As stated on the back cover of this book, “[The] divide that once existed between the past and the present and between the archaeology of distant times and that of recent ones has started to disappear”. Indeed, the perceived quirkiness of contemporary archaeologies has been replaced by wider, if not widespread, recognition that it has relevance to the discipline and to society, and that it has rigour. It involves scholars at the cutting edge of archaeological thinking, in a creative turn if you will, trekking freely across the disciplinary divides that are fast becoming fashionable to ignore. A series of collected works, a dedicated journal, conferences and numerous leading papers have amassed on the ‘contemporary past’ over the last 10 years, all harking back to scholars who carved out opportunities in the 1970s and 1980s, through ‘garbology’ for instance and the largely forgotten though seminal ‘Millie’s Camp’ (Bonnichsen Reference Bonnichsen1973), heavily cited in this latest volume, to address archaeological encounters with the contemporary world.

This collection, featuring some key ‘second-generation’ thinkers, not least Laurent Olivier, Pierre Lemonnier, Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal and Mats Burstrom, is amongst the latest in this increasingly long line of contributions. Given the content, Clashes of time is a good title, although ‘The deep present’ (from the concluding chapter) is also a book-title in waiting. And it is a good book, in its scope and depth of coverage. It also has a distinctive flavour. Unlike most works covering the contemporary past, this takes a deeper view, recognising the diversity of ways in which the past challenges the present and those of us who research it: how things have agency, how they can haunt the present, and shape practice and perception. Whether those things are late medieval traces in the landscape, First World War burials, Second World War camps, houses abandoned in the twentieth century and so forth, and just as “all history is contemporary history” (p. 5), all are ‘contemporary’ for their persistence, their resilience, their place in the contemporary world.

The 16 chapters included here originate from an international workshop in Metz in October 2014 entitled ‘Un passé factice? L’étude des vestiges contemprains comme outil critique de l’archéologie’. As Gonzalez-Ruibal describes in his excellent closing chapter, this is ultimately a book about time, not as an arrow but more as a paper ball “with all its creases, corrugations and convolutions” (p. 267), a simile more suited to describing how time and materiality are woven together. It is a ball we can then choose to unfold or deploy. To unfold it is to isolate past events that are done and over, without any link to the present, “to recompose them as a single thread”, as “fetished historical time” (p. 267). But this book presents authors who adopt the other strategy: redeployment, or keeping the links. Stratigraphy is a staple of archaeological investigation, comprising not various and entirely unrelated phases of an occupation, but rather as continuous time with specific event horizons that punctuate its complex passage. Almost every archaeological site and context (even surface scatters, such a helpful metaphor for the contemporary) has some element of stratigraphy or multi-temporality. The Maison du Mage is a good example, harking back to and scaling up from Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas’s seminal study of a contemporary and recently abandoned council flat in Cambridge (Reference Buchli and Lucas2001). Here, time is a jumble, an impenetrable palimpsest in which change is measured in days. On another scale entirely, Burstrom’s study of a rusty cast-iron tractor seat concerns time and scale—a microhistory of abandonment and discovery, embedded within a larger history of nation-building and modernity (p. 268). His use of Barthes’s idea of punctum (that which catches our attention), is useful here. To cite from among the final words in the book, and returning to Gonzalez-Ruibal’s ‘paper ball’,

Having said all that, there is a significant ‘but …’. The often impressive content fails to mask a disappointing format and significant editorial failings. The English is often poor (although I recognise that most of the authors and the publisher are French and Belgian), the contents list is at the back, there is no index and the chapters vary in size from tiny to what I consider excessive, from three pages of text (Lemonnier) to 39 (the Maison du Mage project—a chapter that the authors themselves describe as like a ‘site survey’). This gives the volume a distinct lack of structure and an unnecessary imbalance, the impression of a collection of various (albeit related) things cobbled together. The illustrations are also variable, with some far too small to be helpful, and a mix of colour and black-and-white photographs with no sense of consistency. None of this is disastrous, but it is distracting and makes navigation far harder than it need be. I would recommend this book to readers, within and beyond archaeology, and to students, but always with this note of caution.