow of time, rather they create the capacity for time itself to emerge or be
synthesised.
Take any number of examples this monument offers us. At one moment at the very start of the Iron
Age people employed the cairn to differentiate a particular architectural space against which they built
a structure and dug a hearth (cf. Hingley 1996). Between 1717 and 1616 cal BC, the cairn created
a resource where memories and histories could be built and connected in the making of a Bronze Age
kerb cairn built alongside it. At the end of the first millennium AD the site offered a resource from which
stones could be gathered to fill a Viking burial, forging links through time, and claims over history and
landscape. Around 3700 cal BC the cairn was a circular monument, a place where bodies could be
differentiated, and brought together, the dead and the different times their bodies captured, mixed and
matched in the dark recesses of its central chamber. A few hundred years later, a tail was added to the
 WORLD ARCHAEOLOGY 115

monument, changing its shape, size and orientation. It was now c. 60 m in length. A ditch was dug around
the front of the monument in c. 3500 cal BCE, potentially at the same time as the tail was added. In 2006,
the cairn acted to differentiate a new archaeological time, as a group of archaeologists began a long-
running excavation of the site. Towards the end of the third millennium cal BC the chambers at the front
of the monument were sealed, the capacity of the tomb to be entered and engaged with closed off, and
Beaker pottery inserted within the layers capping the site. In each of these moments the potential of the
cairn itself drives its eruption, its emergence as a particular point in time. At other points Cladh Aindreis
creates the potential for other patterns and sequences to emerge by providing the material resources for
the habits of lichen, rainfall and gravity – the latter causing stones to tumble. The differential potential of
the cairn remains here even when it is not incorporated into the habits and memories generated by
people.
I have deliberately set out the events here in random order, so as to avoid the implication that they are
either co-present, and thus primarily about memory, or that they form a predetermined sequence, one
where history and habit are primary. The dates provided merely offer archaeological context for the
reader. We can take these moments and put them together in order: construction of the cairn;
architectural alterations; Beaker blocking; Bronze Age construction; Iron Age architecture; Viking extrac­
tion; archaeological excavation – this is a story of linear sequence, habit and history. Or we can look at how
all of these elements are co-present and think of the cairn as the contraction of different periods together,
as a virtual past actualised as memory in a particular present. Neither of these are primary, however. Instead
in each moment it is the ability of the cairn to differentiate potentials, for burials, for architecture, for
archaeology, that creates the possibility for memory and history to emerge. These differences, and their
return, that is to say the third synthesis of time, are primary. It is not a simple linear story but a pattern of
punctuated re-occurrence, of a monument that emerges and re-emerges in different ways, one that
‘happens again’ (cf. Stengers 2011).6 Like the latent power of a storm before the lightning strikes, the

Figure 4. The main chamber of Cladh Aindreis Neolithic chambered tomb, Swordle Bay, Ardnamurchan. Photo by
author.
116 O. J. T. HARRIS

power of the cairn lurks as potential, as what Deleuze (2004, 145) calls a ‘dark precursor’ in the moments
between its dynamic revelation of the flow of time.
There is more here though. At the heart of the third synthesis are specific kinds of events that represent
radical ruptures that create new possibilities for the flow and flux of time, for difference to emerge and
return in new ways. These are moments which create a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, they are a ‘caesura’ in
Deleuze’s (2004, 112) terms, they render time asymmetrical (Williams 2011, 94). Two such moments
present themselves in the archaeology of Swordle Bay. The first is the construction of the cairn itself. The
long history of Swordle Bay since the Neolithic cannot be understood outside of the monument’s
centrifugal force. Whilst the bay has considerable agricultural potential, flat terraces and building
resources, other parts of the peninsula do too. It is the presence of the cairn that calls a specific history
into existence again and again, that creates a before – Swordle with no cairn – and an after – Swordle with
cairn – in the history of this place. The possibility for linear time to exist, depends upon there being
differences to return, on the third synthesis of time, which allows for sequence, or habit, to emerge. One
other clear caesura should be noted here, especially in the context of the earlier claim that our relation­
ship with time has political consequences. In the 1850s Swordle Bay went through the process we gloss as
the Highland Clearances (Casella et al. 2013; Harris 2016). Our work has shown that this would have been
a well populated locale in the run up to this period, with as many as 90 people living here, compared to
five or so today. Whilst our excavations suggest considerable differences between the three townships
that were present in the study area, their abandonment – and deliberate destruction – represents another
clear moment of radical change, a break in the potential for time to return as it had done previously. The
history of Swordle is divided here again, once more into unequal parts, a world prior to and after the
Clearances, a world in which different events become possible and new histories can be mapped. The act
of Clearance effects not only the world after this point, but echoes back before it, changing the way in
which histories of the 17th, 18th and 19th Centuries are written.

Conclusion
The potential power of difference, which returns in the third synthesis of time thus creates the
possibility for time to be synthesised in different ways. The resources of memory depend upon this
difference, just as habit emerges from the flows of memory. The three syntheses of time offer us a non-
anthropocentric and non-linear process driven account of time. This non-anthropocentric approach is
important for a number of reasons. First, it builds towards a posthumanist approach to the past. As
detailed elsewhere (e.g. Crellin 2020; Cipolla 2021; Cipolla, Crellin, and Harris 2021; Crellin and Harris
2021; Crellin et al. 2021; Harris 2021) posthumanism is a vital move for archaeology not because it
takes attention away from human beings, but because it opens up a much more radical vision of what
it means to be human. This means that a non-anthropocentric approach to time creates room for
emergent temporal concepts that have space for forms of humanity beyond those allowed for within
our standard conceptions (cf. Rifkin 2017). Thus, even if we want to write about say, the human
experience of time, the range of ways of doing this is greatly broadened by a non-anthropocentric
account. This is a fundamentally affirmative move, therefore, creating the capacity for narratives that
enable greater space for differences between past and present. Second, it allows us to clearly resolve
the issues with which we started the article, as to whether archaeology is really about history or
memory. Both versions of the discipline privilege particular ways of synthesising time. They draw on
the resources that archaeological materials offer us and put them together in different ways. The
benefit of the approach to time outlined here is that it allows for both approaches to be placed
alongside one another within an account that celebrates a multiplicity of times.
 WORLD ARCHAEOLOGY 117

Finally, it forces us to attend to both the passive process of emergence of time and our work as
archaeologists in actively helping different temporalities to emerge. We need both chronology, and
co-presence, as Lucas (2021, 19) rightly argues, but we also need a way of understanding how they
relate. There can be no doubt that archaeologists need to recognise that time cannot always be
easily divided up into different eras or sections, that it flows and swirls and seeks different levels of
intensity; we need to attend to its duration as Bergson (1911) called it (cf. Knight and McFadyen
2020, 64). Yet we also have to recognise that it is precisely in quantifying and sequencing time that
we are able to recognise what makes different qualities of ‘co-existing and overlapping durations’
come to the fore (Thomas 2020, 130). In Swordle Bay we can tack between this and a historical
account of Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age. We can use high precision dating, or Bayesian
analysis, to define this more accurately, without demanding this be the sole arbiter of the scale at
which archaeologists should write.
The order of history need not, therefore, be the limit of what we can achieve as archaeologists
when it comes to time. Process philosophy can help us think about the patterns and connections
that go beyond the traditions of history, to speculative statements and explorations about alter­
native forms of relationships between events. Here Deleuze’s insistence on the primary nature of
difference is key. This can allow us to go beyond exploring how a particular event happened, what
its specific causes were, or how it could have been different. We can attend as well to the prior world
of differences that give rise to events in the first place (cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1994, 110). Such an
approach also allows us to think about how time emerges in sets of relations that compose humans,
non-humans, landscapes and more. This brings a freedom to explore the multiplicity of times that
categorises any moment, and with that the freedom to foreground forms of time that deny over­
arching political domination (Rifkin 2017). Deleuze’s three syntheses give us tools to map the
emergence of both qualitative and quantitative of modes of time, both memory and history, the
time of duration and the time of science. As part of a broader turn to process philosophy in
archaeology, they open up new ways to make time, and to make time matter.

Notes
1. Gavin Lucas’ (2021) new book came out after this article was submitted, and so has not been incorpo­
rated into the text as fully as it deserves.
2. James Williams (2011) provides an excellent and accessible discussion of Deleuze’s philosophy of time.
3. Indeed, the three syntheses re-emerge, if in somewhat reworked form, in Deleuze’s first book with
Guattari (Deleuze and Guattari 2013, 86–128).
4. Habit, or the first synthesis of time, thus depends on memory, the second synthesis (Deleuze 2004, 101).
5. See Canales (2015) on the tensions this caused in Bergson’s famous debate with Albert Einstein in Paris in 1922.
6. There are certainly similarities here between this and Olivier's (2020, 162) discussion of post-history, and
we can certainly agree with Olivier (2019) that time is ‘filled with returns’. But where Olivier sees this as
replacing the need for chronology and history, the argument in this article positions this as the
fundamental source from which both memory and history emerge, and thus not as a dismissal of the
latter. As Olivier (2019) makes clear, his approach sees archaeology as dealing with things and not past
societies. This is not a dualism I see as helpful.

Acknowledgments
Many thanks to Amy Bogaard, Chris Gosden and Lambros Malafouris for the initial suggestion I submit some­
thing to this edition of World Archaeology. The paper was immeasurably improved by the comments from two
peer reviewers, and from Rachel Crellin, which have left me with much to ponder. My work in Ardnamurchan
118 O. J. T. HARRIS

depends upon a whole host of people, but especially my brilliant co-directors Hannah Cobb and Phil
Richardson. Parts of the thinking for this article were done while supported by a Philip Leverhulme Prize
(PLP-2016-109) and thanks to the them for that.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust [PLP-2016-109].

Notes on contributor
Oliver J. T. Harris is Associate Professor of Archaeology at the University of Leicester, UK. His research interests
focus on the Neolithic and Bronze Age of Britain and Europe and archaeological theory. He co-directs multi-
period fieldwork on the west coast of Scotland and his books include Archaeological Theory in the New
Millennium, Archaeological Theory in Dialogue and Assembling Past Worlds.

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