Robert A. Dodgshon on the End of Time

No matter what sources of evidence are used to define the past--archaeological, ethnographic, documentary, published, oral, etc--they constitute traces of the past that have survived into the present so that our appreciation of what is past is always contemporary with ourselves. In this sense, our appreciation of the past is simply part of how we classify what is in the present....

Until it can be established that our sense of what is past is qualitatively different from our sense of what is in the present, and are not merely parts of the same classificatory scheme, then the past will survive in us and in our constructions of space whether we like it or not.

Robert A. Dodgshon. 1999. Human geography at the end of time? Some thoughts on the notion of time-space compression. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 17:607-620.