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Well, most of the responses are pretty much as I would have expected and largely the kinds of things I was thinking myself. But, if youll forgive me getting a bit metaphysical, one way to look at this is to say that everything is the past (or the future), in that the present is effectively of infinitesimal duration. We experience it, as William James and later Bergson said, as a stream of consciousness. Indeed some psychologists argue that given the slow speed of nerve impulses we are always experiencing things that have already happened. It seems to me that the evidence we have decays away exponentially from the wave of the present. My cup of tea rapidly degrades into some chemicals in my gut and a few tealeaves in the compost bin. I must admit, perhaps because I am a prehistorian by background, that the historical aspect that Dan mentions, still bothers me. So much of what I seem to be doing is source criticism of historical documetation. Where this gets a bit weird is that I find myself increasingly using newspaper archives because the events I'm interested in are to recent to have generated a more "solid" history. Equally theres the internet stuff which has even more of a feel of ephemerality about it e.g. its interesting that people are starting to include a date accessed when refering to materials from the internet. Nevertheless, the saving grace of being interested in material culture, in my experience, is that it often gives a solid ground to things within the chaos of other information. Whatever people say about events the artefacts have at least sufficient permanence for one to measure their assertions against them. If that makes any sense. P G-B -------------------------- contemp-hist-arch is a list for news and events in contemporary and historical archaeology, and for announcements relating to the CHAT conference group. ------- For email subscription options see: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/archives/contemp-hist-arch.html ------- For CHAT meetings see: http://www.bris.ac.uk/archanth/events/chat.html --------------------------