Deep Time Metabolism and Creative Decay

This paper engages with the classical archaeological technique of radiocarbon dating and reconsiders it through an environmental humanities and multispecies lens. Inspired by Lyons thoughts on vital decomposition (2020) this paper will read the decay processes necessary for C14 dating (and other isotope analyses) as allies for making out archaeological narratives. However, the death and decay of an organism, as in the cessation of its metabolic processes, can also be recognised as an event in which former lives make themselves known in the present and project into the future. Then, rather than treating the method as a purely technical means of measuring age, the paper proposes a reading of radiocarbon dating as a poetic encounter where the lingering traces of once-living beings allow for an attunement with what could be sensed as the last, outdrawn exhalation of a being that once was, and which slowly is on its way to become something else. Hence, the paper deals with questions on how multispecies life persists beyond death, albeit in an altered form and with different affective capacities. Hence, radiocarbon dating can be understood to provide a creative decay that not only marks temporal distance, but also provides a bodily physical presence of such life. This also has implications for how to work with Deep Time, and the paper forwards a transtemporeal perspective (Fredengren 2026), as a recognition that past-present-futures are not neatly separated but materially entangled. Then, radiocarbon dating becomes a practice that mediates across temporal registers, which has implications for how to engage with multispecies heritage and sustainability.