The interdisciplinary project investigates social interaction in environments that are characterised by pastness. It analyses naturally occuring interactions using multimodal space-based interaction analysis to describe and interpret how participants use (multilingual) linguistic, gestural, bodily and spacial resources to make sense of and interact in an environment that they understand as being of the past. 

The project implements an approach for the analysis of social interaction that has its roots in ethnomethodology and draws on subsequent developments such as conversation analysis, interaction analysis and multimodal space-based interaction analysis. Researchers taking an ethnomethodological perspective are interested in how participants in an interaction produce social order in their everyday activities, and how they coordinate their contributions to the ongoing interaction to make sense together and achieve mutual understanding. While the analysis of conversations typically focuses on spoken language as talk-in-interaction, multimodal space-based interaction analysis broadens this perspective to include the role of the body in establishing interactional space and sensoriality as an integral part of multimodal interaction as well as spatial and architectural resources. It is postulated that actions in the present are shaped by actions of predecessors. Every time a particular object like a spoon or a hammer, or an architectural space such as a house or a workplace that have been designed or made by people in the past are used by modern people, these objects and spaces influence present-day actions. One way of approaching the past as a form of co-operative action with predecessors is the exploration of ancient techniques and technologies, where participants work with materials and tools that have been used in the (prehistoric) past. Investigation of such activities sheds light on interactional processes that are employed to accomplish joint meaning making of past social and material settings.