Economies of Duration in Urban Archaeology

Summary

Looking to urban life in the recent past, present and future, conventional archaeological chronologies are of less relevance than in deeper history. Instead, we might replace ordered time with duration, time-as-experienced, in our analyses. However, if we want to look at the duration of individual events in the city, we run the risk of reducing our work to a point where it is essentially meaningless, considering single seconds in individual lives at the expense of a 'bigger picture'. This paper will discuss the economy of duration in urban archaeology, by describing what durational time might look like to an archaeologist, how it can be of the utmost importance in our understanding of contemporary urban space, and how we might strike a useful balance between properly understanding transition in people's daily lives and reductio ad absurdum.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• In the City: archaeology and the personal experience of urban transition   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2013

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 386