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.
The collection
The Human Archives
Explore the artifacts, discoveries and ideas that shape our understanding of the world.
10 archives
100 artifacts
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.
Archive 007
Time
Cycles, calendars and physical limits, with trees, diagrams and cultural works that make duration intelligible.
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.
The collection
10 artifacts · Curated sequenceReading across the archive
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.
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