Record: 1 Title: Authors: Source: Document Type: Subject Terms: Abstract: Forgetting the past.

Lucas, Gavin Anthropology Today; Feb97, Vol. 13 Issue 1, p8, 7p Article *HISTORY *ARCHAEOLOGISTS Focuses on the efforts of archaeologists to remember the past. Fear of forgetfulness; Scientific notion of truth as an absolute; Memory seen as the representation of the past; Implication that the past is lost or forgotten; Reference to pre-history; Link between the ethnographic `Other' and prehistory through evolutionism; Reference to books about history. 7096 0268540X 9703062660 Academic Search Elite

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FORGETTING THE PAST

Archaeology and the art of memory In the autumn of 1941, a farmer at Grasidu in Iceland was digging a storage pit for a bumper crop of potatoes when he came across a skeleton with a spearhead; he immediately stopped and an archaeologist, Kristjan Eldjarn was called. Eldjarn spent the day carefully excavating the body, noting a curious gap in the front teeth. One can imagine Eldjarn unease at this moment as the distinction between the farmer and the skeleton outside blurs, a momentary anxiety invoked by a "missing" tooth (Eldjarn 1948: 63-70). Whether the farmer actually was ever related to the skeleton--which did become an issue for a time--, for Eldjarn that moment of recognition must have given him a brief sense of personal acquaintance with the skeleton he was exhuming, and added a dimension to excavation which archaeologists rarely meet. It appears as though he was remembering who that person was buried out in the field, that after centuries of oblivion his memory is resurrected. Might this be a special case of what all archaeologists are trying to do everyday--remember the past? Proust's madeleine soaked in tisane evoked childhood (Proust 1981:51). All manner of things, whether mementos which we draw out of an old box or a common experience which, unperceived for some time, suddenly irrupts into the present, remind us of another time, another place. The past has a strange taste--familiar, but a familiarity of something which was lost and now found; either we want to hold onto it or to rebury it. The past is not perhaps so much about remembrance as about forgetfulness. Do we want to forget? Can we? It is as if there were a need to remember. This fear around forgetfulness--which recaptures the meaning of Proust's title in French, of lost time, le temps perdu, helps us to rethink the notion of the past. Of course, archaelogy appears on the surface to have very little to do with memory: we are not ostensibly remembering the Neolithic, for example, as we remember our childhood. But I do think memory serves as a model, a latent metaphor for the way we

perceive the historical past, and there are some real symmetries between individual and collective memory, which hopefully will be uncovered in the course of this article. For with memory, one is always faced with the question of the original; memory as a representation of the original event. And along with this, go the questions of the authenticity of the orginal and the accuracy of representation: questions of truth. The scientific notion of truth as an absolute has a very clear resonance with the idea of authentic memory, the original. The most authentic memory is that which comes closest to the original event to which the memory refers; similarly the most absolute truth is that which comes closest to the original object to which the truth refers. Both of course rely on a representational model of knowledge/reality, a distinction between the subject and the object. And yet there is more at stake here than simply the truth. Perhaps more important than authenticity is authorship: whose memory ae we talking about? Moreover this question, as I shall argue, is as pertinent to individual as to collective memory. Memory as the repsentation of the past, immediately erases the temporality of the moment of forgetfulness, of the moment when the past bursts in on the present--through a madeleine. It brings the past to presence, and the more one reflects upon the life which the moment has conjured, the more one restitches the tear caused by that moment. Forgetfulness is the threat of oblivion, it is a moment which raises a question mark over one's very identity: remembrance is a way of re-affirming that identity. History, as memory, represents the past in an analogous way presenting it as a story, as if we could remember, and which inexorably loses that sense of a lost time, erasing the forgetfulness which inspired it (Kristeva 1981: Murray 1993). But what is that moment in history, that "taste" which we had forgotten? What other than the "trace". Picking up an old document or unearthing at RomanoBritish pottery vessel, there is that moment of discovery, of that sense of a lost past which at the same time engenders a desire; we strive to remember. We read the text the post-holes and pits, we begin to reconfigure the loss, to forget our forgetfulness. But at this moment, forgetfulness seems to remain personal; how it is that such a personal experience of the past is turned into a collective project of remembrance? Collecting memories In the summer of 1992, I was in Yorkshire conducting some research on the Neolithic and early Bronze Age of the area, and on one occasion I went to see a collection belonging to a local amateur archaeologist. He led me down to the cellar of his Georgian house, and there, amassed on shelves and in bags and boxes on the floor, was the material of decades of fieldwalking and excavation. I was particularly interested in the pottery, and he kindly took down dusty and cobwebbed vessels for me to examine and photograph. Afterwards he asked whether I wished to see his other collections; assenting, I was taken on a tour of the house and the collections of model airplanes and reproduction Greek Pottery, amongst other things. It then struck me that perhaps the motivation behind acquiring all the archaeological material I had seen earlier had nothing to do with an interest in the Past, but was simply another facet of this desire to collect. My reaction was, if I am honest, one of flippancy: yet looking back, I know that this same desire entered my own research: in fact the very reason for visiting this collection stems precisely from this need for a sense of completeness in my research, and this very same desire has motivated a great deal of archaeological work I have done. What is this desire? Michael Shanks has explored the various experiences surrounding this desire: possession, authenticity, but most revealing (after Walter Benjamin), a tension between the order of

classification and the anarchy of the individual object (Shanks 1992:101--2). This tension manifests itself through completion--completion in the sense of the total or finished collection and in the sense of an exhaustive or embracing classification. The same desire spills into narrative and the need for closure, an ending, and yet as with classification there is a sense in which completeness is ceaselessly in conflict with the things or events themselves which resist this closure. For the irony is, to complete the collection or close the story frustrates the very desire which lies behind collecting or storytelling; it is not a question of needs being fulfilled here but desires being sustained. Scheherazade's tales which lasted a thousand and one nights were driven by a desire to stay alive, as she knew she would be killed the moment the story ended; this can be seen as more than a story around a collection of stories but a parable on the very act of storytelling. Collection, classifications, narrative--they all express a similar desire--yet what is the link with memory? The story I related above about my research is very apt in that the material I was seeking was kept in the cellar; and cellars, like attics, are rooms of forgetfulness (Benjamin 1973: 129). They store things, things which get forgotten and upon rediscovery evoke memories. Descending into that cellar and drawing old pots out of boxes was an experience similar to excavation, and the same is true when one visits museums where the material is kept away. Perhaps there is more than an economics of space to consider behind museum storerooms; keeping objects under lock and key, in darkness, returns them to oblivion so that the sense of "remembrance" can be re-experienced over and over by each new scholar. However, there is a difference between the experiences of discovery in a storeroom and on an excavation--particularly with museum storerooms, which are ordered so that one knows exactly what one is getting. The order given to the material--which is why museum storerooms house collections and not just junk--can be seen as a kind of memory system, so that one cant talk perhaps of recovery rather than discovery. However, even on excavations a more generalized and tacit memory system is in use which allows one to identify the discovery. What on site is called background knowledge or general archaeological understanding, in a museum is called classification. The similarity I am trying to draw out in the experience of discovery on site and recovery from a musuem is the use of a mnemonics which is perhaps more explicit in the latter but all the same pervades the experience and engenders the sense of a remembrance of something which has been forgotten. In both cases, we are after all searching for something and although it may not appear so at first glance, this searching is imbued with a sense of loss, or forgetfulness. The frequent question of the passer-by on site, "Have you found anything?", might be translated as "What have you lost?" The reason being, that the answer would be the same in both cases. We are seaching for the past. In what sense can it be possible to search for something not lost or forgotten? After all we have to have some idea of what we are looking for; is all science a quest for something lost? This is a very Platonic notion of knowledge, and one more ascribed to the hermetic memory systems of the Renaissance rather than science--yet it is no coincidence that the two developed alongside each other (Yates 1966). To say that the past is lost or forgotten implies the possibility of remembrance;it implies that whatever is forgotten has a place, that it belongs somewhere adn that this is what we need to find out. Collecting, classifying, narrating: these are all ways of putting something in its proper place, of affirming that it belongs--untimately to us. Affirming the past as belonging, affirms it as ours--as soon as we describe prehistory as a forgotten epoch, it has already become our past; my personal desires in unearthing that vessel are already implicated in a collective project of

memory. How did this collective project develop? I want to briefly look at how the idea of prehistory emerged and changed in Europe (particularly Britain) in order to try and answer this question--or at least suggest ways of answering it. The idea of prehistory When the term "prehistory" was introduced by Daniel Scotland (1851), it took some time for it to be generally accepted, for the word implied a time in which humans lived before history, which seemed contradictory (Daniel 1962: 10). Daniel remarks--and of course it is something we accept today--that history is understood as written history, and therefore pre-history is history before written records (ibid.). Wilson's own text would seem to lend some support to this idea, for in his introduction he remarks on the large gap in time between the first settlment of Britain and the earliest written evidence (Wilson 1851). Daniel's book does not really pursue this much further: rather in his account of life idea of prehistory, he launches upon a history of prehistoric research, and does everything in fact except look at the idea of prehistory. Why should there be a need to distinguish prehistory from history and why does this distinction fall upon the absence of written evidence? There is much more to this than simply a question of methods--today we might say that the difference is not perhaps between history and prehistory but history and archaeology (i.e. the difference in data and corresponding methodology)--but this is not what was said in the nineteenth century, adn the legacy of this in our present use of teh word prehistory is still evident. When Lubbock was writing his book Prehistoric Times he considered the word antehistory instead of prehistory (Daniel 1962: 10); it is interesting to consider whether he was aware of its homophony to antihistory, which would distance this period of time even more from written history, and given the much stronger evolutionary tone of Lubbock's book compared to Wilson's this may be very revealing. The point being that prehistory was separate from history not simply because of a lack of written material; this merely signified a more fundamental schism between a present and past history. Prior to the adoption of the Three Age system--which Wilson's book seems to have been the first to apply to British archaeology (Trigger 1989: 82)--there was a widespread separation of history into a Heathen and Christian period (Sklenar 1983: 88). The use of ethnographic parallels to flesh out the Heathen period has a long history (Hodgen 1964), and is intimately linked with the rise of evolutionism. More significantly though is the manner in which the Heathen as Other residing on the periphery of the world is projected temporally into the Other time: prehistory (Fabian 1983; Friedman 1985). The link between the ethnographic. 0ther and prehistory through evolutionism solved something of a dilemma for Victorian anthropology for on the one hand it needed to distance itself from the ethnographic Other, and yet the need to understand its own self historically meant that this Other lay at the origin of its own identity. As the Heathen became the object of a scientific discipline, ethnology, it is even more distanced, and that this should carry over into archaeology was inevitable. It is interesting in this respect that Wilson laments the fact that at the time of publication, archaeology had still not been accepted as a science by the British Association, even though its close relative, ethnology, was just admitted that year (Wilson 1851, preface). Wilson was very specific about aligning archaeology with the sciences and not history; indeed the impetus for the Scandinavian developments was the need to establish the museum collections in a scientific rather than a simply decorative manner (Klindt-Jensen 1975; Graslund 1987).

All this would seem to suggest that at the time there was a major conceptual barrier between prehistory and history which required a verbal distinction. Undoubtedly this produced some tension with a rising nationalism, but I do not believe that this was such a problem at the time. Trigger states that the 'principal motivation for Thomsen's work, like that of many earlier antiquaries, was patriotism' (Trigger 1989: 73) but this seems exaggerated. Which is not to deny that nationalism played a role in general in the rise in interest in antiquities, but the Age of Romanticism was being superseded by a more scientific concern with the past, more so in northwestern Europe perhaps than central Europe (Sklenar 1983). Worsaae, who succeeded Thomsen as the leading archaeologist in Denmark, wrote in his Primeval Antiquities of Denmark (1843) much more explicitly on the theme of a national heritage, even claiming Scandinavia's relatively 'pure' history (i.e. devoid of the invasions which so characterized the rest of Europe) as the reason for its lead in scientific archaeology (Graslund 1987); yet significantly he also raised the possibility that cultures and races may have existed in the past which do not exist today (Daniel 1975: 50). At the time, this was received with some horror, but during the second half of the nineteenth century, such an idea was much more acceptable; indeed in Wilson's preface to Scottish prehistory (op. cit.) he supplements Worsaae's remark on the purity of the Scandinavian culture with the fact that Scandinavia had also only recently emerged from its primitive period. The implication--a diffusionist (and disparaging!) one--is that invasion accelerated or stimulated evolution. But more tellingly, there is a real lack of concern by Wilson for historical continuity: the emphasis is on a scientific, objective approach to the past. This aside, the question of nationalism and ethnic roots, although a continuing undercurrent of archaeology, was not necessarily that influential on the concept of prehistory until much later--at the end of the nineteenth century. Particularly in Britain and with the rise of evolutionism, prehistory was another time--a time which resembled that of the primitives who inhabited the edges of the World and a time much closer to nature (and therefore the object of science) than history (Fabian 1983; Trautmann 1992; Stahl 1993). Murray explores this notion in terms of the abyss of prehistoric time, and how it captured the literary as well as archaeological imagination of Victorian Britain, which attempted to recover the oblivion of this Other Past (Murray 1993). Moreover, he makes the point that this abyss and fear of oblivion still has not been adequately confronted: instead it is merely deflected through the ethnographic present (ibid.; also see Trautmann 1992). This time is the time before writing, and it is surely no accident that writing was regarded as the defining feature of this break, owing to the deeper associations between nature and speech on the one hand and writing and culture on the other (Derrida 1976). This becomes more apparent when we consider the debate between evolutionism and diffusionism, for what is common to both approaches is a view that humans develop from a state of nature to a state of culture; what many diffusionists held though was that because culture is artificial, against nature, the development of civilization was accidental and by no means inevitable (Trigger 1989: 153). However, there were changes which took place in archaeological thinking at the end of the century: with the resurgence of nationalism and the culture history approach, continuity between history and prehistory was stressed. In Germany, where the original impetus derived, the old word for prehistory, Vorgeschichte, was replaced by Urgeschichte, which better expressed this continuity (Sklenar 1983: 132). Similarly Childe in his many works emphasized the continuity between prehistory and history, though not so much for nationalist as for Marxist reasons (eg. Childe 1964). However, more enduring was an increasing recognition of the contemporaneous diversity of these Other cultures, something

which set off a problem for prehistory in that evolution may have occurred but not in the same way everywhere: the simple Three Age scheme was no longer adequate for Europe, for it did not provide an independent way of comparing different areas contem-poraneously, a problem which increased the further away from Europe you got. Evolutionism and diffusionism are often described in histories of archaeology as two competing paradigms which battled it out at the turn of the century; yet it is clear--even to those who write these histories--that diffusionism always played a role in evolutionism and vice versa. What blew up at the turn of the century was a debate about the extent to which one or the other affected the course of European or any regional prehistory, and this because of the increasing realization of the differences between contemporary cultures rather than their similarities. The resolution is interesting because of what it reveals about the changing conception of prehistory and the changing strategy for appropriating it, 'remembering' it. Whereas in the heyday of evolutionism, prehistory was 'remembered' through a grand narrative of progress which reconciled the needs of distancing the ethnographic present with the need for appropriating the prehistoric past, now it is placed within a universal time-space grid. This is well illustrated in Childe's chart of the archaeological cultures in Central Europe from his book The Danube in Prehistory (1929). Thisjigsaw-like representation of the central European past is important precisely because of the way in which it totalizes the past in a way much grander than anything before (see fig. I). Previous charts had been very much vertically-orientated evoking the directionality of Time; here we have an equilateral block of space-time. Such a chart has become very familiar to us today, and still forms the main way of representing the complexity of prehistory. Yet it has tended also to suppress the concept of direction in history which is marginalized in the absolute chronology of calendar and radiocarbon dates. It is no accident that the culture history approach is associated with a much stronger concern for an independent chronology; in the nineteenth century, chronology was very much linked to periodiza-tion or in the later phases, evolutionary typology. Archaeologists did attempt to apply absolute calendar dates, but this was always only with the aim of tying in the relative sequence; this meant giving dates to the various periods etc. The calendar dates themselves had little relevance to sequence; indeed their only role, one might say, was in determining the pure antiquity of these sequences. However, in the aftermath of the evolutionism-diffusionism debate and the recognition of a plural past developing at different rates, a means of comparing the different sequences became much more essential. The Neolithic in central Europe may not synchronize with that in Britain, and if one wanted to assess the relative extent of diffusionary versus evolutionary development in any particular area, an absolute chronology became essential. The radiocarbon revolution was simply the--one would be tempted to say inevitable--consequence of this need; until then, cross-dating with the oldest written sources from Egypt were relied upon to provide some framework (Renfrew 1976: 30--32). However, this and the other various techniques of absolute dating which have been developed in the post-war years must be seen, I believe, in the context of the changing perspectives on prehistory rather than some simple notion Figure 1. Childe's table of cultures discussed in The Danube in Prehistory (Childe 1929). of progress in archaeological methods. Unlike Lubbock and Wilson, the issue about prehistory for Childe and those following him

(including us today) was no longer about reconciling a 'savage' past with a 'savage' present but reconciling the plurality of the past while maintaining a singular sense of history. Consequently the temporality of prehistory became increasingly detached from its interpretation, which the focus on chronology and its differentiation from both evolution and periodization illustrates-as do the various problems which accompany this detachment. For example the issue of change is often dealt with in a very restricted way: either it is random and change occurs simply because of the flow of time (culture history), or it is deterministic because of the structure of society (processual archaeology). Much of this debate is a direct consequence of the separation of time as chronology from prehistory; Shanks and Tilley in numerous places have remarked on this abstract sense of time, though in a broader perspective in terms of capitalism and the commodification of time (Shanks and Tilley 1987a1987b; 1987c). More particularly here, it produces a very enervated notion of time, one which though ostensibly containing history is also thereby excluded from history. To call time ahistorical is to rob it of part of its very temporality. This alienation of prehistory from time lies at the core of our present day strategy for remembering the past, for by placing all histories within universal time we can appropriate them just as surely if not more effectively as placing them within a universal history--evolution. The problem of such universalizing or totalizing narratives can be restated as - how can we have a view of history which does not transcend history itself? This is one of the issues Ricoeur takes up in his important study Time and Narrative (1984-88); his need is to tread carefully between a Nietzchean or Foucaultian genealogy and Hegelian Total History, but he ultimately rests on the side of Hegel and a separation between history and discourse about history. With Hayden White on the other hand, this distinction is explicitly collapsed and history treated as a text: indeed the very ambiguity between the 'content and form' of history is what makes history possible (White 1987). Yet White's own tropological scheme (White 1973) is itself subject to the criticism that he enfolds history within rhetoric giving in his turn a totalizing conception: a metahistory based, not as with Ricoeur ultimately on content, but on form. White's scheme is just as reductive and perhaps more naively so than Ricoeur's. There is no doubt that the link between history and narrative is very significant, yet one of the problems is perhaps the way in which narrative is divided into universal genres--particularly fiction and history, which can be re-read as part of a long-term western metaphysics which turns everything around the question of truth. In this respect it is worth turning to ethnohistory to open up an area untouched by Ricoeur or White and reveal the possibility of other genres--and metaphysics. Although interest in ethnohistory and the concept of prehistory was being addressed as early as the 1950s among some scholars (e.g. those working in the Pacifica), it is only in the past ten years or so that there has been a significant widening of this interest particularly among Anglo-American anthropologists. Levi-Strauss's distinction of Hot and Cold societies did much to aggravate this, but it can be seen as an expression of a more general attitude to the 'people without history' which extends back into the nineteenth century and European colonialism (Wolf 1982). This focuson the Other's view of history shows a much more complex and diverse response than simple 'mythiciza-tion'. It is known that some societies appear uninter-ested in their past, or even in origins as we perceive it time is a timeless present (e.g. Bielawski 1989); yet this is not the same as having no myths, or no other 'times' to which such 'traces' of the 'past' belong. However we do not want to fall into a rigid distinction between myth and history. Others have pointed out that many societies may have a tripartite

conception of (historical) time--the living past, within memory; the distant past, of the lineage; and the cosmological past, of origins (Vansina 1985; Layton 1989). Yet even here the separation is perhaps overly artificial--what perhaps anthropology is increasingly striving for now is indigenous genres of mythic-historical consciousness rather than a totalizing division of different kinds of history (Hill 1988). Thus the genres of fiction and history discussed by Ricoeur which are representative of our culture cannot be transposed; indeed, one can see how these genres coloured our view of other societies' narratives--myth as fiction. By focusing on the 'genre', the specificity of Other attitudes to history can be disclosed. Harkin takes this up explicitly with reference to Ricoeur's work, arguing for the need to recognize the historical nature of human existence and thus the way indigenous people in their narratives deal with this (Harkin 1988); in particular, it is interesting how frequently narratives referring to the Contact period with European culture turn up (eg. Harkin 1988; Hill & Wright 1988; Turner 1988). Given this shift away from generalized myth to particular genre, how does this enter into archaeology--especially as we lack the spoken narratives of ethnography? In this we have to consider another damaging opposition: that between the written and the oral (e.g. Goody 1977). The problem with this opposition is that it not only sustains the distinction between myth and history, but it also privileges language as the means of transmission of social memory: it frames the whole debate purely in terms of language (Whitehouse 1992; Rowlands 1993), a prejudice which goes right back to Wilson and Lubbock. One should rather be far more receptive to attitudes in non-verbal ritual and more generally material culture and how these can frame social memory (eg. Kuchler 1987; Barth 1987; Lowenthal 1985; Connerton 1989; Whitehouse 1992). In particular, one finds a very common theme in the way the landscape becomes 'narrativized', incorporating the past in the present and the sense of history engendered through a journey (eg. Rosaldo 1980; Thornton 1980; Hill & Wright 1988). This theme is found for example in a both literary and cartographic way in Robinson's work on the Isle of Aran (Robinson 1986) but also to some extent in Tilley's short monograph on prehistoric landscapes (Tilley 1994). Tilley's little book is significant in demonstrating this emerging interest in archaeology in the relation of narrative to landscape, but one can equally regard it as part of a more general shift to seeing prehistory as a kind of ethnohistory. Archaeology has many ways open for it to explore historicity in the past, particularly through the landscape, but also through material culture in general. To give some examples: Sorensen's study of Bronze Age metalwork in Scandinavia and Britain studies the comparative degree of uniformity; in Scandinavia the metalwork is much more standardized than in Britain, which is not just helpful in creating typologies but actually says something about the different strategies in the reproduction of material culture, which she interprets in terms of social attitudes of conservatism (Sorensen 1989). Now while there may be many possible explanations for standardization in material culture--and of course many other elements can be brought in to support or refute such explanations the notion of conservatism is surely crucial in also understanding a society's conception of their past (and future). The whole question of innovation or conservatism in material culture might then be more refreshingly addressed not in terms of technological progress but what it says about a society's view of themselves, historically. Conversely, to give a complementary example, a material culture which revives an earlier style or curates/re-uses earlier artefacts/sites also offers extremely good potential for interpreting local genres--a 'prehistoric ethnohistory'. A common case in Britain is the re-use of

earlier Neolithic monuments by later Neolithic/early Bronze Age communities, which is associated with a particular material culture assemblage--Beakers (eg. see Braithwaite 1984). Given there is the potential for these kind of ethnohistories, are there any other ways of characterizing them? Hodder's recent paper on material culture sequences is an extremely provocative and innovative foray into this realm, linking White's tropological scheme to archaeological periodization (Hodder 1993). Although he rejects White's metahistorical cycle of tropes, he employs the idea that a particular period may be dominated by a particular trope and that this is not only a creation of the archaeologist but also evident in the material culture. In this way, Hodder ingeniously argues that our periodization is neither simply the historian's invention (e.g. Collingwood 1927) nor a grand totalizing framework for history in the mode of Spengler or Toynbee, but the conjunction of two horizons of interpretation--the present and the past. This is an argument very receptive to the duality of history as narrative and events; however, it is also perhaps too coarse in its view of change as a succession of periods/tropes. What is presented is a sequence of 'Zeitgeists', where 'style' and 'epoch' are conjoined in a manner reminiscent of older Art Histories (eg. Ginsberg 1982). The problem is that, in focusing on narrative and trope, the actual sense of history is elided: within any phase, there is a 'sense of history' from a particular figurative view, but the process of history, of historicization, is totally absent (Pomper 1980). Despite the objections, it is clear that the process of considering such issues as conservatism, innovation and revivalism in material culture and thinking about periodization and the figurative character of narratives, is now opening up in archaeology a much more critical understanding of the nature of prehistory, one which links it much closer with ethnohistory and history in general. It leads us back to the more theoretical debate too about historical consciousness and memory; whose memories we are trying to recover in the past--whose past is it? In many ways Hodder's suggestions on the relation between periodization and narrative suggest that the answer is not 'theirs', or 'ours' but both-and more crucially perhaps, that the very identities at stake are in flux because of this interdependency. Forgetting the past A key element of Freud's metapsychology is childhood amnesia. Why is it we cannot remember our earliest years? It was a common theme of forgetfulness which he linked for example into adult neuroses and dreams (Freud 1986: 315-317; Freud 1976:), and an analogy he draws is quite revealing: '... infantile amnesia ... turns everyone's childhood into something like a prehistoric epoch ' (Freud 1986: 317). Freud's concept of amnesia and forgetfulness was very much dominated by the idea of memory, that is, authentic memory of an original event which is either repressed or distorted into a transformed or 'false' memory. Forgetting is thus simply the negation of memory - not remembering, albeit in a complex manner, i.e. through distortion or repression. Yet what if our forgetfulness of our earlier years is not a question of mis-remembering or not remembering at all, but a more radical forgetting which has no connection to memory whatsoever? Consider the difference between these two cases. On the one hand. I forget where I have placed my pen, and when I do eventually find it, I remember that that was where I had left it. On the other hand, when someone tells me about an event from my childhood, I do not necessarily recall it: I simply accept it as having happened. In what sense can we say I have forgotten it? There are other cases where this also occurs: someone reminds me of an appointment and maybe I have no recollection of

it, or the amnesiac who is told he is married and has no memory of this. There are clearly two kinds of forgetting here: one where, when the 'forgotten' event or object in question is raised, one has an immediate experience of recall, and one where this does not occur. In the latter, an anxiety might very well be experienced, a fear that this forgetting is absolute, a fear of oblivion; and this fear is intimately linked with a fragmentation of the self. Of course the 'memory' may return or be resurrected at a later date: indeed this is the basis of Freud's psychotherapy. But what if we were to accept that there may be cases of a forgetting which is actually absolute: that there are no conditions under which it is conceivable that one might remember? I do not wish to delve into psychology here but consider the very idea itself of a radical forgetfulness which has no association with memory because the conditions under which recollecting or forgetting (in the usual sense of not remembering) are not present. This means essentially a situation where the representation of oneself in time, a time-consciousness, is not present. Our attempts to write history and prehistory are pervaded by a fear of oblivion, a desire to maintain this time-consciousness to the extent that time itself becomes transcended. Our conception of ouselves is intimately bound up with this: it is the character of modernity (Habermas 1985: 1-22). In such a discourse, the idea of forgetting can only be understood as not remembering; childhood amnesia and prehistory present perhaps the greatest challenges to modernity, for they seem to present instances of forgetting which are most intransigent with respect to remembrance: no matter how many photographs are shown or stories parents may relate about our earliest years, we never seem to have that moment of illumination that occurs when we find that pen. And no matter that we place prehistory in a grand narrative of evolution or particular narratives in a universal time, it never quite becomes our own past. One might argue, why should this matter? It matters surely because of what it says about identity, personal or collective. I am not trying to perpetuate an analogy between childhood and prehistory here: quite the opposite, it is because of modernity's need to appropriate time that such analogies arise in the first place. Prehistoric societies are not childlike, yet it is this very link made within modernity which reveals its own inadequacy. What I am saying is that because the need to remember occurs through a universalizing conception of time, the authorship of this memory becomes necessarily entangled with such totalization; and forgetfulness whether as childhood amnesia or prehistory--will inevitably be understood always as a failure of memory. Our search for a forgotten past will always be an attempt to. make it our own past, to remember it; but does the past 'belong to us? may it have been forgotten not because of some repression or distortion--i.e. a failure of transmission, but because it was never ours to remember? And would the same apply to our earliest childhood? Such memories are not ours but our parents' or whoever; who I am is not all mine--'I' do not belong to 'me', any more than does British prehistory (or history for that matter) belong completely to contemporary Britain, let alone a sub-culture within that such as its archaeologists. For whether we are talking about collective or individual memory, what is at stake is the definition of that person or group's identity, a definition which seems to be driven by a desire for closure because of its attempt to transcend time. This is the paradox in a way facing anthropologists or archaeologists--indeed all of us as human beings; what are the strategies for coping with alterity? I can only raise the question here which is more widely addressed in the philosophical literature, but in raising it l simply wish to suggest that in engaging with the past, with the prehistoric other, we should perhaps ask ourselves who are they to

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