This book is the third in a series dedicated to thinking about night in the past. It is set apart from its predecessors (Archaeology of the Night: Life After Dark in the Ancient World, 2018, edited by Nancy Gonlin and April Nowell; and Night and Darkness in Ancient Mesoamerica, edited by Gonlin and David M. Reed, 2021) by its focus on “lychnology” (defined as “the study of ‘pre-modern lighting devices’” [Gonlin, p. xv]) and on urban environments, which together produce the “nocturnal lightscape[s]” of the subtitle. The examples of lighting devices include lamps, such as those depicted in tombs at Deir el-Medina, Egypt (Meghan E. Strong), and recovered archaeologically at Tiwanaku, Bolivia (John Wayne Janusek and Anna Guengerich); torch-blocks at Samothrace, Greece (Maggie L. Popkin); and fire boxes and cedar torches at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico (Robert S. Weiner). Lynchnology also extends to sources of light in this volume, such as newly drilled fire in Tenochtitlan, Mexico (Kirby Farah and Susan Toby Evans) and moonlight, as observed in the Wari capital in Peru (Martha Cabrera Romero and J. Antonio Ochatoma Cabrera); tied to Maya rituals of rulership (Kristin V. Landau, Christopher Hernandez, and Nancy Gonlin); and marked by architectural alignments at Cahokia, Illinois (Susan M. Alt) and Chaco Canyon (Weiner).
The volume's explicit focus on the night reveals the extent to which the day is an unmarked category in archaeological analysis, interpretation, and writing. Turning to the marked category of night requires the volume's contributors to shift traditional archaeological approaches in ways that are both productive and thought provoking. Two aspects stand out. First, to interpret the material evidence of darkness, the authors employ imaginative, often phenomenological, reconstructions of the night and its lightscapes. Second, the volume's focus on lychnology reveals how technologies not only allowed people to light up the dark but also generated entirely new temporal rhythms, activities, and associated materialities.
The book's emphasis on lychnology prompts investigations of the physical remains of lighting devices, whereas the drive to envision the activities that took place after dark invites speculation. The difficulty in relying on both concrete material evidence and imaginative reconstructions of the night informs the entire volume, as evidenced by contributors’ preference for conditional and potential moods: at Samothrace, “artificial lighting would have brought the sanctuary's architecture to life . . . architectural sculpture too would have come to life under lamp- and torch-light” (Popkin, p. 84); hearths at Tiwanaku “would certainly have generated a considerable volume of smoke, which likely lingered well into the night” (Janusek and Guengerich, p. 107); Cahokia “would have resonated with chants, and the music of drumming flutes . . . the sounds of bodies and feet that might be executing a ceremonial dance” (Alt, p. 194); and people approaching fireboxes in Chaco Canyon “would experience . . . the sizzling, cracking, and popping of juniper being seared to ash; blast of searing heat; scent of woody smoke; bright, red-orange glow and constant dance of flickering tongues of flame” (Weiner, p. 223; all emphases are mine).
Authors therefore do not distinguish phenomena that archaeologists can directly attest to through their material traces from those that can only be inferred or imagined. That lack of distinction is not a criticism. In fact, it is arguably one of the book's most important contributions. An archaeology after dark requires the use of narrative as a method, as championed by philosophers of science (Adrian Currie and Kim Sterelny, “In Defence of Story-Telling,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 62:14–21, 2017). Storytelling serves as a kind of middle range theory, connecting the empirical to the imagined and illuminating possibilities for how archaeological interpretation could be (or perhaps should be) carried out.
An archaeology of the night is not only about what happens after dark but also about the distinctive temporalities of those activities—constructed, manipulated, and still somehow accessible through material culture. This volume reminded me of the work of the Ottoman historian Cemal Kafadar, who, enjoying the advantages of both material and textual evidence, has demonstrated how “new regimes of temporality” emerged with the introduction of coffee to early modern Istanbul. The social and physiological effects of the stimulant and the spaces dedicated to its consumption redefined work and leisure, creating new modes of socializing and forms of culture and class that took advantage of darkness (Kafadar, “How Dark Is the History of the Night, How Black the Story of Coffee, How Bitter the Tale of Love: The Changing Measure of Leisure and Pleasure in Early Modern Istanbul,” in Medieval and Early Modern Performance in the Eastern Mediterranean, 2014, p. 243). Each of After Dark's chapters succeeds in evoking experiences of night and darkness in ancient cities, but some also push beyond the use of technology merely to ward off darkness and move toward explorations of “the human appropriation of the dark” (Monica L. Smith, p. 261)—the ways in which people embraced the night, often to manipulate its physiological and emotional affects. Susan Alt, for example, reminds readers that the night was not only for fire-lit rituals and vigils, but also for planting or harvesting, craft production, and raids and attacks: “they did not stop all other activities just because the sun went down” (p. 192). Robert Weiner draws on ethnographic observations to demonstrate that some gambling activities were not only practiced during dark hours but occasionally even proscribed during daylight (p. 228), making certain stone markers or divinatory bone dice from Chaco Canyon even better archaeological indicators of nighttime activities than torches and fireboxes.
After Dark provocatively and effectively shows that daytime was not necessarily the principal province of life in the past while also demonstrating that an archaeology of the night requires attending to distinct material traces and approaching them in new ways.
