Once Upon a Time

Keynote Address at the HEAA Banquet

by Professor C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky
25-Year Honorand

Clifford Charles Lamberg-Karlovsky

It was 11 years after I came to Harvard that I began to teach in the Extension School. That was 26 years ago. A quarter of a century, measured in terms of a lifetime, is a considerable time. Being an archaeologist concerned with the invention of the first cities, a quarter of a century ago is merely yesterday. Time, and its passing, or, indeed, its approaching is a rather mysterious thing. As David Landes, in his book on the history of clocks, points out, time is something we can measure but it doesn't mean that we understand it. We do understand the meaning of "Wait a second." But can we comprehend that in the same second the number of oscillations of the cesium atom is precisely calculated as 9,192,631,770?

We are all involved in time, caught in its web. Perhaps because we don't understand the nature of time we can give it so many identities. We can blame time for our shortcomings, "I didn't have the time," or direct it to accomplish a goal, "Make time to do it." We can appreciate its nature, as when Willie Nelson sings of a "good timin' man." We can use it to anchor our activities, "time for lunch," or as foreboding a future, "Bad times a' comin!" As an archaeologist I am involved with time, a very different time, perhaps even a strange time, which, I will later indicate, is nevertheless one of a specific nature.

Time has a profound effect upon us. Physicists seem preoccupied with time. Stephen Hawking wrote a history of time that became a runaway best seller, in spite of the fact that few, most certainly myself included, while reading every single word understood little of its content. Stephen Weinberg has spent a considerable part of his life attempting to comprehend what happened in the first three seconds, some six billion years ago, when our universe exploded into existence.

Time is an abstraction that we continuously make very real. Ben Franklin reminded us that "time is money." Carl Sandberg found it a "teacher." Mencken a "legalizer." Oliver Wendell Holmes thought time a "liar," while Longfellow thought it "fleeting," and Cervantes thought it "treat(s) the truth." Perhaps we can all agree with Theophrastus that "time [is] the most valuable thing a man could spend." Certainly, in the context of our graduation activities, we might consider following the advice of Horace: "Now's the time for drinking." Napoleon, not known for his generosity, could say "You can ask me for anything except time." I can follow Napoleon's thought but I am not certain that I understand Sir Walter Raleigh when he states that "History has triumphed over time." Whose history? Over which period of time? Time is something we waste, spend, or ignore. It is something that we can either keep up with or find ourselves behind. Time, Shakespeare tells us, can even fly while St. Matthew finds both good and bad in the "signs of the times." According to Rabelais, one can "kill" time, or as Samuel Pepys would have it, time can be "lost." In one way or another we can all join Nietzsche in thinking that "My time has not yet come." Time, we can all agree, has movement. But it can, as Shakespeare tells us, "stand still." It can also be a "song" (Yeats), a "bridge" (Richard Burton), a "corridor" (Longfellow), and even a "tooth" (Edward Young).

Time also takes different forms. According to Andrew Maxwell it may be a "winged chariot," or a "thief" according to Leigh Hunt, or rendered as a "scythe" by Napoleon. Shakespeare was unable to make up his mind about time. On the one hand it could "stand still" while, on the other hand, it was a "tide" that had a "fashion," even a "saltiness." Time can leave its material evidence as in "the footprints in the sands of time" (Longfellow), or it can "be heavy in your hands" (Tennyson). It can even have a temperature as in "There'll be a hot time in the ol' town tonight" (Joseph Hayden). Naturally, time can be divided. You can pay on time, or have the time of your life, you can even serve time. As time is divisible there can be many different times: a time of peace, of old age, of innocence, of a misspent youth. There can even be, as we read in Laurence Sterne's Tristam Shandy, "a time of salads," which might well serve as the title of Woody Allen's next film. Kenny Rogers comes right to the point. Time has four categories: a time to hold 'em, fold 'em, to walk away, or to run.

Time for an archaeologist is an occupational hazard. I spend a considerable portion of each day figuring out not only the time in which something happened, for instance, the invention of writing, but also why it happened. To an archaeologist, as to a historian, time can be an event--what happened in 1492--or a process, for example, the eradication of slavery or the origins of agriculture. The archaeologist cannot agree with Thomas Mann who wrote that "Time has no divisions to march its passage." For an anchoring of archaeological time we can turn to the ancient Greeks. Horace offers a chronology: "To Bronze Jove changed earth's golden time / With Bronze, then Iron, stamped the Age."

Horace is telling us that in remote antiquity there was a Golden Age followed by the Bronze Age and then the Iron Age. Horace, and before him Hesiod (circa 700 bce), offers us our first chronology, painted on a chronological canvas of a vast unknown duration. Today we refer to this as the Three Age System: The Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages of remote antiquity. Note, however, that Horace addresses another theme. The gods, in this instance Jove, "changed earth's golden time," a Golden Age, to Bronze. The Greeks saw in the passing of time a cyclical history of ups and downs. They would have readily agreed that "What goes around comes around." It was left to the later Judeo-Christian tradition to turn time into a linear direction, a one-way street, directed toward a presumed inevitability of progress. The archaeologist has little disagreement with Alexander Pope that there is a change "in principles with time." With the passing of time there is a change in principles and interpretations. And, fittingly for an archaeologist, it is to our earliest interpretations of time that I now wish to turn.

Is a sense of time peculiar to humanity? Wolfgang Köhler denied the higher apes a future tense. He thought they might best be understood "more directly from a consideration of the present only." We, on the other hand, have been "keeping time," a phrase suggestive of ownership, for tens of thousands of years. Alex Marshalk, of Harvard's Peabody Museum, was the first to note that complexly notched artifacts recorded the passage of time, perhaps to track the seasons and thus better understand and control one's environment. We have been involved in doing that for millennia. When we took our fully human form, some 400,000-plus years ago, time became part of our mental activity: the past related to knowledge and experience, the present to feeling (anxiety or happiness), and the future to desire, obligation, and potentiality. Everyone records time but not always in the same manner nor for the same reason. Yet, its recording is always associated with counting. Time seen as a number of seasonal changes related to variations in climate affecting animal/plant life and changed astronomical observations. Time requires choices. For example, when does the day begin?--to the ancient Egyptians at dawn, to the Babylonians, Jews, and Muslims, at sunset, to the Romans first at sunrise and later at midnight. The astronomer Ptolemy wanted the day to start at midday. No one followed his recommendation until the coming of today's teenagers.

Today the past seems far more important to us than it did to the civilizations of the past. The Egyptians, Babylonians, and ancient China differed. Their wisdom came from the past and the task of the learned was to convey it to the present. Ancient civilizations lacked museums, there were no laws to protect ancient monuments, and there was no multimillion dollar trafficking in antiquities. Nor was there legislation to identify, protect, and support what the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization calls "World Heritage Sites." The past had no archaeologists dedicated to recovering and understanding remote antiquity. Archaeologists, like museums, are an invention of some 150 years ago. To ancient civilizations the past had no future. One of the most striking manifestations of the past century is our enhanced appreciation of a remote past and a perceived need to reconstruct it from surviving remains. It was not until the close of the nineteenth century that the idea of excavations, as a nonliterary means of reconstructing the past, was invented in western Europe.

It is the world of ancient Mesopotamia that I know best. Mesopotamia, an urban, literate civilization, endured for some 3,000 years. It suffered an almost complete lack of concern for the past. The past consisted of recording king lists of prior reigns. It began with a sequence of eight kings who reigned a total of 241,000 years. The past as perceived in Mesopotamia was mythic and with that came a belief of a prior golden age, one free from fear. According to a poet of 2000 bce:

Once upon a time there was no snake, there was no scorpion,

There was no hyena, there was no lion,

There was no wild dog, no wolf

There was no fear, no terror,

Man had no rival.

The reconstruction of a mythic past does not constitute what some have called a "historical consciousness," that is, a conscious concern for confronting and understanding the nature of one's past, its relation to the present and potential future. It has been suggested that the invention of a "historical consciousness" belongs to the Greeks, but that is another story. In Mesopotamia, celestial phenomena guided human events making the reading of the heavens a principal concern. Attention was directed toward predicting and controlling an orderly permanence within the social order. Celestial omens were portents of human events. This attitude gave birth in our daily newspapers to that section in which we can read about our future--the horoscope page. The oldest known horoscope goes back to 410 bce, yet millennia before that, astrologers held that to every celestial event observed there was a counterpart in human events. This led the Babylonian priests systematically to observe and record the heavenly bodies. The heavens were studied not only for omens that might direct human events but also for establishing a calendar, and they did this with innovation and mathematical imagination. It is to the Babylonians that we must credit a fairly precise astronomical definition of a year based on the careful observation of the summer solstice.

Babylonian priests believed that the history of humanity was governed by the stars. Nascent astronomers attempted to avert disaster and secure a permanence of social order by "reading" the stars. The New Year's festival was their most important celebration. It inaugurated the solar cycle, signified the victory of order over chaos, and symbolized the renewal of fertility. It did not, however, assure an undisturbed social order. For this a continued "reading" of the stars was essential. If human destiny is controlled by the stars, then a belief in one's own role as an agent of change is denied. Past, present, and future are imprinted in celestial events over which one has no control. Under such conditions one can readily understand how their conception of time would dramatically differ from ours. Time and history are inextricably intertwined. They are not abstract immutable categories but cultural constructs that change to suit the semantic framework that society demands of them.

The cultural construction of time resulted, most visibly, in another type of construction, the Egyptian pyramids. They were built to house their inhabitants for a time eternal. The pyramids affirmed the overwhelming importance of eternity, rendering our time on earth akin to a dream rather than reality. Time and history may be perceived of in many different fashions, for example, as circular, resulting from what Mircea Elaide believes to be the dominance of mythical thought, or as linear, in the manner of St. Augustine's sacred and historical thought.

There is a relationship among time, space, and identity. At a certain time, in a certain place, you, or your ancestors, have a specific identity. An archaeologist is all too aware that place and identity change through time. Today these three are independent variables; time, space, and identity are frequently confused and seen as directly related to each other. Typically, the confusion is brought about to serve a political agenda. Take the recent discovery of the hominids in the new Republic of Georgia, dated to 1.8 million years ago. With great fanfare they were exhibited in the National Museum in Tbilisi as "The First Europeans" even though they dated to some 1,799,600 years before the formation of modern Europe. Calling these hominids European, even though they are not even homo sapiens, had a clear intentionality: the people of modern Georgia are Europeans--they are not Asians or Middle Easterners, but Europeans! Needless to say, attributing this partial skull as a European created a considerable debate not only in Georgia but also with reverberations in Japan and Europe.

There is an equal swirl of politics, certainly not science, surrounding the recently discovered Kennewick Man. Found in Washington State and dated 9,000 years ago, it was identified by one anthropologist as being a Caucasian with its closest biological affinities to Europeans. Needless to say, such an attribution created a considerable ruckus, particularly in light of the fact that a small native American tribe was requesting its return for reburial. They considered it one of their ancestors. This request was made under the federal law governing the repatriation of native American burial materials in their respective tribes. Time, space, and identity were all being confused.

As an archaeologist I cannot think of a single example in which a single culture endured in the same place for 9,000 years and maintained its identity. Claiming Kennewick Man to be a Caucasian harkens back to nineteenth-century racial science, based as it is on a discredited craniometry. Its attribution as European conjures up an image of someone walking from Paris straight across Asia on his or her destination to Starbucks in Seattle.

Archaeologists have had a fairly good handle on time, that is, the creation of careful and long chronologies. They have also done well with regard to space. We reconstruct ancient landscapes, environments, and settlement regimes within specific cultural contexts. When it comes to identity we must admit to an ignorance of ancient languages spoken and ethnic affiliations to which people adhered. Today it is in the realm of identity that the archaeologist confronts his or her greatest controversy. It is perhaps not surprising that in our modern world, in which ethnicity is a paramount aspect of our identity, we wish to find our modern ethnicity legitimized in a past. Asserting the existence of one's primordial ethnicity permits one to claim territorial rights over a landscape and alienate the rights of "the others."

That is precisely what is happening in many parts of the world. In India great energy is expended in proving that the Indus Civilization, circa 2000 bce, is Aryan and its rightful descendants, modern Hindus, have rights to their native land. The subtext reads: Muslims in India are interlopers in a foreign land. In China archaeological work in Xinchiang is limited. Xinchiang is ethnically Ulgher with a rich and distinctive past from that of the Han Chinese. China in colonizing Xinchiang does not want to sponsor Ulgher pride in their ethnicity by recovering the richness of Xinchiang's past. Recently, the archaeology of this region has been much in the news. The discovery there of burials, dated to the last centuries bce, have been identified as Caucasian and at least one well-known American scholar, specializing in the study of ancient China, has suggested that civilization came to China from Europe. The Caucasian attribution reverts once again to a nineteenth-century racial biology while the alleged European origins of Chinese civilization is an absurd simplification. In the past decade there are well more than a dozen books published dealing with nationalism, ethnicity, and archaeology. Typically the books are about the role of archaeologists attempting to stem the tide of abusing the past for nationalist reasons, or ameliorating the ethnic rights of one group over a disenfranchised "other." Sad to say, some essays and books are written by archaeologists who promote and agitate for nationalist and ethnic causes in self conscious efforts to subordinate "the other."

One last example. Recently, I had an opportunity to visit a number of archaeological sites in the Russian steppes, just south of the Ural Mountains on the border of Russia and Kazakhstan. The sites are of special interest for they date to around 2000 bce and represent the first permanent settlements on the vast Eurasian steppes. The sites are referred to as "The Country Towns." The site of Arkhaim was the focus of excavation. It was a well-fortified community of pastoral nomads involved in the raising of horses and cattle and producing metal objects from the ores of the nearby Ural Mountains. I was among the first foreigners to take the 10-hour bus trip to this out-of-the-way archaeological site. I was impressed that the excavator was able to convince the government to set aside several thousand acres around the site as an archaeological park and that he was in the process of building a most impressive site museum. I was astonished to learn that in the month of July over 30,000 visitors came to Arkhaim. I was even more astonished to learn that the site, Arkhaim, lends its name to the neo-Nazi party in Moscow. What was going on? It was not archaeology, it was politics and it could be replicated in numerous nation states. The site was being used for nationalist and ethnic purposes in order to legitimate a mythical past. Arkhaim, it was said, was the first Slavic nation, it was the birthplace of the Slavs, it was also the birthplace of the prophet Zoroaster. One came on pilgrimage to Arkhaim to gain energy from the cosmos, worship fire, and participate in the pagan rites of the original Slavs. These people on the lunatic fringe would have it that archaeology has demonstrated that the steppes were the original homeland of the Slavs. As subtext read: all other ethnicities are Johnny-come-latelies. The Slavic peoples are the primordial dwellers of the steppes. This in spite of the fact that today, within this vast region of mineral and oil wealth, they are an ethnic minority.

Whether it be in America, China, Russia, or in Kosovo, South Africa, or Israel, the past is being used and misused to support political agendas. In almost all instances the passing of time matters not at all. Time changes no one. What matters is that an ethnic identity be given a primordial past, one that supports the rights of a modern identity to its desired privileges (usually in opposition to another ethnic identity). Similarly, an ethnic identity is inextricably tied to a given space. Ethnicity and territory are seen as forever one; time is warped in which the present is a direct reflection of the past. Thus, writing was invented by the Sumerians some 5,500 years ago, but Saddam Hussein takes credit for it; King Herod ruled over Judea and Samaria some 3,000 years ago, thus Ariel Sharon should today; or conversely, in Afghanistan, we the Taliban rule today, thus giving us the right to destroy the idols of the past, so let us do away with the Buddhas of Bamiyan.

In the final analysis, time alters all. There is no such thing as a primordial ethnicity. Most of us in this country have a hyphenated ethnicity and our grandfathers would appear to us as "the other." I think of time as akin to light. Pass them through a prism and they come out as something different--light changes color and time changes culture, identity, and meaning. Such change deserves our constant attention and study.