The Human ArchivesDrag to turn · Select an archive
Origins
From ancient light and meteorite grains to footprints, creation images and Darwin’s branching sketch: different ways of investigating beginnings.
Explore this archiveEnter OriginsExplore the other archives below, or follow the selected jewel into its artifacts and stories.
Explore the collection
10 archives · 100 works
Origins
From ancient light and meteorite grains to footprints, creation images and Darwin’s branching sketch: different ways of investigating beginnings.
Duality
Paired forms, opposing forces and complementary descriptions, examined through religious images, living structures and physical experiments.
Nonduality
Connections between things often treated as separate, approached through cultural knowledge, mathematics, physics and contemplative traditions.
Life
Fossils, living forms and images of life, followed by the unresolved search for life beyond Earth.
Death
Extinction, preserved remains, burial and remembrance: what endings leave behind, and how people respond to mortality.
Energy
Sunlight, living systems, fire and nuclear technology, alongside cultural accounts that use a different language for vitality and transformation.
Time
Cycles, calendars and physical limits, with trees, diagrams and cultural works that make duration intelligible.
Causality
Causes, predictions and the limits of knowledge, explored through philosophical arguments, divination, mechanisms and physics.
Memory
Natural records, cultural memory and recording technologies: how traces endure, and how people learn to read them.
Consciousness
Ten ordinary words organise an enquiry into self, relationship, attention, action and memory. This is an experiential archive, not a sequence of historical objects.
Drag to turn · Select a work
Cycles, calendars and physical limits, with trees, diagrams and cultural works that make duration intelligible.
About this archive
Time is encountered before it is measured, but different practices make different aspects of it available to us. This sequence sets celestial cycles and calendrical works beside physical records and measurements. A mandala is not a clock, and a philosophical limit is not an observed event. The collection is organised around those differences as much as the connections.
Finding a recurring order
The Moon, Nabta Playa and the Dresden Codex place attention on cycles and the interpretation of celestial observations. Read their historical settings before assuming a common purpose.
Representing and recording duration
The Kalachakra Mandala, Carbon and Pinus longaeva bring together a cultural representation, a physical basis for dating and a living record. Their forms of evidence are different.
The limits of measurement
Rømer’s diagram and the speed of light lead towards questions of observation and physical limits. The singularity entry belongs at a boundary of description, not at a confidently pictured destination.
Other archives
Discuss and improve this archive
Questions, replies and reviewed suggestions.