Ballard in the Bronze Age? Writing otherness in past and future narratives
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-03-27

The tropes of literary science fiction and archaeology (particularly prehistory) are closely connected: as the session abstract has it, archaeologists and science fiction writers construct past and future worlds out of the same social and cultural building blocks. Science fiction authors have sometimes written about the prehistoric past (or analogous cultures) with more engaging results than archaeologists! But there are different modes of science fiction, just as there are different types of archaeological narrative. Perhaps we can equate processual and post-processual approaches in archaeology respectively with ‘hard’ science fiction, seeking to extrapolate and understand the consequences of particular technological developments, and the ‘new wave’, which aimed to unsettle human experience of the world and explore other viewpoints and states of mind. Just as the ‘material turn’ in archaeological theory has served to reconcile elements of processual and post-processual approaches, this paper will suggest that both types of science fiction offer lessons for writing narratives of prehistory that seek to convey both the materiality and otherness of the past. It will also attempt to be moderately entertaining. 

Jonathan Last (Historic England)