Political Geologies Past and Present: An Introduction

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.

Researchers working across the humanities and social sciences have recently demonstrated how the study of earthy materials is rooted in historically and ontologically specific frameworks. Such frameworks are, as Bobbette and Donovan (2019) demonstrate, “political geologies.” Geological practices are inherently political because of how practitioners identify, select, frame, and even exclude certain materials. These ongoing interdisciplinary conversations impact archaeological practice as well as interpretations of geomaterials, particularly with regard to evaluating political relationships. Simultaneously, archaeologists are reevaluating how to examine the political, with critical perspectives toward the normative political economy models that are the foundations for many considerations of so-called “raw materials.” In this introductory paper, we discuss salient links between these two bodies of literature to problematize the political from the geological ground up. We also touch on some of the broader themes of this session: explorations of the political in geoarchaeology, reevaluations of uncritical approaches to earthly materials, and juxtapositions of scientific and Indigenous ontologies in archaeological practice. We suggest that archaeologists must be part of interdisciplinary conversations in political geology, since our methods and theories are rooted in categorizations and understandings of geomaterials.

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)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36584.0