hourglasses first...

Every anthropological theoretician and every dimensional physicist has attempted to define time as a quantity or perception to make their mark and get their name in the history books.  Noteables who come to mind are Levi-Strauss, Marx, Lucas, Gell, and others, but after reading all of these works (and trying to make sense of what long winded academics think about time) I have come to the conclusion that a clockmaker may be a better source of relevant information for those looking at both the historical development of time in the western world in regards to the social sciences.  I will admit before posting this blog post that this will be a thread of a series of ongoing blog posts related to my Master’s in Maritime Archaeology at Sdu, but will contain no graphics or measurements taken from material from either the Vasamuseet in Stockholm or any other source without prior approval.  I will at time reference what I am doing for it is relevant to my larger research questions which go beyond my master’s material.

So what am I interested in as a social scientist?  My background training before coming into archaeology has been everything from a professionally unemployed naturalist throughout my childhood years to geochemistry as it applies to artifact conservation for my undergraduate thesis, but my formative urges stem largely to my apprenticeship to my father who was and still is a capable clockmaker in Central Virginia.  I was and still am fascinated about the manufacturing techniques and their evolution in clockmaking in both pre-industrial and post-industrial societies, having worked on and examined clocks from the 16^th century to the modern.  Like so many in the field of academia I have failed to grow up beyond this and loose the altruism of my youth and those simple questions children ask, why? Time is pervasive throughout our daily lives today.  It was pervasive through our lives 50 years ago.  It was just as pervasive in the western world 500 years ago but for different reasons.  Perhaps I have asked a mundane question, but how was the perception of time different to those people of the Renaissance and why did they need to change from even older ways of viewing time?  This larger question will be examined in the following blog posts as I construct replicas of the temporal devices that were around 500 years ago; sandglasses, sundials, and candles.

I will be doing this as much for my own benefit as any reader of my blog.  I will be attempting to rid myself of the pre-conceived notions of modern temporality of the modern world and physically and mentally reconstruct what time meant as a monetary and social investment with the social reasons why such an investment was deemed worthwhile.  While to many this will seem a mundane and unlikely path to gain knowledge of the past it is often the case when we challenge pre-conceptions that old information which was common knowledge of the past and not written down comes to light which illuminates our past far better than the written documents that remain.  After drawing the first of the objects to be replicated, a 16^th century German horloge or hourglass I have already found some substantial information on the production, resource use, social value, and perception of time reflected by this object.  I will begin inking many of my drawings this week so that in the next blog I will be able to explain more in detail as well as start collecting the materials to build my first hourglass.  That is for the next blog :)