In search of lost time : fiction, archaeology, and the elusive subject of prehistory

This discussion has only sketched the outlines of the epistemological questions underlying the writing of prehistoric fiction, and has barely touched the narratological and ethical ones. To simplify my approach for the purposes of this essay, I focussed on European prehistory rather than that of other areas of the world, in which the relationship of Indigenous and settler populations lend more complexity to ethical questions. Space constraints also prevent me from here comparing prehistoric fiction with historical fiction, and archaeologists’ narrative experiments with parallel developments in historiography, such as speculative biography and microhistory. Some of the epistemic issues involved in writing prehistoric fiction are significantly different depending on the specific period of prehistory. Non-archaeological sources such as oral histories, comparative mythology and historical linguistics considerably enrich what we know about later periods; future research into prehistoric fiction might examine the effect of variation in the epistemic bases of different prehistoric settings (in both time and place) on the kinds of stories written about them. I hope, however, that this article has demonstrated that the ‘epistemological friction’ that Flohr Sørensen identifies as a necessary aspect of the production of archaeological knowledge (‘Archaeological Paradigms’ 131) is also present in the writing of prehistoric fiction, both as a challenge and as a productive tension. Our knowledge of prehistoric life is inevitably riven by gaps, uncertainties and ambiguity, but it is by no means a void of ignorance. Many kinds of work can make inroads into the grey areas of the deep past, following the echoes of prehistoric subjectivity. Much of that work is done with shovel and trowel, and the painstaking testing of hypotheses large and small; my contention is that there is a place in those efforts, too, for storytelling