On Putting Time in its Place: Archaeological Practice and the Politics of Time in Southern India Kathleen D. Morrison The work of time-making is always a work of the present, and even in its driest form, the archaeological chronology, is a political process. Archaeological practices which make time from space necessarily dissect unifed material landscapes into temporal slices, ‘cuts’ of time and space that can either mute or give voice to past interactions with material landscapes, engagements sometimes called ‘the past in the past.’ Despite the fact that historical and ar- chaeological remains in India are often central to political contestation, the structures and objects studied by archaeologists and art historians are typically viewed as straightforward exemplars of past periods, dynasties, or cultures, disappearing from gaze as they leave the period to which they ‘belong’. This article considers some forms of interaction between peo- ple and places in southern India—from ashmounds to megaliths to temples—interactions ‘out of time’ according to traditional archaeological practice, but which reveal past contes- tations and concerns. Such forms of landscape history require both analytical techniques such as chronologies which divide time, as well as landscape-based approaches which can heal those divisions by allowing past action ‘out of place’ to be made visible. Relationships on the borders of discipline and exper- tise are mediated through sensory experiences with data, the alignment of … research with the nation, and the epistemic scale-making that grounds all sci- entifc practice. These sensory engagements are not primary, primitive, or entirely outside of culture, but are trained, learned, disciplined, and contextual. This is where expertise is formed, in the spaces be- tween intimate encounters in relationship with the weight of cultural learning that teaches experts in the making how to encounter, analyse, compare, and interpret. (O’Reilly 2016, 28) Time and space each have their own politics and prac- tices of recognition. While analyses of the violence to memory, experience, and particularity done by the reductive force of Cartesian space and its key tech- nology, the map, is by now well-rehearsed (Edney 1997; Lefebvre 1992), much less has been written about disciplinary practices of time-making in South Asian archaeology and their implications for the kinds of histories we produce. These histories are, neces- sarily, interested and situated, but current archaeo- logical practices which fail to move beyond the lim- its of chronology-making to consider also the multi- ple forms of engagement and contestation of people in the past with objects and places from their past hobble the ability of archaeologists to address certain kinds of politics in and of the past. By ‘politics in and of the past’, I reference both the political nature of time-making itself, especially as disciplinary practice, as well as the varied contests and struggles that took place even during the distant past. Outside archaeology, these topics have been rec- ognized, studied and cogently analysed. Struggles over meanings and representations of the South Asian past animate debates over textbooks and memorials, while historic structures such as temples, mosques, megaliths and reservoirs are often highly contested and politicized. Indeed, the at times bloody and ex- plosive contests over what is quite literally ancient history have generated a large and productive liter- ature about the politics of materiality (Amin 2002; R. Davis 1999; Eaton 2000; Eaton & Wagoner 2014; Cambridge Archaeological Journal 26:4, 619–641 C  2016 McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research doi:10.1017/S0959774316000421 Received 29 September 2015; Accepted 9 July 2016; Revised 8 July 2016 http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0959774316000421 Downloaded from http:/www.cambridge.org/core. University of Chicago, on 04 Nov 2016 at 16:41:29, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at http:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms.