Time and Space: two interconnected dimensions, measured through humanity's sensory experience and existence on Earth, but also beyond it, given the technological prospect of space exploration enabling the colonisation of extraterrestrial sites (the Moon and Mars, for instance) in the near future. Among the human sciences, Archaeology—or more properly, Archaeologies, acknowledging the plurality of approaches that has characterised the discipline in recent decades—develops through studies in constant dialogue with these dimensions. More precisely, it interlinks them through the epistemic construction of imaginary bridges, operating between two temporal instances of perception and analysis—Past and Present—when examining sites and artefacts situated within landscapes interrogated by archaeological investigation, employing specific techniques.
Yet the third instance of the habitual triad that divides Time makes its appearance — which is, in fact, a reductive division, a limiting problem, insofar as it endorses the conceptual image of the timeline — when Archaeology has contributed to our recognition, in the studied anthropic actions, of tendencies or factors that evolve, change, and alter; and that may thus influence the configuration of scenes and scenarios of the Future. In one word, we might synthesise what this human science interprets, identifies, and translates: Transformation (notably, a term conjoining both aforementioned dimensions). In this sense, the discipline engages with processes of finitude, for its elementary raw material comprises remains, fragments, ruins. It may be understood as a science that produces—always at some moment inscribed within the contemporary, that is, within the present time of those practising Archaeology—narratives of humanity's diverse forms, which affect the collective imaginary when disseminated, involving (and stirring) images and meanings at multiple levels; narratives that matter because they provoke social memory and provide us with a harbour for anchoring existential references drawn from our experience as beings who have long inhabited and progressively transformed the planet, and who, in their journey to expand frontiers, now venture beyond it.
This science writes the history of those who left no written record—or who recorded it through codes now inaccessible to us, as with certain cave paintings and engravings—thereby unveiling trajectories across the longue durée, through multiple pathways of penetration, reaching the vestigial recesses of our own species and those ancestral, earlier species that preceded us, spanning the most remote epochs when hominids inhabited and traversed territories, expanding their horizons of dominion. Such a science can thus give voice, by interpreting surviving physical testimonies, to those past existences, narrating the history of beings who, in the flow of Time, transformed themselves whilst transforming the very Space they inhabited, constructing diverse cultural landscapes leading to the diffuse form of the ultra-artificial environment presenting itself today: contemporary urban landscapes, hyper-built and replete with vertical accents. What, centuries or even millennia hence, will be said of our presence in this Time now lived? What will be archaeologically interpreted (if the discipline persists in any form) of human vestiges beneath the Anthropocene, whether here or within other spheres of sidereal Space?
Silvio Luiz Cordeiro