Martha is a pet rat; she is two and a half years old and has a mammary tumour which means she will have to be put down soon. Two and a half is a good age for a rat, but of course it will still be very sad for me to lose her after what, for a human, is such a short time. I hope Martha doesn’t feel that brevity; it would be a cruel evolutionary trick if rats were aware of a longevity they could never have. Rats have individual personalities, they laugh, display empathy - not only towards their genetic kin - and have an interest in social status. They have agency but it is not the same as human agency; I don’t think they reflect on the conditions of their or my existence in the way that I do. I suspect Martha’s imminent passing, if she is aware of it, is harder emotionally for me than for her. My life would have been different if I hadn’t known her, but not in ways I can easily articulate. And I wonder how I might think about her in ten or twenty years time; would I even remember much of our short-lived connection or recall her individuality amongst the pet rats I have known? Thinking about the differences in lifespan and time perception between humans and rats, and more specifically the significance and transience of Martha’s short life within my much longer one, prompted me to reflect on how as an archaeologist I try and write about the lives of people in the distant past, human biography as the Martha-scale within the long spans of prehistoric time.

Ironically for a subject concerned with people, prehistory has always had problems with reconciling the very small and the very large at the scale of a human lifetime. We can observe individual events, such as a burial or the digging of a pit, and large-scale patterns, such as the distributions of Beakers or long barrows. But in between these scales are the biographies of people whose lives and actions, at once repetitive and creative, linked events and patterns. In one sense this is the eternal sociological problem of agency and structure, or habitus and generative principle, but whereas sociology tries to find patterns through observing people, prehistory seeks the people within material culture patterning observed at many different scales. These days we can approach such questions with new scientific tools and theoretical approaches. We can increase the precision of scientific dates through statistical modelling, interrogate human and animal mobility through bone and tooth isotopes, and apply ideas of network, assemblage and entanglement to thread together different strands of evidence. Yet I still don’t think we are very good at writing about people’s lives; something is still missing. Chronology is not history; movement is not biography; theoretical models are often richer in the source than in the application. Thinking about Martha’s place in my life reminds me of my dis-satisfaction with how I attempt to articulate the human scale in prehistory, between event and pattern or between site narrative and grand narrative. Although we can often now date prehistoric events at a generational (quarter-century) scale, the human scale is not just a matter of chronology; it is a mode of being, the passing of time always filtered through perception, memory and selfhood. Whereas prehistory is often more concerned with creating typologies, hunting out comparisons, and privileging what is shared over what is unique.

So we can talk about how a flint-knapper making a scraper, a potter decorating a bowl or a labourer digging a ditch carries forward ways of doing things that contribute to the patterns observed in the archaeological record, allowing us to recognise traditions, styles, cultures and periods. But understanding those people at the Martha-scale, as agents whose lives, however brief within our chronological frameworks, amounted to more than the simple accumulation of events, is more difficult. Individuals are less predictable than our posterior density estimates and grand narratives: their joys and traumas affected who they were and how they worked; their memories, like mine, have slipped and changed over years and decades. How do we find a place for this kind of agency in prehistory? I think it requires two main things: firstly paying greater attention to variability and difference in the archaeological record, foregrounding the messiness of human society (in Michael Mann’s terms) rather than just seeking repeated patterns; and secondly the exercise of our imagination in exploring plausible worlds and their perception, not to produce historical fiction but rather a kind of fictive history, which nevertheless remains grounded in the materiality of the archaeological record.

In the age of ‘post-truth’ we need to take particular care that a project which flirts with the tropes of fiction is honest and nuanced, respectful of its subjects; just as in order to make sense of Martha’s agency I need to avoid anthropomorphising her rat-ness or reducing her being-in-the-world simply to a rhetorical device. But contemporary politics also show that we need, more than ever, the deep-time perspectives of prehistory - the demonstration that other ways of living were and are possible - and these will resonate more with people today if our syntheses are populated with plausible human agents.

Prehistory can never ape documentary history and should not aspire to do so - they are different modes of understanding the past, based on different forms of evidence. However, we must continue thinking about how to convey the purpose and poignancy of the individual human lives that have contributed to the patterns we observe. This is particularly the case at a time when sophisticated scientific techniques can look like ends in themselves rather than springboards for interpretation. I have moved far away from thinking about an elderly rat, but I see Martha is still sleeping, dreaming of her last tasty meal or the next one. And yes I do have some evidence for this imaginative interpretation - the combination of scientific data on what rats dream about and my own memories of how she usually managed to be the first one over to claim a treat.