Making a "-cene": Archaeology, Politics, and the Anthropocene

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.