Making a "-cene": Archaeology, Politics, and the Anthropocene
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)
The concept of the Anthropocene relies on ideas about the human past, the relationship between humans and non-humans, and the material politics of the contemporary world. Many of the central engagements of archaeology have become objects of concern for other disciplines and new publics. Viewed from archaeology’s ongoing engagement with these ideas, the political implications of the turn to (and the contents of) the discussion of the Anthropocene are uncertain. Often these discussions recruit or rely on narratives about the human past and what it can tell us about human nature and our potential futures.
This session interrogates how discussions of the Anthropocene in the contemporary moment rely on particular narratives about the past, and how these relate to archaeologists’ understandings of the politics of the past and our accounts of politics in the societies we study. Politics, here, is not limited to questions of the polity or political subjectivity, but includes questions of inequalities in access to materials and power, as well as humans’ relationship to nonhumans. As such, it draws together a number of strands of recent theoretical interest in archaeology, including: symmetrical archaeology, new materialisms, human-animal relationships, and a renewed interested in the archaeology of the political.
Other Keywords
Anthropocene •
water •
Cahokia •
andes •
Urbanization •
Pastoralism •
Environmental Archaeology •
Moche •
Human-Animal relationships •
Mediterranean Archaeology
Geographic Keywords
South America •
United States of America (Country) •
Department of Martinique (Country) •
Missouri (State / Territory) •
Republic of El Salvador (Country) •
Department of Guadeloupe (Country) •
Antigua and Barbuda (Country) •
Kentucky (State / Territory) •
Illinois (State / Territory) •
Wisconsin (State / Territory)
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-6 of 6)
- Documents (6)
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The Anthropocene Divide: Obscuring our Understanding of Socio-Environmental History (2017)
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Much scientific debate has focused on the timing and stratigraphic signatures for the Anthropocene. In this paper, we argue that strident debate about the Anthropocene’s chronological boundaries arises because its formal periodization necessarily forces an arbitrary break in a long history of human alteration of environments. The aim of dividing geologic time based on a "step-change" in the global significance of socio-environmental processes goes directly against the socially differentiated and...
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Deep Time Versus Archaeological Time: Disentangling Stratigraphy, Periodization, and Historical Narrative (2017)
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The earth sciences have periodically contributed to shifts in archaeologists’ theoretical and methodological approaches to space and time ("deep" time and sociocultural evolution, stratigraphic laws and contextual interpretation). The Anthropocene seems to herald another such shift, but the category/concept remains controversial given its bridging, by design, of science and politics. This paper argues that archaeologists can clarify our discipline’s engagement with these debates by comparing...
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Is the Anthropocene a Beastly Problem? Thoughts on Human-Animal Relationships and Contemporary Narratives of Change (2017)
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Pizzly bears and coywolves have been making headlines over the past few years. Offspring of illicit pairings between species of charismatic and aggressive megafauna, these hybrid monsters are presented as signs and portents of a troubled future. This paper explores the relationship between contemporary discourses about unruly and uncanny hybrid species and academic efforts to define and engage with the Anthropocene. It questions the relationships between tacit understandings of the animal as a...
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On some classical roots of the Anthropocene: where does Mediterranean archaeology belong? (2017)
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In the long run-up to deciding the Anthropocene’s scientific status there have been few archaeological voices, as many have noted, revealing the proposed epoch’s narrow periodization of human-environment relationships. None seem to be more absent than classical archaeologists, an omission which reflects not only disciplinary cleavages but also tacit conceits about the classical world as paradoxically generative of and divorced from modern geopolitics and human-nature interfaces. From the early...
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Ontologies of water: intensities and magnitudes (2017)
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Increasingly, the effects of global warming take the form of destructive movements of water, whether vanishing bodies of water that create desertification or floods that damage human habitations and take lives. The extensive archaeological record of the North Coast of Peru offers a place to study long-term human strategies for living with the dangerous and unpredictable movement of water. Despite frequent earthquakes, floods and torrential rains that re-shape land- and sea-scapes, humans...
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The politics of urbanization and the Anthropocene: a view from Cahokia (2017)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
Anthropocene: a hotly debated geological epoch entangled with climate change, the Industrial Revolution, and the perceived deleterious effect of humans on the natural world. A dialectic surrounds the Anthropocene because identifying this epoch, geologically, has real implications for global politics and the future of humanity in a changing global environment. Crossland (2014) suggests that to understand the palimpsest of global human action that resulted in the Anthropocene requires us to...