UCL Institute of Archaeology Gordon Childe Lecture 2026
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Date
May 20, 2026
Location
UCL Institute of Archaeology, London
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We are delighted to invite you to this year’s Gordon Childe Lecture, delivered by Prof Laurent Olivier. Please join us for an evening of discussion and exploration, featuring Prof Olivier’s lecture (18:00 to 19:15), followed by a drinks reception (19:15 to 20:45).
“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 appear to us as a form of revelation.”Key Speaker: Laurent Olivier
Participants
UCL Social & Historical Sciences
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Our interests span the globe, as we seek to understand the social, political, economic, cultural and environmental processes that have shaped the world over time.
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 themseleves as strata.
Seen from the perspecitve 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 appear to us as a form of revelation.
