ABSTRACT
The concept of the Anthropocene intensifies this awareness of persistent pasts, indexing the toxic and the threatening, rather than the benign, aspects of co-presence. Bruce Braun argues that the Anthropocene calls for an understanding of time that acknowledges both how the ‘past haunts the present’ and how time flows ‘toward people, from the future to the present’. A reimagined concept of relational time perhaps provides a more useful lens for understanding the complex temporalities at play in such landscapes, and the way they emerge in specific moments of encounter between humans and nonhumans, objects, and others. The language of peril is pervasive: The risk posed is that the physical evidence on which an appropriately detailed and comprehensive archaeological and historic record of an important modern industry should be based could vanish or be significantly damaged before it receives the attention which future archaeologists, historians and societies might require.
