I would like to thank all my respondents for taking the time to read my paper and offer their critical and constructive feedback; in their varied responses, they have highlighted aspects which I had not considered, challenged me to elaborate on some of the less clear points I made and revealed ambiguities or even contradictions in how I have articulated the concept of contemporaneity. Rather than respond individually, I would like to try and answer what I see as the main points which collectively emerge from these comments.

One of these concerns the form of archaeological narrative that my investigation into the concept of contemporaneity would imply. Indeed, I would be the first to acknowledge that my discussion at the end of the paper regarding this matter was somewhat perfunctory, to say the least. From the comments, I want to address two related problems that arose. First, both Olivier and Jones pick up on a similar issue that they regard as problematic: the implicit reversion to a conventional chronological narrative of sequence which would seem to contradict the very claims I make in this paper. Second, and in contrast, Crossland sees my rejection of chronological time as actually preventing the possibility of acknowledging other, specifically past, perceptions of time and contemporaneity. These are both important points so I will respond as best I can to each in turn.

Olivier is perhaps the most direct when he challenges my use of the concept of consociality as being simply another version of conventional history and suggests that I am forcing archaeological matter to conform to historical time rather than the time of memory. There are some important points I would like to make in response here. First, I am troubled by this dichotomy of memory and history which Olivier deploys, a dichotomy which is central both to his very important work on archaeology and time (Olivier Reference Olivier2011) and also generally, it seems, to French historiography after the studies of Pierre Nora (Reference Nora1989). The basic assumption here seems to be that events (i.e. history) are sequential but objects (i.e. archaeology) are not. This is why Olivier stresses the persistence of his pottery sherds in a feature two centuries later; it is not a point about formation processes and residuality but rather a point about artefacts not having any kind of temporality in a chronological sense. The sherds are no more 6th-century than 3rd-century. They exist equally in both times. However, there are two problems here. First, in Olivier's own example of the backfilled silo pit, the very possibility of acknowledging the survival of these older sherds depends on a historical time frame. It was radiocarbon dating that showed the incongruity in the first place. Even to talk about the non-historicity of the archaeological object presupposes historical temporality as a context. Moreover, the fact remains that while the sherds could be described as equally 3rd-century B.C. and 6th-century B.C., they could not be described as 10th-century B.C. They did not exist at that time. Which challenges the notion that objects have no historical temporality; I would argue that they do by virtue of the fact that at some point in historical time they come into existence, and probably at some future point they will cease to exist.

The second problem concerns the relevance of those pottery sherds. In purely chronological terms, one cannot call them 6th-century any more than 3rd-century – or indeed 21st-century, as those sherds still persist. But so what? How does one use this recognition in a meaningful way? One can talk about these sherds in terms of memory, but I do not see how using memory is necessarily counter to talking about history. These sherds can be deployed in a narrative about 3rd-century Marsal in Lorraine, or about a 21st-century excavation in the same locale. One could even juxtapose these narratives together with a third about the vessels these sherds came from in the 6th century B.C. in a non-linear way. But however you do it, it is hard to frame any narrative without reference to historical time, simply because the relevance of these sherds and their agency changes depending on which time frame you choose to discuss them in. For me, the interesting challenge is not opposing memory and history but juxtaposing them in ways which deal adequately with what I have called modes of persistence and attentiveness to a more thoughtful concept of contemporaneity. It simply means we cannot reduce the presence of 6th-century sherds in a 3rd-century feature or a 21st-century excavation to one of mere residuality.

It is this issue of juxtaposition that I also want to emphasize in regard to Jones's concerns about my use of the term ‘gradients of consociality’ (p. 12). Jones suggests that the concept could return us to a successional view of time – or what Olivier might call historical time. In the example of my relation to Lincoln, for example, I suggested that my consociation with him was separated by several degrees because he died a century ago and my relation to him is mediated only through other objects, directly or indirectly connected to him. These degrees of separation constitute the gradient. Like the opposition of history and memory, I would argue that we cannot forgo successional time and simply replace it with a temporality of the contemporary. Rather, the structure of archaeological narratives is best seen as the conjunction of successional time and relational time. The gradients of consociality are defined both by the persistence of stable objects (e.g. Lincoln, the body) and by the entanglement or co-relation of objects (e.g. Lincoln's body with Lincoln's coat) which constitute more fluid assemblages. Measuring persistence depends on successional time; measuring entanglement depends on relational time or contemporaneity. This point also relates to Jones's misgivings about my presumption of persistence, where he asks about the conditions for stability or ephemerality. These are, indeed, crucial questions, but ones which would take us into another realm of questioning concerning the integrity of objects and their identity, even drawing us into debates about relational and essentialist ontologies. It also relates to questions of scale and how far one might be able to stretch gradients of consociality, a point raised by both Jones and Yarrow. I am not sure I could do any justice to such questions in the short space available here, so I leave these for another occasion.

If Olivier and Jones are both correct in seeing successional or historical or chronological time as still embedded in my argument, Crossland takes my initial rejection of such time as a point of departure to question whether my arguments do not deny other past perceptions of temporality. This is a complex issue which Crossland proficiently explores, and in response I need to clarify a number of points. First, I do not ultimately wish to ‘dispense with any notion of succession altogether’, as both Olivier and Jones already observed. This phrase was used in a very specific context, in terms of the relation between tensed time – that is, between past, present and future – I still do not see the relation between these terms as successional. However, there are other temporal terms which are fundamentally successional (e.g. earlier/later) and these guarantee that there will always be an aspect of time which remains successional. Second, it is precisely the non-successional nature of the past–present–future nexus that would allow us to explore other perceptions of the past in the past.

It is at this point that I think my articulation of writing archaeology in the mode of the contemporary was unclear and this is why Crossland has perhaps misunderstood me on this issue. To elaborate on this, I want to use her own very clear exposition in which she draws on Koselleck's asymmetry of the ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectation’, as these illustrate my argument equally well. As she puts it: ‘Koselleck's conceptual categories of the present–past “space of experience” and the future “horizon of expectation” provide a framework for examining the conditions of historical possibility’ (p. 17–18). This is also the point I was trying to make, albeit very poorly, and more specifically to argue that these very conditions of historical possibility change over time because of shifts in the gradients of consociality. While it may seem perverse to quote a section of my own text, I do it precisely because it clearly needed further elaboration:

Contained here is a clear sense that successional time has not been dispensed with, but also a clear imperative to retain this idea of temporal asymmetry. The fulcrum between Koselleck's ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectation’ will shift. The horizon of expectation was most certainly different in 400 B.C. than it was in 300 B.C., as was the space of experience; it is precisely the idea of consociality and its gradients that, I suggest, we can use to explore these differences. Indeed, if one relies solely on successional time, then it seems to me that such a task is more likely to be foreclosed. Moreover, surely Koselleck's temporal taxonomy underlines the point that the relations of past, present and future are not successional at all, but rather more relational. I believe that the same non-successional character of tensed time is also quite clear in Karlsson's discussion of Heideggerian temporality, which had a clear influence on Koselleck. Contemporaneity, specifically consociality, then, actually allows us to do what Crossland wants, rather than preventing it.

Writing archaeological narratives is one thing, but is that all that is at stake here? Crossland, Karlsson and Olivier raise questions of the broader relevance of such discussions of time in archaeology. Karlsson asks what it might mean to live contemporaneity as opposed to just writing it. Drawing on Heidegger, Karlsson hints at the possibility of archaeology as an existential project, both individually and collectively. How does thinking about contemporaneity challenge our perceptions of what it is to be human – to be an archaeologist, in fact? In a sense, what is at stake here is the broader relevance and purpose of archaeology and what Karlsson seems to say is that this, too, is a question bound up with our notions of time. And he is right. The contemporaneity of the archaeological record which I discuss is not simply about how we might write narratives about archaeological material, about the consociality of things like potsherds and burials; it is also about our own consociality with that thing we call the archaeological record, indeed with anything which has been on this earth far longer than us. Our understanding of that consociation shapes our actions in the present – and future. As both Olivier and Karlsson effectively argue, doing archaeology is not simply writing or talking about the past, it is a fully temporal project where the past matters, because of its intersection with the present and future. This is both an existential (Karlsson) and political (Olivier) question and one which is not really drawn out in my discussion but with which I concur. To what extent, though, are the answers to these questions given by this consociation, or are they rather a matter of ideology, as Olivier suggests?

It is in the same spirit that I read Yarrow's comment on my restricted focus on contemporaneity in relation to objects; as he points out, an anthropologist may see things differently, where contemporaneity is something articulated through discourse or practice. In the realm of the spoken word or interpersonal interactions, a very different sense of contemporaneity might emerge. While I appreciate this point – and especially the point that I am articulating a very archaeological perspective on contemporaneity – I am wary of polarizing the world of discourse from that of material things. In my discussion on Lincoln the myth versus Lincoln the man, I tried to argue that consociation is a concept which can be used to cut across such distinctions. Even if we only talk about Lincoln, Lincoln consociates (his coat, the memorial, the movie) will not be easy to extricate from such talk. At the same time, Crossland, Karlsson, Olivier and Yarrow all impel me to question whether the political or ethical dimension to contemporaneity is something that is adequately captured in my use of the term ‘consociation’ and especially in the object-centred focus of my discussion. Of that, I do have doubts. Even Olivier's discussion of presentism, as a dominant historical ideology of our time, seems to be rather ambiguous in asserting the weight of historical events in shaping this ideology and the ability of this ideology to be disconnected from the material world (not to mention the irony of this in terms of Olivier's own critique of historical narrative).

It is Crossland's comments, however, that perhaps go deepest in regard to the political and ethical dimension of my discussion. Relating to the point raised earlier about the potential implicit in my position for denying past/other perceptions of time and contemporaneity, she also questions the way this does not address how certain pasts are privileged, how certain people, events, stories are excluded from history – and excluded from being contemporary. Reading Crossland's comments, I was immediately reminded of the work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot and his book Silencing the past (Reference Trouillot1995), where a politics of elision and selection infiltrates every stage in the production of the historical archive. This is about politicizing source criticism, politicizing formation theory. I have discussed Trouillot in my work on the archaeological record (Lucas Reference Lucas2012; also see Wylie Reference Wylie, Proctor and Schiebinger2008), and while I emphatically see the politics of history as inextricably entangled with ontological questions about the nature of the archaeological record, it is certainly not a theme I have elaborated much upon and Crossland is right to draw attention to it. But the ontology is important.

Thus I have reservations about the way Crossland articulates this issue, through a typical Peircean triplet of history-as-trace, history-as-past and history-as-interpretation. In particular, I find the idea of history-as-past deeply troubling – as something distinct from history-as-interpretation and history-as-trace. Trouillot's work was precisely an attempt to bypass the whole opposition of history-as-past versus history-as-interpretation by focusing solely on history-as-trace (i.e. as archival production). This is how I also see the matter. We don't need a historical past, nor do we need history as representation. Objects, people, ideas – they enfold the past, present and future in a way that does not require such separation, which is how I have tried to discuss the idea of contemporaneity in my paper.

I have only touched on some of the more immediate concerns I perceived in the comments of Crossland, Jones, Karlsson, Olivier and Yarrow and tried to respond to them as best I can in relation to my original arguments. Perhaps in the process, I have misrepresented them, but I hope not. However, it is also clear there are a number of issues I left hanging, issues which clearly require more work, as these commentators have all so eloquently demonstrated. One concerns the question of identity in relation to time; as Jones remarks, the idea of persistence presupposes stable identities. When is Lincoln still Lincoln? Is there an answer to this that can take us beyond the sterile riddle of how many grains of sand make a heap? Another issue hinges on the distinction between contemporaneity as an operational concept one uses in archaeology (as I have argued in my paper) and contemporaneity as a culturally relative idea related to other projects – political (Crossland), anthropological (Yarrow) or existential (Karlsson). In one sense, we should be wary about overstating the distinction between these two uses of contemporaneity; at the same time they cannot be completely collapsed. If I have tried to argue against certain dichotomies in my response (e.g. between events and objects, history and memory, language and materiality), others have seemed to become more entrenched (e.g. successional and relational time). But underlying this second issue is another one – between archaeology as epistemology and archaeology as ethics. This may just turn out to be the most important one in the face of current ontological discussions in archaeology regarding agency, relationality and materiality.