Kaolin as the Stuff of Politics among Recuay Communities? Applying Political Geology to Ancient Andean Ceramics

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Political Geologies in the Ancient and Recent Pasts: Ontology, Knowledge, and Affect" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Recent scholarship argues that the knowledge and use of earthly materials is a power-laden field that is relationally distributed across everyday activities. This paper draws on these theoretical discussions in “political geology” to grapple with three interpretations for prehispanic Recuay kaolin pottery. Recuay villages flourished between 100 and 700 CE in Peru’s highland Ancash region. Recuay communities shared a common material culture (e.g., kaolin finewares), which was enmeshed in mutual ontological dispositions and cultural practices. However, their sociopolitical and cultural organization do not easily fit into archaeology’s neat political categories. Archaeologists have classified Recuay political arrangements in diverse ways, from “chiefdom” to “commonwealth.” I use archaeometric data to consider the ways in which archaeologists can interpret kaolin pottery to understand Recuay political relationships. First, I show how archaeologists draw sociopolitical boundaries using scientific categorizations of elemental and mineralogical data. Second, I consider how kaolin’s vital materialism (sensu Bennett 2010) may have helped to organize Recuay politics and territory. Finally, I draw on Andean ontologies to evaluate the role of kaolin deposits as salient political actors. Each of these interpretations may lead archaeologists to different conclusions; thus, this juxtaposition troubles the use of ceramic data to infer ancient political relationships.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Political Geologies in the Ancient and Recent Pasts: Ontology, Knowledge, and Affect   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35773.0