The revolution will not be recognised: The phenomenology of past social change

Format: Standard Paper Session

Organisers: Andrew Gardner (UCL) & Jake Weekes (CAT)

Living through the events of the last couple of years, it is hard to avoid the media refrain, and indeed a genuine sense, that we have been experiencing major inflection points in history. But how did people experience change, whether apparently major, or small and everyday, in the past? And how can we use the phenomenology of past social change to understand the agencies and structures which shaped it? Archaeology is a quintessentially temporal discipline, but we often feel limited by problems of chronological resolution in tackling these questions, settling instead for broad-brush narratives and traditional periodisations. These are unsatisfactory, however, for numerous reasons, not least that they gloss over the awareness that people had of traditions and innovations being in a constant interplay throughout every slice of time we care to create. In this session, we seek different archaeological case-studies, and different theoretical perspectives, to interrogate the lived realities of social change in the past. Who noticed the Neolithic Revolution, or the fall of the Roman Empire? What difference did knowledge of change make to the possibility of further change? How much change did one person in the Bronze Age, or the Maya Classic, witness in their lifetime? And what social theoretical tools from Marxist, post-Structuralist, Structurationist, or other traditions might be most effective in facilitating such investigations?