Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time (Francis Bacon 1605).

TIME is trouble and this is especially true for Easter, the greatest feast day of the Christian year. Easter marks the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, thought to be three days after His crucifixion that took place sometime between 27 and 33 AD. To celebrate Easter, the faithful need to know which date of each year will be that day and herein the trouble yet continues. As late as 1997, a gathering of the liturgical intelligentsia could still not agree on a universal method for calculating this most important of dates in the church calendar.

First the Church decided that Easter would always be on a Sunday, which meant that the date of the celebration would not be the same from year to year. In order that Resurrection Day be on a Sunday, the Church had to have a formula that transcended the annual calendar of fixed dates.

Easter was therefore decreed to be “observed on the Sunday after the first full moon on or after the day of the vernal equinox”, the last being March 21. However, that full moon that might have the wolves and dogs howling is not an astronomical one in the heavens, but an “ecclesiastical” full moon, that is, one that is measured.

From there it gets more complicated, so take it on Christian faith that this Easter, April 8, is the day it is supposed to be and enjoy the church service, the kite flying or the egg hunting, as you will.

The trouble with Easter time is compounded by the main trouble with time itself, which does not physically exist, unlike the moon, the sun and the stars that can imbue our lives with chronological meaning.

As time does not exist in a material form, we have invented ways to see it in diagrams, two of which control most waking moments. For marking the date of Easter, your birthday and other important days and appointments, the calendar is vital, but herein lies more trouble with time, for in order to devise a calendar, we have to translate data from the physical world into a diagrammatic form.

The moon waxes and wanes each month and summer gives way to autumn, winter and spring, as the Earth jogs around the sun each year, slightly tilted on its central axis.>he<$> trouble with the timing of these physical events is that they are not exact or amenable to being put into a timekeeping straitjacket, such as a calendar. Nonetheless, since time immemorial, we have been inventing calendars to make an exact sequence of days and years, to agree with the natural world. When the First Council of Nicaea met in 325 AD to determine the timing of Easter, they were running on the Julian calendar, put into place by the main character in that great HBO series, R<$>.

Then in 1582, Pope Gregory introduced a calendar that is now the international standard; an example is produced here for this April. The Gregorian calendar is used in most countries to mark the date of Easter, but some Eastern Orthodox Churches still employ the Julian, so Easter may fall on different dates, after two millennia of conferences and computations on the subject, depending on which country you are in.

The other vital diagram of time is the watch face, invented some time before the 1500s and seen in an incipient form as a sundial. The passage of daily time is shown in the division of the dial, or “watch diagram”, into 12 or 24 parts, or hours.

Until the age of the digital watch, which shows only numbers giving the exact time, the watch face was the primary diagram by which humans could see time.

Without the diagrams of the Gregorian calendar and the watch face, we would not be able to see time nor organise our lives with any accuracy. Easter may wander about the calendar from year to year, but you better be able to schedule your weekly resurrection to be on the job at 9 a.m. on Monday morning, or else.

Archaeological sites are the physical remnants of things that happened through time. As Francis Bacon might have said, they have survived the destructive ravages of time to be interpreted by scientists today.

As geological deposits define the history of the Earth, the layers and surfaces of archaeological sites are central to the reconstruction of the the evolution of human societies. They are very real H.G. Wells “time machines”, but for looking into the past, rather than the future.

The Harris Matrix, which I invented in 1973, is a method that gave archaeologists, for the first time, a calendar or watch facefor archaeological sites.

The resulting diagrams, which are unique for each site but can be expressed by universal system, are the true stratigraphic sequences for the archaeological remains that have been excavated.

That is to say, the Harris Matrix is to archaeology what the Gregorian calendar is to most people: itthe only way to see time<$> and therefore to organise and record events through the passage of the years.

In the case of archaeology, that recording and organising takes place long after the fact, as the archaeologists strive to translate the physical world they are destroying by excavation into an archive for the future, a new and unique record of what happened through time at that particular place.

To Bacon, time was so important that it was the “author of authors”. By such metaphor, archaeology is the Shakespeare of Shakespeares, for no other time-science has written so many primary plays about the development of human societies over the course of history.

Archaeology, as might have been said by Francis, who apparently invented the stuff by experimenting with preservation of pork with salts, “brings home the bacon” by its unique ability to recapture the time and tides of the lives of our ancestors by digging up the earth.

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Dr. Edward Harris, MBE, JP, FSA, Bermudian, is the Executive Director of the Bermuda Maritime Museum. The views expressed here are his opinion, not necessarily those of the trustees or staff of the Museum. Comments can be seno drharrU>@logic.bm, to PO Box MA 133, Sandys MABX, or by telephone at 79480.<$>