archaeology

The Exposure of Time

Gianni Sarcone

Not so long ago, before the digital age, photographs were fixed on silver gelatin photographic paper. But there are other, far more powerful mediums capable of freezing a moment — sometimes even an entire civilization — in space and time: ash and forest.

Take Pompeii. In AD 79, the eruption of Mount Vesuvius abruptly brought life in the city to a halt, burying its streets, houses, and inhabitants beneath volcanic debris. Pompeii became, in a sense, a three-dimensional photograph of a precise moment in time. Walking through its streets today, we can still see traces of everyday life interrupted: decorated houses, shops, familiar objects, inscriptions on the walls. Everything seems to tell us what was happening just moments before time stopped: the bustle of the streets, voices mingling, merchants calling out to passersby, children crying, lovers meeting away from prying eyes. As if all those lives had been imprinted in stone.

Then there are the Maya cities, such as Palenque. Here, the shutter seems to have worked much more slowly. It did not capture a single moment, but the gradual disappearance of an entire civilization. After the city was abandoned, the tropical forest slowly covered its temples, palaces, and plazas, until it almost completely absorbed them.

At Pompeii, ash stopped time. In the Maya cities, it was the forest that covered it.

Two very different ways of preserving the past: one through a sudden interruption, the other through the slow return of nature. In both cases, what we discover today bears a strange resemblance to a photographic image — except that here, the image is three-dimensional, and its frame is time itself.

And there is something quite extraordinary about that: time, which normally erases everything, has left an image behind. An image without film, without a camera, without a photographer.

And perhaps that is the most haunting photograph of all: one that no one ever took, but that time itself developed.

Pompei
Pompeii
Palenque
Palenque

Before War Had a Name

Gianni Sarcone

Since humans learned to stand upright without wobbling too much, they also learned how to organize confrontation—and how to justify it, which sometimes requires more invention than the act itself.

The archers painted on the rock shelters of the Spanish Levant—particularly in the Castellón region, around sites such as Morella and the Cueva del Roure area—belong to a broad artistic tradition dated to the late Mesolithic and early Neolithic (roughly the 7th to 6th millennia BCE). They are among the earliest narrative images known in Europe. The scenes show hunting in motion, and in some cases have been read as episodes of intergroup conflict.

Archers facing each other at Cueva del Roure, in Morella (Castellón). The scenes depicted in the Levantine Spanish rock paintings, dating to the 6th millennium BCE, are among the earliest known representations of warfare.

What is clear is not the confirmed presence of war, but the early shaping of its story. From very early on, humans did more than strike—they composed. They organized action into sequence, gave it form, and turned events into something legible. And perhaps that is where the deeper history of power begins: in the ability to convert chaos into composition.

So is war in our DNA?

No. DNA does not encode behavior. It defines capacities that are shaped by culture, history, and environment. Still, it leaves a clear paradox: we are built to cooperate, and we are built to exclude. Early humans lived in tight-knit groups, bound by cooperation, while competing with other groups for resources. That tension likely shaped both empathy and aggression.

The brain still carries traces of it. The amygdala rapidly classifies “us” and “them,” triggering threat responses, while the prefrontal cortex helps regulate and reinterpret them. Culture largely determines which patterns dominate. We see the same mechanism today in digital echo chambers, where similarity is continuously reinforced and difference flattened.

Organized warfare, as we recognize it today, appears relatively late in the archaeological record. Clear and recurring evidence becomes more visible around 14,000–10,000 years ago, and expands with the rise of sedentary and agricultural societies. Homo sapiens, however, has existed for roughly 300,000 years. Across most of that span, the evidence points more toward small-scale, episodic violence rather than sustained, systematized warfare.

War, in this sense, may be less an ancient biological destiny than a comparatively recent cultural development—built upon older cognitive and social instincts.

P.S. Early language systems such as Proto-Indo-European—the reconstructed ancestor behind many European and some South Asian languages—did not rely on a single abstract word for “war.” Conflict was instead described through specific acts like raiding, fighting bands, or disputes. The idea of “war” as a unified concept came much later, which is why Indo-European languages still reflect different, unrelated roots for it today.