Replicated temporality. Time, originality, and rock art replicas

Archaeology is the discipline that is concerned with the understanding of past human behaviours through the study of material remains. Archaeology draws its fascination from its perceived ability to unravel the deep past and the origins of humanity. In the public imagination, archaeology is most often associated with the discovery of ancient civilisations, hidden tombs, and mysterious artefacts. These imaginations tend to emphasise temporal depth, antiquity, and a distance between the present and the archaeological evidence. Discoveries that emphasise a previously unknown antiquity or the origins of an important development tend to generate the greatest public attention, such as the earliest abstract signs, the earliest evidence of sedentism, or the earliest evidence of the settlement of Australia or the Americas. However, the notion of ‘the past’ continues to be interpreted in many different ways within archaeology itself and the discipline has diversified considerably in its approaches to different types of evidence and periods. These variabilities also relate to differences in the understanding and conceptualisation of time, both in terms of theoretical and methodological approaches towards the temporal dimension as well as the impact of public and historical imaginations. In this paper, we want to explore how these aspects impact the processes of the transformation of archaeological evidence into heritage in the context of European Palaeolithic cave art sites. More specifically, we want to examine how time is perceived, created, and imagined in the context of the 3D replicas of the famous painted caves of Chauvet and Lascaux. We will argue that these replicas are reflective of an established modern fascination with originality, related dimensions of significance, purity, authority, and wholeness, and an essentialist and linear understanding of history. However, the temporality of the replica also allows reflection on the unstable character of these notions. The replicas simultaneously exist in (at least) two temporalities and the viewer’s engagement might oscillate between the two. It similarly refers to the faithful (and technically masterful) replication of a deep time object in the present as well as past human actions and abilities (which might have been equally masterful). However, the replica also allows reflecting on the fact that both replicas and so-called deep time objects exist in the present and that they both participate in the unstable and socially constructed temporalities of authenticity and originality. This paper has been accepted for publication in the following forthcoming volume (pending the final review of the complete book manuscript by the publisher): O. Moro Abadía, M. W. Conkey, and J. McDonald (eds.), Deep-Time Art in the Age of Globalization: Understanding Rock Art in the 21st Century. New York: Springer