Out of Time : Alienated temporalities in archaeological knowledge production

The transformation of complex spatial and temporal patterns into mapped and recordedarchaeological data requires archaeologists to translate temporally non-distinct processes ofexploration into a series of visual recordings of distinct moment of discovery. These visual records,produced by articulating key moments in the excavation process as cleaned and documentablecontexts and finds, form a collage of multitemporal evidence entangled, first, to other contextsarticulated previously and later in an excavation, and second, to a category of temporally distantpast of which it is said to be a record. These practices of temporal and contextual alienation,which isolate parts of a processes to construct collages of moments frozen in time, echoes theloss of authenticity, or aura, that Walter Benjamin recognized as a consequence of themechanical reproduction of art. However, while Benjamin understood mechanical reproductionto lead to the removal of art’s historical anchorage in magic and religious rituals, which hadpreviously granted it its meaning, the alienation required to translate moments in andarchaeological excavation into stabilized data takes a different form: the reproduction of contextas data. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with archaeologists working at thecutting edge of digital data recording, this paper explores the visual and epistemological practicesinvolved in translating context into archaeological data and what happens to context andcomplexity when individual moments of archaeological exploration become decontextualizedand later recontextualized as recorded data out of time and out of place.