UCL Institute of Archaeology Gordon Childe Lecture and Seminar 2026

Confronted with the temporalities recorded in materiality, archaeology ultimately deals with the present, within which the past remains embedded as an absent presence or an imprint. Archaeology therefore does not simply describe the past as an event occuring in its own moment. Instead, it engaged with its temporality, which is necessarily multiple, veiled, and ambiguous, because it is carried by traces that accumulate and layer themselves as strata.

Seen from the perspective of archaeology, the present is fundamentally multi-temporal or hetero-chronological. The past is gone and will never return. But it nevertheless continues to occupy the present as a material presence. It transforms itself as it is transmitted, in processes of transformission, where it appears masked, alternating between periods of latency and sudden reappearance. Something is there that is no longer there. Something we cannot fully know continues to act, persisting beyond loss and disappearance.

The time of archaeology, which is a time of the material memory of the present, is not the same as the time of history. This diachronic time, fundamentally cumulative, is now revealed in the Great Acceleration of the Anthropocene. Today, both past and future are crushed into a present with no way out. In such a moment, the present itself becomes memory, and its archaeology begins to appears to us as a form of revelation.

Laurent Olivier was Curator in Chief of the Celtic and Gallic Department at the French National Museum of Archaeology in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France, until retiring this year. His main area of research is the archaeology of the European Iron Age, but he is also interested in the history of the archaeological discipline and its place in the building of collective identities. He is the author of The Dark Abyss of Time: Archaeology and Memory (2015).