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?

Other Keywords
Historic • Historical Archaeology • Colonialism • Landscape Archaeology • Ethnohistory/History • Environment and Climate  • Geoarchaeology • Zooarchaeology • digital archaeology • historical ecology

Geographic Keywords
Republic of Peru (Country) • Republic of Panama (Country) • Republic of Colombia (Country) • Netherlands Antilles (Country) • Aruba (Country) • Republic of Ecuador (Country) • Republic of Chile (Country) • South America (Continent) • North America (Continent) • South America: Andes

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-12 of 12)

  • Documents (12)
Documents
  1. Castle Ballintober, Roscommon, Ireland: Nothing but Tractors and Cows (2023)
  2. Digital Archaeology and Virtual Reality Models of the Penal Colonies in the Galápagos Islands (1860–1959) (2023)
  3. Environmental Justice and the Water Temple at Cara Blanca, Belize (2023)
  4. Fadeaway Environments and How Infrastructure Change Creates Ghost Towns and Societal Remnants (2023)
  5. Geographies of Black Cimarronaje in the Northern Andes of Ecuador (2023)
  6. Ideological Infrastructures and Bio-Political Ecology: Investigating Colonial-Era Entanglements of New Food and Religious Systems (Sixteenth Century, Ayacucho, Peru) (2023)
  7. “On the Road to Moorhead”: Contextualizing the Infrastructure of Transient Workers and Moorhead Saloons along the Minnesota and North Dakota Border (2023)
  8. The Role of Infrastructures in the Production of Multigenerational Inequality in a Historic Black Community: The case of North Brentwood, Maryland (2023)
  9. Salt-Making at Santa Catalinas de Salinas: Ecological Stress in the Northern Ecuadorian Highlands from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century (2023)
  10. Unsettling Infrastructure: The Feral Qualities of Water in an Archaeological Tale of Railroads and Pipelines (2023)
  11. Unsettling Infrastructures that Settle: From the Andean Hacienda to a Minnesota Railway (2023)
  12. Washington's Board of Public Works and the Burial of Black Georgetown (2023)