Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the prehistory of human interactions with the environment, during the formative stages of the Anthropocene. It explores how the comingling of humans and earthy matter forged a new material world in which humans increasingly viewed themselves as masters over matter.

Paper long abstract:

This paper interrogates some of the earliest documented evidence for intra-actions between human bodies and earthy matters and how this shaped and transformed the material world during what might be described as the formative stages of the Anthropocene. Looking at the Neolithic in the Near East it explores how daily entanglements of humans and earthy materials anchored people to place (particular points in the landscape) ‒ effectively describing a process in which people become (as described by Kate Feyers-Kerr 2019, 114) consubstantial: "cultivating a confederacy between communities and the earthy substances of place". This paper focuses on the vitality of earthy matter from a New Materialities perspective; it interrogates how the distinct capacities of clay/earth/mud provoked, enabled and constrained human behaviour and how the daily encounters between these substances and people created a new material world in which we became human. Pottery, figurines and houses were all crafted from mud, fire and water and these "phenomena" (Barad 2003) persist in the environment millennia after humans shaped them. Thus, this paper also argues that understanding early material entanglements and their impact upon ancient landscapes is of relevance to our current preoccupation with the detritus of the Anthropocene and the mark that humans leave/have left upon the world.