Apologhìa for Chronology: An appraisal of chronology as a multi-layered problem
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-05-10

Over the last thirty years, time and temporality in archaeology have been the subject of a large body of literature. Despite the abundance of divergent opinions in the discussion, one crucial matter seems to stand out as a common goal: going beyond chronology. Even scholars who recognize its essential benefits, tend to construct chronology as a unilineal, directional and sequential view of history or, at least, as a set of practices enabling such view. I suggest that such an understanding of chronology can be reductive and hide the theoretical complexity that underlies the discipline. I will start by providing a more inclusive definition of chronology, characterizing it as an intellectual field that deals with time reckoning in historical investigations. I will then bring examples from archaeology, art history, historiography, diplomatics and epigraphy in order to prove that chronology can be multilinear, non-sequential, and bidirectional. Finally I will tackle the argument that chronology flattens history and makes time homogeneous as if the pace of change was constant. Indeed, one of the most common dating methods in archaeology, seriation, is solely possible as some artifacts are more resistant to change than others, and because different shapes can coexist for a long time. 

Maria Emanuela Oddo (MT School for Advanced Studies, Lucca)