Feeling for the deep past: archaeological analogy and historical empathy

Abstract

Debates about how to narrate the ‘deep past’ have rarely drawn archaeologists and historians together despite their shared concerns. This article examines one such mutual concern, the interpretive role of what in archaeology is termed analogy, and in history, historical empathy: crudely put, the way that human-centred narratives may project present-day or universal behaviours and activities into the past. I explore debates about analogy in archaeology, and consider the role of ‘empathy’, especially within textual and visual devices deployed to create empathy with ancient peoples. I exemplify these strategies through reference to First Footprints, a 2013 archaeological synthesis intended as a long-term history for a general audience, accompanying a major documentary film series of the same name. Images may constrain the ‘ampliative’ flow of interpretation to instantiate aspects of reconstructions of the past and bridge temporal horizons. While these strategies may lack methodological surety, nonetheless they provide an important means of creating and dramatizing human history and engaging audiences. Strategies that emphasise temporal simultaneity intersect with Indigenous concepts of time as non-linear, and place as animated by Dreamings, or abiding ancestral beings. A more nuanced understanding of the methodological and theoretical implications of these empathetic strategies suggests their importance in telling deep time stories. Archaeological and historical accounts must acknowledge Indigenous world-views that fold time to join past and present. Through the combination of disciplinary expertise, methodological rigour but also techniques that prompt the historical imagination, First Footprints represents an innovative approach in which historical empathy and archaeological analogy might potentially unite to tell deep time history.