Material Time

Material Time
John Robb
The Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture
Edited by Ivan Gaskell and Sarah Anne Carter

Print Publication Date: Jun 2020 Subject: History, Social and Cultural History
Online Publication Date: May 2020 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199341764.013.19

Abstract and Keywords

Material culture theorists have had limited success in integrating the material qualities of
objects into social and historical interpretations. Following Ingold, this chapter argues
that material qualities have to be understood as experientially mediated affordances for
human action. One of the most salient material qualities of an object is its inherent tem­
porality—how the processes it forms unfold in time. The temporal qualities of materials
demonstrably structure how people understand and use them in both obvious and subtle
ways. Building upon this, I argue that much of what people do when they work with mate­
rials is to cope with their temporality to align them with human needs and the rhythms of
social life. The chapter finishes by pointing out some important implications of the materi­
ality of time for historical analysis.

Keywords: materiality, time, material qualities, scheduling, storage

IN the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures outside Paris, there is a platinum alloy
bar that was, for almost a century, the meter—the permanent international reference
standard for how long a meter really is. What would be the equivalent for time? Can one
imagine an official metal bar recording how long a minute is? The obvious, common-sense
reply is that this is silly: you cannot represent time materially because time is not materi­
al. It is invisible, intangible, fleeting. By definition, time is transient and material things
have duration.

But precisely the opposite is true. For humans, time is inherently a material process. Ma­
terial things have inherent temporalities and it is through materials’ processes that we
know time. Moreover, this is not a trivial fact. Materiality theorists have argued persua­
sively that the material qualities of objects are central to how human interaction with
things unfolds, but they have typically discussed qualities such as color and hardness. A
material’s temporality is at least as important as its visual qualities and texture, and it
lies at the heart of both the experiential rhythms of social life and some of the most fun­
damental strategies people develop for dealing with things—scheduling and storage, for

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Material Time

example. To understand human technologies, thus, we need to understand basic issues of

materiality of which temporal qualities are a key example.

Materiality and Temporality

Since the turn of the millennium, a wide range of theorists have rediscovered material
culture, in fields ranging across literature, history, sociology, anthropology, and philoso­
phy. One of the major problems is that of materiality. The point of material culture, of
course, is that it is material: there must be a fundamental connection between the materi­
al substance which things are made of and their social and historical being. Yet under­
standing this connection has proved remarkably recalcitrant. Virtually all material culture
theorists agree that matter is not simply a blank parchment to be written by sociality, a
pure, generic substance to be imprinted with form by social need; the (p. 124) specific ma­
terial qualities of things are essential. But operationalizing this analytically is more diffi­
cult. The great bulk of work on material culture in history, sociology, anthropology, and
psychology is concerned principally with the social construction and discourse of objects;
it has very little to say about their actual material qualities and what difference they
make. Within archaeology and anthropology, the question is often posed through the term
“materiality.”1 However, anthropologist Tim Ingold has charged that the term provides
simply a vague placeholder for conceptualizing the implications of the qualities of
matter,2 and it is true that materiality theorists often either focus exclusively on social
construction of the object or reduce the material qualities exclusively to the level of stat­
ing that stone is hard or ocher is red, rendering them trivial and obvious. Objects thus be­
come hollow or superficial: they are convenient surfaces merely to be inscribed with so­
cial meaning, like three-dimensional printed replicas of themselves made from generic
plastic substance.

The most useful approach to materiality is via seeing material qualities as affordances,
following Ingold and building upon James Gibson’s work in environmental psychology.3 In
this model, an external, material world certainly exists independent of human perception,
but in order for people to act in it, they have to perceive and understand it. Thus, the spe­
cific material qualities of things—weight, hardness, color, texture, workability, taste,
smell, and many others—exist as potentialities until people experience and cognize them.
Material qualities are thus not physical properties which dictate how people perceive or
use substances, in an unmediated way. Instead, they provide affordances for humans’ per­
ception and use; they emerge from a process of negotiation between the material world
and humans’ abilities to understand it and work with it. This is obvious: iron-bearing min­
erals afford a raw material which can be transformed into metal only once you under­
stand that they do and have the technology to extract iron; through most of human histo­
ry, they afforded a source of color. A forest affords the possibility of leisure and an en­
counter with nature only for people to whom “leisure” and “nature” are concepts through
which they orient themselves in the world; to other people, it may afford other possibili­
ties, from a foraged dinner to primal terror. Affordances do not dictate how people under­
stand and work with materials, but we have to negotiate with them. We do not have to
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Material Time

comment on the solidity of a stone, but people are ethno-realists whose action is ground­
ed in encounter with the world; given stone’s contrast with other materials we commonly
interact with, if we choose to do so, it is much more likely that we will say that it is hard
than that we will say it is soft.

This approach has two further implications for understanding materiality. One is that ma­
terial qualities do not merely provide convenient signifiers in the construction of meaning
(e.g., stone provides a convenient signifier of durability); instead, they are emergent
properties which are interwoven with all the processes of interacting experientially with
materials. For instance, basic production techniques and strategies will integrate and
even produce specific material qualities. Temporality provides a good example of this. Se­
condly, although our intellectual instinct is to draw a hard and fast line between the quali­
ties which the world has regardless of the observer and those which human observers im­
pute to it, the properties which happen independently and (p. 125) those which are caused
by human intervention—between “nature” and “culture” in other words—such a distinc­
tion is more misleading than useful here; for understanding materiality, the real action is
in the indivisible mediating zone in which humans perceive and act.

The Materiality of Time

Does time exist, and if so, in what sense? The nature of time is a matter for philosophers,
cosmologists, or perhaps deities, so it is not addressed directly here. Rather, this chapter
proceeds on the assumption that time exists and that it allows events to happen sequen­
tially in some way. The concern here is in how humans know time and integrate it into
their experiential understanding of the world. This issue has been addressed extensively
by anthropologists and archaeologists, who have principally discussed the experience of
the flow of time and how different cultures understand time through models such as
cyclicity and linearity.4 Another body of literature by historians and archaeologists ex­
plores scales of time within a distinctly historical analytical framework.5 Neither litera­
ture, however, really considers how material things intervene in the experience of time.
This is fundamentally the same epistemological question whether we are asking how peo­
ple in general make sense of their daily lives, or how professional historians and archaeol­
ogists define events, date them, and put them in order when creating historical interpre­
tations.

To start in the obvious place, how do humans understand the passage of time? The an­
swer is straightforward: we measure time entirely by the material processes which unfold
in it. Most basic frameworks of chronometry rests upon dates, which are a notational way
of reckoning time based upon the earth’s physical processes of rotation (days) and orbit
around the sun (years and seasons). Within a day, clocks measure time through any of
several usefully regular physical processes: the tension of a metal spring mediated by a
geared mechanism, the swing of a pendulum, and the vibrations of quartz crystals or even
atomic particles. Indeed, the history of both chronometry in general and absolute dating
methods in archaeology is all about the search for observable physical processes regular

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Material Time

enough to measure the passing of time by: in archaeology this includes not only radioac­
tive decay (as in radiocarbon and uranium/thorium dating) but the accumulation of sub­
atomic particles (optically stimulated luminescence dating, or thermoluminescence), and
even the seasonal growth of trees (dendrochronology). We equally depend upon material
processes to know time in daily experience. Clock time is our conventional framework,
but if one is deprived of it, one judges the time by various clues which are either material
in themselves or represent material processes: events which have or have not occurred
(the mail being delivered, the morning train passing by), the quality of light and dark­
ness, rhythms of noise (the traffic in the streets, the birds in the hedges). As experiments
of people living in isolation chambers or deep caves show, when other clues are taken
away, humans understand time through the yardstick of their own bodily rhythms.

From here, it is a simple step to argue that among a material’s relevant qualities
(p. 126)

is how it behaves temporally. The possibility that material things have inherent temporali­
ties has rarely been discussed, creating the impression that things are temporally neu­
tral, that they are fitted into time entirely by social use and convention. Temporality as a
material quality has been discussed only by Ingold.6 Ingold argues that materials are al­
ways in flux, never free from time and change. While Ingold is interested philosophically
in matter as an almost animate substance, this Heraclitean formulation misses the point.
In a philosophical sense, it is true that a rock is embedded in time as much as a soap bub­
ble is: a boulder may be always eroding fluidly. But from the point of view of a human sit­
ting on the boulder, it is a static fixture. Similarly, a human’s body is always in flux, but it
forms a static, planetary world to the bacteria living on his teeth or in her gut. And, in­
deed, the human may change the temporality of the stone by eroding it more quickly, just
as the bacteria may change the temporality of the body they inhabit by maintaining its
health or by infecting it. The point is that it is not the absolute fact of temporal change
which is important, but the temporality which emerges from an object’s material qualities
as they afford possibilities of use, inhabitation, and understanding to the subject.

The temporality of an object derives from the nature of the relational processes it can be
involved in. These processes are not uniform; different processes happen to, and with, dif­
ferent materials and objects. Clearly, except for those rare processes so linear and regu­
lar that we can use them for chronometry, this temporality will only be an approximation,
a generalization, a center of gravity for a material’s possibilities: most processes involv­
ing stone may unfold slowly, but it can be transformed in an instant through a catastroph­
ic earthquake or through dynamite. But this contingency is true for all material qualities;
the redness of a stone vanishes in the dark, water can undergo a phase change into ice or
steam, without undermining their general affordances of redness or liquidity. As a gener­
alization, the temporality of a material is defined by the speed and pattern with which its
most salient and characteristic processes unfold. For the student of material culture, this
is enormously encouraging. As with the grain in wood, the signs of melting and crystal­
lization in metal, or the remodeling of bone, it means that all things have their past
locked up in their physical structure, whether we can read it readily or not.

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Material Time

The time of words illustrates this point. Although spoken words may seem immaterial,
they consist of vibrations in air; you cannot transmit speech in a vacuum. To the extent
that they have an inherent temporality, words are proverbially fleeting. This is a material
quality of their vehicle of transmission; sound vibrations can be produced rapidly in al­
most infinite variety, spread almost instantaneously, and dissipate rapidly. These material
features are so fundamental that speech evolved around them, and they condition how
sound is used socially. We usually acknowledge the fluidity of words in disparaging terms
(for instance, by saying that spoken promises have little value because they vanish, unlike
written words or deeds). But the temporality of words runs much deeper than that. Com­
munication, in fact, presupposes the temporality of words. Communicating with sound re­
quires the speed, flexibility, and nuance with which we can speak; holding a conversation
in written rather than spoken form (for instance, via a (p. 127) typed Internet chat) re­
quires linguistic adaptation to compensate for the reduced speed and narrower band of
communication. Beyond this, acting socially often requires change and situationality, los­
ing the past and acting spontaneously, the fungibility of words, the ability to communicate
in a given moment without being straitjacketed by all the fossilized wordage one has ever
uttered. And imagine a world in which any sound did not dissipate quickly but remained
floating in the air indefinitely; in the dense sonic clutter, any kind of detailed utterance
would rapidly become incomprehensible.

In some ways, the temporality of words becomes most apparent when we transpose them
into media other than sound waves; this not only changes how long they last but also
makes them into different speech acts. For example, until the invention of recording me­
dia allowed sounds to be reproduced and heard in a place and at a time other than when
and where they were first made, all music was live music; all speech was live speech. Un­
til the invention of writing systems about five thousand years ago, the only way to ensure
faithful reproduction and transmission of spoken words would have been by liturgical
means, such as ritual practices stressing the verbatim reproduction of a fixed wordage.7
Writing itself is a transformative act which gives fixity and authority to speech, a distinc­
tion replicated in further distinctions between ephemeral or erasable writings and ones
given the authority of permanence by inscription in media such as stone.

Just as earth time is almost always originally rooted in the materiality of astronomical cy­
cles, human time is originally rooted in the materiality of the body. The temporality of hu­
mans as material objects is their biography, an elastic story with a tough core extending
from conception and birth through growth and maturation, reproduction, degeneration,
death, and, frequently, transformation into postmortal social beings. As historical changes
in the ages of menarche, puberty, parenthood, and death illustrate, the temporality of the
body is not a fixed biological temporality overlaid by sociality, but a temporality of some­
thing which is always simultaneously biological and social. For instance, dividing the hu­
man biography into stages such as infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old
age may be a cultural interpretation of the biological processes of growth, maturity, and
degeneration, but once someone is assigned to such a category, the decision may have bi­
ological consequences which shape how her body changes physically (for instance,
through patterns of work, nourishment, sexuality, and exposure to risk and harm).8 We in­
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Material Time

tervene in the temporality of the body both in life, around the time of death—both to re­
tard death and to speed it up (withdrawing life support from the terminally ill, for in­
stance), and after death in processes such as embalming, cremation, mummification, and
memorialization.

The biography creates a scale of narrative time mediating between day-to-day social in­
teraction and the cosmological or ritual time.9 Birth, growth, aging, and death provide
metaphors for understanding change in other things, and generalized biographies pro­
vide units of time such as the generation, the unit of time marking the maximum change
in an individual’s social capacity. The human body provides a yardstick of time in other
ways, for instance, in our capacity to cope with change. We learn our basic framework of
perception, categorization, and language in early childhood, along with many motor
skills, and these things thenceforth are deeply embedded psychologically: if these things
(p. 128) change slowly, we can cope with change, even if we are keenly aware of it. But if

change happens with a rapidity that outstrips our capacity to relearn, the result may be
psychological dislocation and trauma.

At the other extreme of temporality is stone, a proverbially enduring substance. Stone’s

hardness makes it durable and resistant to change, as well as slower and more costly to
work than rival substances such as earth and wood, particularly by hand. These qualities
make it difficult to use for short-term or expedient purposes, but they make it ideal for
something which is made to endure, or which is intended to be seen as enduring. The
best-discussed case of the temporality of a specific material concerns how stone was used
throughout much of Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe in ritual structures such as mega­
lithic tombs, menhirs, and henges. As archaeologist Richard Bradley originally argued,
such structures, with their massive permanence, generated a sense of ritual time distinct
from quotidian time.10 More recently, stone’s hardness and durability has been associated
with the permanence of the supernatural; it has been suggested, for instance, that the
stones at Stonehenge represent human beings after a process of “hardening” into ances­
tral figures, and there is general consensus that the stone statue-stelae portraying an­
thropomorphic beings in Western Europe between 3000 and 2000 BCE represent or
present ancestral figures.11

These examples give some important and common illustrations of how material things are
enmeshed in processes which have characteristic temporalities. Moreover, they show how
people are usually keenly aware of the temporal characteristics of things, not merely in
order to be able to manage things practically, but often as the basis for cultural senses of
time of different natures. Indeed, we often play with temporality by transposing things to
a different temporal key. For example, beyond shaping our ability to communicate, the
temporality of sounds shapes how we think about communication. The transience of
speech forms part of our sense of what speech as a social genre means (as opposed to
writing). And when permanence is needed, we transfer speech to more enduring material
forms: writing on paper, inscription in stone. Thus, the ability to shift communication
through media with different temporalities like a set of gears provides a social resource
for responding to social need. Similarly, transferring a social being from a medium which

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Material Time

endures in biographical time to a medium embedded in longer time effects a transforma­

tion in their nature. The temporality of stone is thus used creatively in the paradox of
stone people such as the human statues found across Europe in the third millennium
BCE, a form of abstraction which transforms something mobile, responsive, and living
within biographical time to something massive, stationary, and (from the perspective of
human time) permanent.

Temporal Strategies: Managing Time

The inherent temporality of material things is one of their most salient characteristics in
structuring how people interact with them. In the parlance of actor network theory,
action originates in heterogeneous networks of actants which include both people
(p. 129)

and things, and temporality forms one of the key characteristics of actants which condi­
tion how actions unfold.12 Things have processes unfolding at different paces. This means
that humans need constantly to coordinate and manage the pace of things. Such time
management is built into the basic fabric of how people interact with material culture. Ex­
amples are legion, and they range from simple to subtle and complex. On a superficial
level, such interactions are often a way of adapting the rhythms of things to the needs of
human schedules. But things are not infinitely malleable; each material offers a limited
envelope for how far its processes may be rescheduled, and every such intervention im­
poses its own technological subroutines and space-time demands on people. They are
therefore anything but the simple imposition of human structure upon passive material.

Four examples of types of material change involving material things and people in dynam­
ic relationships follow. The first is what can be termed accelerating processes. Material
processes can be catalyzed in many ways; many interventions which fragment or heat ma­
terials speed up processes. Plowing speeds up water absorption, air uptake, and root pen­
etration of the earth, just as manuring speeds growth and sheltering seedlings allows
growth earlier in the growing season. Processing foods in specific ways—for instance,
grinding grain—and cooking change the speed with which we can eat and break down
food. Drying lumber in heated environments shortens the time before it can be used for
carpentry. Careful composting converts waste to useful material more quickly; indeed,
cremation accomplishes rapidly a bodily transformation which otherwise could take a
much longer period.

The second example is retarding processes. Conversely, we often retard material process­
es to coordinate their times with our scheduling needs. This is usually done either by al­
tering the environmental conditions to render them more stable—storing food in cold,
frozen, oxygen-deprived, salty, or acidic conditions—or by transforming them material in­
to a more stable object. Pottery is fired to render it stone-like; leather is tanned to make it
less perishable; grain is dried to prevent bacterial and fungal growth so that it can be
consumed when people need it rather than when it is about to spoil.

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Material Time

Maintenance schedules form the third example. Human projects often involve stability or
stasis; nobody wants a castle built upon sand, or even one which requires constant paint­
ing and repair. Things, conversely, often want to change. Many objects, particularly large
and complex ones such as bodies, houses, cars, and roads, form ongoing projects of con­
stant maintenance whose schedule is set by the nature of the material and its inherent
tendencies to change. This is an argument which will ring true to those who have to get
their hair cut, mow lawns, repaint houses, and change the oil in their car. But such needs
typify the past as well—for instance, the constant need to rethatch and replaster houses,
to coppice woodland, prune fruit trees and maintain herds, and to maintain agricultural
terraces and irrigation canals in working order. Buying a house or building up a family
herd may take years from planning to fruition and involve constant attention and mainte­
nance once accomplished. In this sense, our important possessions are not merely things;
they are projects, often ones which involve intricate scheduling and commitment over
long time spans, and they possess as well as are possessed by people.

Fourth is storage and scheduling. Scheduling coordinates need with the availabili­
(p. 130)

ty of resources; storage coordinates availability with need. Humans originated as highly

mobile foragers mapping their movements onto plant and game resources, and it is likely
that storage was one of humans’ earliest and most important adaptations. Carrying con­
tainers such as fiber or skin bags and nets allow mobile people to use resources over
longer windows of time, not merely when present at the resources’ source, and though
organic materials are poorly attested in archaeology, carrying containers were likely one
of the earliest technologies. Storage probably originated as caches of food to be revisited.
Sedentary agricultural lifestyles were a major development, with people centering their
settlement around an annual hoard of carefully stored food; some form of silo or granary
is evident at most early agricultural villages. Such stored resources were not neutral
technologies, but restructured patterns of movement and sedentism, tethering people to
places. Larger-scale storage for industrial reasons (such as the stockpiling of raw materi­
als), for commercial reasons (such as the collection of products for trade), and for politi­
cal reasons (such as taxation for redistribution) really becomes evident with complex poli­
ties. Inter generational transmission of wealth is a particular form of storage. We now
take storage of all kinds as a natural and self-evident mechanism in many chains of social
action, without recognizing its historical specificity as a tactic in managing the temporal
flow of materials.

These examples illustrate the general directions of how people manage the temporality of
things, but the effects of material temporality can be much more subtle when worked out
in detail. For instance, things that are available in limited temporal windows impose par­
ticular demands and conditions on human use. They often have a higher cost, or the cost
can vary wildly through seasons of abundance and scarcity, as with highly perishable pro­
duce. Similarly, hearing singers and actors in time-restricted live performance is differ­
ently valued, and priced than hearing their performance stored reproducibly and trans­
ferrably. Another example is furnished by speed in capitalist production. In a world in
which time and money are interconvertible via the cost of labor or the opportunity cost of
land and materials, inherently slow things also have different costs and social careers.
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Material Time

Slow food costs more than fast food, and if a factory manager can cut a few minutes off
the cost of producing something the result is more profit. Wood is a fascinating example
of how material temporality affects both economics and design. It takes a long time to
grow a tree with a thick trunk. Moreover, the slower trees grow, the tougher their wood
is; but hardwood forests tie up capital longer and deliver profits more slowly than fast-
growing conifer plantations; hence, oak and other hardwoods are much more expensive
than softwoods such as pine and fir. Thus, commercially planted forests grow fast-grow­
ing softwoods almost exclusively. Moreover, trees in many commercial forests are har­
vested at a standard diameter of about 40 centimeters. This produces a large yield of nar­
row softwood timbers. Hence, pieces of wood larger than about 20 centimeters across are
relatively costly, and many uses (such as floorboards, paneling, and furniture) which once
used wide or solid timbers have been redesigned to use either narrow strips of wood or
composite wood-based materials such as plywood, chipboard, or boards made from thin
strips bonded together. In this example, material (p. 131) culture design has shifted direct­
ly in response to how the temporality of wood meshes with the needs of the economic sys­
tem.

To understand how the time of materials helps generate the rhythms of social life, it is
useful to turn from disparate illustrations to a single historical scenario. Here let’s make
a foray into the Central Mediterranean Neolithic. This is Italy and adjacent areas such as
Dalmatia, Sardinia, Sicily, and Malta between about 6000 and 4000 BCE (as this example
has already been described in detail, it can be summarized briefly here13). This is a low-
tech, slow-tech world, a world of small hamlets and villages, settlements of a few dozen
people farming wheat, barley, and pulses, and keeping sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs.
They did a little hunting and gathering, and a fair amount of low-key ritualism. It is not a
world of hierarchy; nor is it a world of elaborate ritualism like the Neolithic of Stone­
henge. It is a world of everyday social projects such as building villages, exchanging ani­
mals, and journeying to visit neighbors, the pursuit of which generated the relations and
preoccupations of social life. Managing the time built into the basic materials of life was
integral to these projects.

Aside from the basic ecological seasonality of farming—which meant an ongoing rhythm
of sowing and harvests, and a commitment to storage and sedentism—other projects had
their own rhythms. Houses were small wattle-and-daub huts, rarely longer than 5 meters,
sheltering a few people. As a technology, such structures had a lifespan of perhaps twen­
ty or thirty years, and they required regular maintenance of daub and thatch to remain in
condition. They also required embedded routines with their own temporal structure; for
instance, house building would have required a long preparation period during which one
quarried heaps of clay, gathered stacks of straw and sticks (perhaps from woods coppiced
a year or two in advance), and twisted huge lengths of twine to tie the frame together.
Then there was the temporality of animals. The vegetable staples—grains and pulses—
once dried could be stored indefinitely and prepared in any quantities at any time. In con­
trast, meat came in large, perishable packages; when cattle were slaughtered, a small
household was faced with the problem of consuming large quantities of soon-to-decay
meat within a short window of time. The solution was to hold a feast, converting quanti­
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Material Time

ties of perishable meat far too large for a household to consume into social obligation and
reciprocity—a form of the “social storage” strategy common in Neolithic Europe.14 On a
larger scale, livestock were important social valuables, and building up and managing a
family herd would have been a multiyear, careful undertaking whose pace was set not on­
ly by household needs and ambitions, but also by parameters such as animal reproduction
and demography.

Among made objects, making pottery was an art of expert timing, with a highly struc­
tured chaîne opératoire, each stage of which required careful understanding of the
changes clay underwent. Weathering gathered clay would have taken weeks or months.
Molding a vessel, adding features such as handles and lugs, impressing decoration, dry­
ing vessels, burnishing surfaces, and firing all had to be carried out within specific win­
dows of time, on the order of hours, as the clay being worked dried, heated, or cooled.
Firing rendered vessels permanent, placing them into another scale of time. On a larger
scale, the lifespan of finished pots affected the historic career of pottery types. Large,
thick, (p. 132) durable, and rarely moved storage vessels provided long-lasting prototypes
for potters making new pots and thus reproducing this “distributed object” (in Alfred
Gell’s sense of the term15). Consequently, such vessels changed little throughout the
1,500 years of the Early and Middle Neolithic. In contrast, much as it is the coffee cups
and cereal bowls which break most commonly in today’s household pottery, it was the
small, relatively fragile, frequently handled ornate bowls which broke most often in the
Neolithic. Hence, these had a much more rapid turnover, and the assemblage at any giv­
en point which provided prototypes for potters making new vessels had a much shallower
time depth. The result was that these styles underwent much more rapid stylistic drift.

Stone axes provide another example of how an object’s lifespan was conditioned by its
material temporality. Axes were an important Neolithic valuable, often made from meta­
morphic stone such as amphibolite imported over long distances and worked with great
labor to take aesthetically attractive forms and a shining, high-gloss surface. While stone
changes and weathers in geological time, in a human time scale it is stable, virtually stat­
ic; the management of stasis or change in axes depended entirely upon how humans
chose to shape their biographies. In making an axe, by far the greatest amount of time
would have been the final polishing to obtain its lucid surface. This lucid surface was not
functionally needed, but it was important for axes’ social roles as valuables and perhaps
magical objects, and its perfection was immediately visible to the eye; axes thus stored
and displayed the time put into making them. An unused axe could last in pristine condi­
tion forever (at least in terms of human time), as many in museums still demonstrate. But
axes were also working tools, for woodcutting, carpentry, and other tasks, and they may
have served as weapons as well. When they were used as working tools, axes were liable
to break or dull, after which they needed reshaping or resharpening. Reshaping axes af­
ter wear or breakage rapidly made them smaller. Use, breakage, and reworking were
thus reductive one-way processes, and after a certain point an axe would become too
small to use further. Axes thus had bifurcated biographies depending upon how humans
chose to use them. Axes found on living sites are usually worn and broken fragments,
while axes found in caches or ritual depositions are usually intact and ready to resume
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Material Time

their lives as social valuables. The biographies of axes, thus, were managed; some were
rapidly consumed as working tools, while others put them in a kind of temporal stasis and
preserved them as social capital.

We could review the temporality of other Neolithic Mediterranean projects—the fast and
unidirectional reduction of flint and obsidian, the strategies of storage and scheduling of
all kinds of material, the seasonality of sea travel, the cultural demography shaping the
growth and abandonment of little communities—but these instances illustrate four impor­
tant points that have implications for historical analysis.

First, the temporality of materials acts as an affordance in Ingold’s sense. It does not de­
termine what one does with a material; there are often alternative ways of dealing with it.
For instance, our Neolithic villagers could decide whether to consume an axe quickly or
reserve it for future use; they could have developed ways of storing meat rather than
holding feasts to consume it rapidly. But it establishes one of the parameters of the situa­
tion one has to think about, one of the claims the material as an actant makes upon the
unfolding chain of events.

The second concerns André Leroi-Gourhan’s concept of the chaîne opératoire, or

(p. 133)

operational sequence, with which anthropologists of technology are familiar. This speci­
fies the sequence of steps which must be carried out to make something, or in a wider
sense to effect a social operation.16 In an immediate, analytical sense, the chaîne opéra­
toire is where the temporality of materials enters the equation. Productive acts have not
only a sequence but a duration. Some, such as weathering a heap of clay for potting or
leaving an animal in its pasture, can be extended or compressed elastically, allowing a
project to be hurried up or shelved until it suits a social need. Others, such as dealing
with a freshly killed cow or molding and finishing a complex vessel, require specific kinds
of actions within quite narrow windows of time. A key step in socializing the temporality
of materials, therefore, is managing each step—aligning a step which requires intense ac­
tivity with a lull in other rhythms or with an event which will bring together lots of
helpers, or figuring out how to convert a highly structured moment into an elastic one
(such as processing a volatile object to make it storable).

Third, the temporality of materials often acts at several scales of time. There is the se­
quence of actions needed to deal with transforming or using materials in an immediate
sense—whether you have to strike while the iron is hot or can leave a pot to simmer unat­
tended. But in a larger scale, these rhythms are also built into larger institutions, which
are mediated and shaped by other needs. Killing an animal may trigger a feast, but one
does not kill an animal haphazardly; it is part of a calculated decision to convert social
capital on the hoof into action. The decision of which temporal track to channel an axe in­
to is a social decision integrated into micro politics of other kinds. Material temporality
will be most obviously seen in social worlds dependent upon a few resources with tightly
defined temporalities—the staple harvest, the annual salmon run, and so on. But it re­
mains a pervasive if often quite subtle conditioning factor in many situations. In the earli­
er example of modern wood production, basic schedules of growth percolate through the

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Material Time

economics of the industry as far as the design of furniture which consumers can buy. As
another instance, in the Central Mediterranean Neolithic, the normative burial rites made
use of the gradual dissolution of the body to allow the remembered individual to merge
gradually with the history of the group. This is a typical role of funerary rites and ideolo­
gies, which mediate the visible material changes triggered by dying, death, and a shift
from metabolism to decomposition and map them onto a larger narrative of individual bi­
ography and a larger scale of group history.

Fourth, as one expands the scope of analysis, material temporalities become cross-linked.
The master narrative which coordinates many schedules in most societies is that of sea­
sonal cycles, which are always both ecological and economic and social. But other cross-
linkings also are often established. For example, in the Italian Neolithic, houses were of­
ten intentionally burnt down, probably to mark the death of the people living in them or
the dissolution of the social unit they represented. In effect, the history of the group is
written in a generational time made from the merged biographies of the people compos­
ing the local group, and this forms a temporal framework into which the lifespans of
houses were fitted by rituals of intentional destruction. The composite effect of such
cross-linkings among the many projects people undertake is to place material temporali­
ties at the heart of the compelling rhythms of social life. In this sense, (p. 134) people live
in “taskscapes” (in Ingold’s term), the accumulated rhythms and commitments of all their
activities; this is the key point that Ingold draws our attention to in his wonderfully in­
sightful phrase “the temporality of the landscape.”17

Finally, the temporality of materials not only conditions how people interact with them; it
can also form a symbolic resource as well. One example is the symbolism of stone, noted
earlier, used to transform both words into lasting statements and people into beings exist­
ing on another plane of time. Temporal structure also provides drama via the contrast be­
tween times of fast and slow activity, free or coordinated activity, low-risk and hazardous
activity; for instance, in pottery production on most scales from craft to early industry, the
highly structured, irreversible moment of firing is often the dramatic climax of the opera­
tion. And when time is understood as a proxy for labor, objects which store and display
time visibly can form special kinds of valuables; polished stone axes took on this role in
the Neolithic, much as high-end textiles which condensed huge amounts of labor did in
the Iron Age and Classical periods.

Conclusions and Implications: Timing Is All

Material culture theorists have had limited success in integrating the material qualities of
objects into social and historical interpretations. Sometimes this is simply because they
have been interested principally in social discourses about objects rather than in the ob­
jects themselves, but it is also probably because discussion of material qualities has re­
mained at a somewhat superficial level—for instance, focusing upon colors and what they
can be used to symbolize, rather than going into the details of how people interact with
objects and materials. I have tried to argue that one of the most salient material qualities

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Material Time

of an object is its temporality—how the processes it forms unfold in time. The temporal
qualities of materials demonstrably structure how people understand and use them in
both obvious and subtle ways.

Much of what people do when they work with materials is to cope with their temporality.
Humans develop complex strategies for speeding up and slowing down material process­
es to align them with their needs and the rhythms of social life. Scheduling and storage
regimes superimpose multiple fields of activity to create an overall time map of human
life. Moreover, many of these strategies of temporal management are not trivial matters
of putting an object on a shelf until you are ready to use it; they involve major transforma­
tive efforts such as plowing fields, converting milk into cheese and butter, and tanning
leather, which themselves structure other things. Beyond this, the inherent temporality of
things is apparent in the chaînes opératoires and maintenance schedules they impose on
humans in order to simply remain usable. Managing the temporality of objects is thus not
really a matter of imposing a human social logic on (p. 135) a receptive material world; it
creates a world of negotiation where the social and the material reciprocally and inextri­
cably structure each other.

There are four sets of theoretical implications for historical analysis—ideas which really
require further exploration. The first concerns object biographies and materiality. How
does this discussion help the historian or archaeologist trying to interpret a specific case
of material culture? Returning to the question of materiality, it is clearly not enough sim­
ply to reinsert the object in its historical context and read it semiotically as a social text.
Without coming to grips with the material qualities of the object and how they structure
its social life, we can at best only partially understand why objects were important to an­
cient people, how they gave form to ancient lives, and why they were the way they were.
Using temporal qualities as an example, we see that materials never determine the uses
people make of them, nor do people impose their projects randomly upon materials,
sculpting the Colosseum out of ice or writing emails carved in stone. Rather, making and
using things is a prolonged negotiation in which humans recognize, respond to, use, or
redefine the material qualities of an object, often with remarkable attention, knowledge,
and skill—not only technical skill but often conceptual and organizational acuity as well.

In analyzing the temporality of objects, this leads us methodologically toward the familiar
concepts of the chaîne opératoire and the object biography18—both ways of conceptualiz­
ing the sequence of operations involved in making and using a thing. These are usually
established by a combination of close analysis of the actual substance of a thing (often
with scientific techniques to characterize its sources and working methods), analyses of
its use contexts, traces of wear, signs of repurposing, and depositional context, often with
experimental work as an adjunct. But the difference is that these sequences are not inter­
preted merely as necessary or functional technological pathways; rather, the temporal
trajectory of an object is in itself an achievement, a reworking of the temporal possibili­
ties of the material which is frequently both technically accomplished and conceptually
astute.

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Material Time

The second implication concerns reflexivity in the practices of both history and archaeolo­
gy, and the character of objects as “time travelers.” It is obvious that there is a link be­
tween the material qualities of objects and their long-term historical careers. From words
upward, evanescent or even moderately ephemeral materials vanish from our historical
and archaeological consciousness. The freak preservation of “Ötzi,” the Tyrolean Ice Man,
and his organic finds, has taught us almost all we know about what clothing Europeans
wore at 3000 BCE;19 learning a single Neolithic song would transform our knowledge of
the period entirely. But the material qualities of things also condition their historical ca­
reers in subtler ways. To take an example, Neolithic pottery design typically required de­
tailed local social knowledge to interpret its stylistic cues. This defines a temporal brack­
eting, even if it is one not apparent at first sight: local social knowledge decays rapidly,
and even within the thousand-year span of the Earlier and Middle Neolithic, earlier pot­
tery styles probably meant little to people encountering fragments of old pottery. In con­
trast, Neolithic axes had (literally and figuratively) more superficial designs; their aes­
thetic emphasized readily cognized features such as the (p. 136) color of stone and surface
gloss, which require much less context. This conceptual portability, which allowed them
to travel across widely separated Neolithic societies, has also helped them to slide down
through the ages. They were thus repeatedly collected and reinterpreted by later peo­
ples, from Classical Greeks and Romans to modern farmers, antiquarians, and archaeolo­
gists. There are important studies yet to be done about the other means by which objects
make their way through time via strategies of translation which make them less ephemer­
al or localized, freer from restrictions of medium or knowledge base (for instance, by
replication into drawings, photographs, imitations, free-floating designs, or generic
styles).

The third implication emerges from what we might term the political logic of temporality
regarding, in particular, storage and control. Ways of dealing with temporal challenges
have political implications. For example, when key resources are available for short, per­
haps unpredictable intervals, humans have developed three basic options: mobility to ac­
cess a range of resources as they become available, reciprocity to even out local short­
falls, and storage to make good shortfalls. But these have very different political effects;
for instance, the first two tend to inhibit the development of inequality, while the third
creates a resource which can be used as political capital. The shift over human history
from scheduling to storage goes hand in hand with a historical increase in inequality.
Property and wealth provide another example. What is the intergenerational transmission
of wealth if not a way of having specific people–thing relations outlast the materiality of
the body? The development of property rights allows the individual body to be substituted
by a collective kin or corporate body which, ideally, lasts as long as the thing worth pos­
sessing. Such arrangements act as check-dams in the historical flow of material value,
making it pool temporarily before flowing on. Looking at the same relationship from the
other side, the needs of things, the relationship of accumulation rather than production or
use poses new needs for nonperishable, infinitely convertible, and hence increasingly im­
material forms of value. The point is that coordinating different material temporalities

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Material Time

creates a host of issues for social and economic engineering, as well as lying at the heart
of religious and ethical considerations of familial reproduction and social relations.

Finally, material temporality has implications for understanding the shape of human histo­
ry. Is there a relationship between the kinds of materials humans engage with and the
overall shape of history? The pace of change has been speeding up throughout human
history; on the scale of grand narrative, is plastic or silicon a faster material than stone,
bone, or metal? It seems unlikely that any one material alone can determine the charac­
teristics of a technological system. We can leave aside here the fact that the “Stone Age”
is so called because its stone objects have survived to be found by archaeologists, not be­
cause people then particularly used stone more than other materials such as wood, skins,
basketry, or bone. More to the point, somewhat counterintuitively for any simple evolu­
tionary story, the Paleolithic use of stone—flaking it to make sharp cutting edges—is a dis­
tinctly fast technology in which an entire chaîne opératoire may be accomplished in a few
minutes and many artifacts were made and discarded expediently; it is only from the Ne­
olithic onward that the use of stone in polished axes, monuments, and statuary began to
exploit its qualities of slow working and durability.

Instead, if there is a relationship between temporality and the shape of history, it

(p. 137)

probably lies in the technological style of overall systems through which materials are
used—systems which provide the lenses through which people see the affordances of ma­
terial qualities. For example, systems encompassing varied technologies are likely to be
more dynamic than those with fewer technologies, as each new component or technique
will enable more recombinations and pathways, opening up new possibility spaces. Such
systemic factors may underlie the repeated pattern of alternating rises and plateaus in
the long-term history of material complexity.20 Moreover, systems which maximize pro­
ductivity are likely to be more unstable than systems which maximize security, as the de­
velopment of capitalism since medieval times may demonstrate. Moving to a yet more ab­
stract level, innovations in human–thing relations such as the concept of enduring, exclu­
sive rights over things may themselves change the dynamic of a material culture system
over the longue durée. But in the present state of the discussion, these are questions and
hypotheses, not answers.

Bibliography
Bailey, Geoff. “Time Perspectives, Palimpsests and the Archaeology of Time.” Journal of
Anthropological Archaeology 26 (2007): 198–223.

Barth, Fredrik. “An Anthropology of Knowledge.” Current Anthropology 43 (2002): 1–18.

Bradley, Richard. “Ritual, Time and History.” World Archaeology 23 (1991): 209–219.

Gell, Alfred. The Anthropology of Time: Cultural Constructions of Temporal Maps and
Images. Oxford: Berg, 1996.

Gosden, Chris. Social Being and Time. London: Blackwell, 1994.

Page 15 of 18

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Material Time

Gosden, Chris, and Yvonne Marshall. “The Cultural Biography of Objects.” World Archae­
ology 31 (1999): 169–178.

Ingold, Tim. “Materials against Materiality.” Archaeological Dialogues 14 (2007): 1–16.

Ingold, Tim. Perceptions of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill.
London: Routledge, 2000.

Lucas, Gavin. The Archaeology of Time. London: Routledge, 2005.

Robb, John. The Early Mediterranean Village: Agency, Material Culture and Social
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Change in Neolithic Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Robb, John. “Time and Biography.” In Thinking through the Body: Archaeologies of Corpo­
reality, edited by Y. Hamilakis, M. Pluciennik, & S. Tarlow, 145–163. London: Kluwer/Aca­
demic, 2002.

Robb, John, and Timothy R. Pauketat. Big Histories, Human Lives: Tackling Problems of
Scale in Archaeology. Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press, 2012.

Shryock, Andrew, and Daniel Lord Smail. Deep History: The Architecture of Past and
Present. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

Tilley, C. The Materiality of Stone. Oxford: Berg, 2004.

Notes:

(1.) Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell, eds., Thinking through Things:
Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically (London: Routledge, 2007); Daniel Miller, ed., Ma­
teriality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).

(2.) Tim Ingold, “Materials against Materiality,” Archaeological Dialogues 14 (2007): 1–16.

(3.) Ingold, “Materials against Materiality,” Tim Ingold, Perceptions of the Environment:
Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000); James Gibson, The
Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979). Cf. Christo­
pher Y. Tilley, The Materiality of Stone (Oxford: Berg, 2004).

(4.) Alfred Gell, The Anthropology of Time: Cultural Constructions of Temporal Maps and
Images (Oxford: Berg, 1996); Chris Gosden, Social Being and Time (London: Blackwell,
1994); Jan Harding, “Rethinking the Great Divide: Long-Term Structural History and the
Temporality of the Event,” Norwegian Archaeological Review 38 (2005): 88–101; Gavin
Lucas, The Archaeology of Time (London: Routledge, 2005).

(5.) Geoff Bailey, “Time Perspectives, Palimpsests and the Archaeology of Time,” Journal of
Anthropological Archaeology 26 (2007): 198–223; Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Mate­
rial Life, 1400–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1973); R. I. Moore, “World His­
tory,” in Routledge Companion to Historiography, ed. Michael Bentley (London: Rout­

Page 16 of 18

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Material Time

ledge, 1997): 918–936; John Robb and Timothy R. Pauketat, Big Histories, Human Lives:
Tackling Problems of Scale in Archaeology (Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press, 2012); Andrew
Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail, Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

(6.) Ingold, “Materials against Materiality.”

(7.) Fredrik Barth, “An Anthropology of Knowledge,” Current Anthropology 43 (2002): 1–

18.

(8.) John Robb and Oliver Harris, The Body in History: Europe from the Paleolithic to the
Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Chris Shilling, The Body and So­
cial Theory, 2nd ed. (London: Sage, 2003); Joanna Sofaer, The Body as Material Culture:
A Theoretical Osteoarchaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

(9.) John Robb, “Time and Biography,” in Thinking through the Body: Archaeologies of
Corporeality, ed. Yannis Hamilakis, Mark Pluciennik, and Sarah Tarlow (London: Kluwer/
Academic, 2002), 145–163.

(10.) Richard Bradley, “Ritual, Time and History,” World Archaeology 23 (1991): 209–219.

(11.) Tilley, The Materiality of Stone; M. Parker Pearson and Ramilisonina, “Stonehenge
for the Ancestors: The Stones Pass on the Message,” Antiquity 72 (1998): 308–326; Stefa­
nia Casini and Angelo Fossati, Le Pietre Degli Dei: Statue-Stele Dell’età Del Rame in Eu­
ropa—Lo Stato Della Ricerca (Notizie Archeologiche Bergomensi 12) (Bergamo: Civico
Museo Archeologico, 2004); Francesco Fedele, “Statue-Menhirs, Human Remains and
Mana at the Ossimo ‘Anvòia’ Ceremonial Site, Val Camonica,” Journal of Mediterranean
Archaeology 21 (2008): 57–79; John Robb, “People of Stone: Stelae, Personhood, and Soci­
ety in Prehistoric Europe,” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 16 (2009): 162–
183.

(12.) Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

(13.) John Robb, “Beyond Agency,” World Archaeology 42 (2010), 493–520; John Robb, The
Early Mediterranean Village: Agency, Material Culture and Social Change in Neolithic
Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

(14.) Paul Halstead and John O’Shea, “A Friend in Need Is a Friend Indeed: Social Storage
and the Origins of Ranking,” in Ranking, Resource and Exchange, ed. Colin Renfrew and
Stephen Shennan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 92–99.

(15.) Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1998).

(16.) André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1993).

Page 17 of 18

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Material Time

(17.) Tim Ingold, Perceptions of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill
(London: Routledge, 2000), 189 ff.

(18.) Chris Gosden and Yvonne Marshall, “The Cultural Biography of Objects,” World Ar­
chaeology 31 (1999): 169–178.

(19.) Konrad Spindler and Ewald Osers, The Man in the Ice: The Preserved Body of a Ne­
olithic Man Reveals the Secrets of the Stone Age (London: Phoenix, 2001).

(20.) Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail, Deep History: The Architecture of Past and
Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

John Robb

John Robb is Professor of European Prehistory at the University of Cambridge, and

Fellow of Peterhouse, University of Cambridge.

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