Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Following recent work like that of Tsing et al. (2021), this session explores “infrastructures” as assemblages of humans, more-than-human entities, and broader ecologies. Infrastructures sometimes produce broad systems of inequality and segregation, routes of connection and community, and/or leave various forms of devastation and ruination in their wake. We welcome contributions broadly relating to the impacts and consequences of diverse forms of infrastructure through time and across the globe, including railroads, highways and roads, shipping routes, mines and sites of extraction, animal herding, pipelines, boom towns, plantation and post-plantation landscapes, and the bio-political consequences of state infrastructural divestment, etc. Drawing on diverse theoretical contributions, this session attempts a deeper archaeological theorization of infrastructures and related ecologies. How do environments and other-than-human actors impact infrastructural projects and vice versa? What sorts of methodologies and questions can archaeologists bring to this topic? What are the sociopolitical implications and possibilities of our work in exposing these processes?

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  • Documents (12)

Documents
  • Castle Ballintober, Roscommon, Ireland: Nothing but Tractors and Cows (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Samuel Connell. Chad Gifford. Daniel Cearley.

    This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Late Medieval colonization of Ireland by the Anglo Normans was characterized by the imposition of English infrastructures upon the Gaelic Irish landscape. Indeed, our work beyond the Pale at Ballintober Castle, County Roscommon, sees a shift from the seasonally pastoral nature of...

  • Digital Archaeology and Virtual Reality Models of the Penal Colonies in the Galápagos Islands (1860–1959) (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Fernando Astudillo. Paúl Rosero.

    This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Islands have been used by societies around the world to abandon, exile, or relocate those deemed unworthy. Repressive institutions, as a form of state infrastructure, have been created on the islands during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to detain political prisoners,...

  • Environmental Justice and the Water Temple at Cara Blanca, Belize (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeannie Larmon.

    This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nestled between stark white limestone cliffs and freshly burned agricultural fields, the Cara Blanca, Belize, water temple complex sits teetering on the edge of a 60+ m deep cenote. The Ancestral Maya built the structures so as to integrate the structure and the landscape—with...

  • Fadeaway Environments and How Infrastructure Change Creates Ghost Towns and Societal Remnants (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Sando.

    This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Infrastructure decisions influence human settlement and can leave archaeologic and geographic evidence for us to discover and decipher. Discovery in that much of this evidence has faded away into the environmental background of current human occupation and can be rediscovered by...

  • Geographies of Black Cimarronaje in the Northern Andes of Ecuador (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniela Balanzategui. Barbarita Lara. Genesis Delgado.

    This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Construction of the colonial landscape and its legacies that guide the agendas of neoliberal governments have permitted a series of effects that define that north-central Andes under a historical geography created by the hacienda system and its confluence of human exploitation,...

  • Ideological Infrastructures and Bio-Political Ecology: Investigating Colonial-Era Entanglements of New Food and Religious Systems (Sixteenth Century, Ayacucho, Peru) (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Scotti Norman.

    This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. ThThe extended Spanish conquest of Indigenous groups in the sixteenth century prompted infrastructural collisions of governance, foodways, and religious ideologies that indelibly altered Indigenous physical and ritual landscapes. Through the entanglement of new European foods and...

  • “On the Road to Moorhead”: Contextualizing the Infrastructure of Transient Workers and Moorhead Saloons along the Minnesota and North Dakota Border (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Betsinger.

    This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Following the Civil War, the Midwest experienced unprecedented population growth. Keeping pace with the expansion of numerous commodity frontiers driven by the building of railways, cities such as Fargo, ND, and Moorhead, MN, became seasonal locales for thousands of transient...

  • The Role of Infrastructures in the Production of Multigenerational Inequality in a Historic Black Community: The case of North Brentwood, Maryland (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Mohammadi. Stefan Woehlke. Olivia Meoni.

    This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. North Brentwood is a historic Black community on the outskirts of Washington, DC. It is the second Black town incorporated in Maryland, and the first suburban one in the state. Its founding is steeped in the exploitation of social and environmental infrastructures to turn a profit...

  • Salt-Making at Santa Catalinas de Salinas: Ecological Stress in the Northern Ecuadorian Highlands from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jorge Flores.

    This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The residents of Santa Catalina de Salinas have exploited salt since prehispanic times in the northern Ecuadorian Andes, possibly in the hands of the indigenous groups of the Chota-Mira valley. However, during colonial times, this activity shifted to the hands of mestizos and...

  • Unsettling Infrastructure: The Feral Qualities of Water in an Archaeological Tale of Railroads and Pipelines (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Butler.

    This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The eastern Great Plains of North Dakota and west-central Minnesota are home to the remnants of one of the world’s largest ancient glacial lakes, Lake Agassiz, as well as the United States’ longest river, the Missouri. These two powerful water entities shaped and disrupted the...

  • Unsettling Infrastructures that Settle: From the Andean Hacienda to a Minnesota Railway (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Zev Cossin.

    This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Through European colonization, plantations and haciendas became infrastructures that “settled.” These colonial infrastructures transformed social and ecological relations throughout the Americas as they displaced Indigenous peoples from the land. Later, other forms of...

  • Washington's Board of Public Works and the Burial of Black Georgetown (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Palus.

    This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cultural resource management projects in and around Washington, DC, have documented the episodic and nearly complete displacement of the city’s first exurban Black communities in areas that would become metropolitan suburbs. This recurring theme illuminates a posture of...