1 Chapter 4 Probing the Limits of Metaphor: On the Stratigraphic Model in History and Geology Chris Lorenz In my contribution I analyze an important and influential way in which an increasing number of historians and historical theorists have conceived the problem of historical time over the last twenty years. Helge Jordheim has aptly baptized this way of thinking the stratigraphic model of time – derived from stratigraphy, a subdiscipline of geology (Jordheim 2017). According to this model, that was made famous by Reinhart Koselleck (2000), historians can best conceive of historical times in terms of layers of time or temporal strata – Zeitschichten in German – analogous to the way in which geologists conceive of the crust of the earth in terms of geological strata. So the stratigraphic model basically consists of a metaphor that maps specific characteristics of the study of earth history on the study of human history. Next to Jordheim, other interpreters have debated and promoted the stratigraphic model that has recently acquired an extra relevance in the light of the debate about the Anthropocene, although this debate is rarely mentioned (Zammito 2004; Olsen 2012; Bouton 2016; Esposito 2017; Hoffmann and Franzel 2019; Lorenz 2019; Hellerma 2020). The advantage of the stratigraphic model for history is usually located in at least two characteristics. First, it is supposed to capture and represent the fundamental plurality of historical times – in contrast with the modern idea that History consists of one unidirectional flow of time. Koselleck famously argued that Enlightenment-philosophers were responsible for transforming the notion of history from a plurality of ‘histories’ aka stories about the past into History as Progress and Process – although Rohbeck (2020: 159-177) fundamentally questions Koselleck’s arguments concerning Progress. Second, the stratigraphic model is supposed to catch and represent the ‘simultaneity of the unsimultaneous’, that is, the simultaneous presence of layers of time that have different origins in chronological time. According to Jordheim (2011), it aims to synthesize synchrony and diachrony. In my chapter, I basically question the suggested deep analogy between layers of time in geology and history in general, and the supposed cognitive ‘surplus value’ of the geological