Edward Swenson - Constructions of Time and History in the Pre-Columbian Andes

Archaeologists have long held that they secure a privileged position in explaining long-term historical change. Despite this overarching concern with chronology and process, archaeologists have only recently considered indigenous temporalities and modes of historical production. This book springs from a Theoretical Archaeological Group symposium (Chicago, 2013) organized to explore how time, the past, and memory were conceptualized by the ancient people of the Americas. In turn we sought to compare indigenous philosophies of time with contemporary archaeological approaches to theorizing and writing history. Entitled Envisioning Time and Imagining Place in pre-Columbian Landscapes, the symposium involved the participation of number of scholars working throughout the Americas. Although this book focuses exclusively on the Andes, the volume benefited from the exchange of ideas and compelling arguments made by conference participants. We thus extend our sincere thanks to Jonah Augustine, Katrina Burch Joosten, John Creese, Nicole Couture, Dave Haskell, Christopher Stawski, Alexi Vranich, and Mary Weismantel. Although they did not originally present papers at the TAG conference, we are also grateful that Zach Chase, Mara Jos Culquichicn-Venegas, Francisco Seoane, and Matt Sayre accepted our invitation to submit chapters to the volume. Furthermore, we express our gratitude to Tamara Bray for agreeing to write the concluding chapter in a short period of time. We also extend our deepest thanks to the acquisitions editor at the University Press of Colorado, Jessica dArbonne, for all her hard work in ensuring this volume would come to print. Despite many delays and setbacks, Jessica was always patient, encouraging, and extremely helpful. Of course, we appreciate all the support of the University Press of Colorado staff. Finally, we thank the anonymous reviewers of the chapters for their insights and criticisms, which helped improve the final product.

Recently archaeologists have endeavored to uncover subjective experiences of time and period making as a complement to the traditional construction of regional and site-based chronologies (]).

The major problem with stand-alone chronologies is that successive events are plotted in linear sequence with little attention to their duration or the retentions of such actions on later social practices ( Husserl 1966 ). Of course, chronology, as an exemplar of John McTaggarts B series of time, is an indispensable tool for representing the abstraction of times phenomenal passage (McTaggarts so-called A series) (see Gell 1992 ; Gosden 1994 ); however, when employed as historical explanation, it inevitably effaces the culturally specific experience and sensual flux of time itself ( Munn 1992 ). In other words, chronology must be expanded to encompass different modalities and durations of time if archaeologists wish to reconstruct both unique histories and temporalities ( Bailey 2007 ; Lucas 2005 ). In a similar light, anthropologists increasingly recognize that objects and landscapes (and archaeological remains in general) defy the successive event-based timescales of conventional historiography. The physical persistence of the past in the present and the efficacy of buildings and accumulated artifacts to direct future action reveal that archaeological time is dynamic and pluritemporal, one of diverse retentions, protentions, and discontinuities ( Swenson 2017 ; see also Dawdy 2010 ; Gonzlez-Ruibal 2014 ; Gosden 1994 ; Olivier 2011 ).