Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

This paper develops three conceptual metaphors with analytic value for refining environmental ethnography through sand as both matter and method, highlighting how sandy admixtures unsettle boundaries among geological, organic, and anthropogenic processes.

Paper long abstract

From shorelines remade by sea-level rise to extractive enterprise, urban construction and rural terraforming, sand is a preeminent indicator of human induced global disturbance forming the substrate of Anthropocene lives. This conceptual paper presents work developed in a special issue published in Spring/Summer 2026, edited by presenters, to argue that sustained attention to sand and sandy admixtures offers a productive way to refine environmental ethnography. While geoscientific classifications distinguish sand through size and mineral composition, an ethnographic perspective brings into view a wider field of sandy substances, including sediments produced through everyday consumption, infrastructural degradation, and intensifying industrial activity. These mixtures increasingly unsettle analytical separations between geological, organic, and anthropogenic materials and call for approaches capable of grasping their shifting formations and social consequences.

The paper outlines three conceptual metaphors for approaching sand as both matter and method. 'Granular particularism,' offers a framework to trace the heterogenous materials and scales of intertwined human and geological substances and practices. 'Sedimentary configuration' provides a means to the play of fixity and flow characterizing sand-based geosocial formations. 'Compositional politics' makes evident the unsettled alliances and inherent inequalities between human and more-than-human actors that derive value from sand’s utility to fostering life and livelihood. By centering sand as an analytic, the paper advances a methodological orientation attentive to the subtle material entanglements of Anthropocene life and demonstrates how environmental ethnography can benefit from closer engagement with sedimented forms and processes.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

In Romania's Danube Delta, sand dunes were targeted for extraction under Ceaușescu; a factory was built but never opened. Following quartz from geological formation to protected substance, this presentation asks what sand reveals about layered time and friction between political & geological scales.

Paper long abstract

What can a grain of sand tell us about political time? In Caraorman, a remote village in Romania's Danube Delta, quartz sand dunes were targeted under Ceaușescu for industrial extraction. This was part of a regime whose ecological violence matched its political repression, draining wetlands and building canals with forced labor. A processing plant was constructed. Then, the 1989 revolution halted everything. The factory never opened; the dunes and surrounding ancient forest remained intact. Today, the ruins sit inside a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, where the dunes and wetlands are strictly protected.

This contribution takes up the panel's invitation to think "from the ground up" by following quartz sand across temporal and political scales. Under microscopy, the grains reveal a deep history—silica formed over millions of years. Yet this same substance became the object of authoritarian industrial ambition, only to be reimagined as "heritage" by contemporary conservation regimes. The sand persists through these shifts, outlasting the polarized political projects that lay claim to it.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and audiovisual documentation (photography, microscopy, remote sensing, film), I trace how quartz moves between registers: geological substance, extractive resource, protected matter. I argue that rather than treating the site merely as a ruin, attending to the granular reveals how deep time and political time remain unevenly sedimented. The sand does not just record history; it exposes the fragility of human administrative categories—whether extractive or protective—when laid against the scale of the geological.

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

Treating gas as an interscalar vehicle, this paper moves through geological formations, extractive politics, and histories of land and energy use in Groningen (The Netherlands), to explore representational challenges of the (planetary) legacies of fossil fuels.

Paper long abstract

The documentary “The Soil is Moving: When Worlds Collide” (2023) depicts the struggles of residents in Groningen, the Netherlands, seeking recognition and compensation for damages caused by earthquakes linked to gas extraction. While it foregrounds conflicts between residents, the government and extractive industry, it begins with reflections on the landscape shaped by peat extraction and polders, highlighting a collision between subterranean worlds and the surface.

This paper explores an ethnography ‘from the ground up’, by treating natural gas as an “interscalar vehicle” (Hecht 2018) that moves our analysis across a variety of the scalar and temporal registers and claims. As a dynamic participant gas allows us to move ‘through’ the soil with attention to different strata, centuries of human land and energy use, colonial extractive practices, energy consumption, welfare state narratives, and residents’ experiences of marginalisation and resistance – while notably, connections to climate change are largely absent in these accounts.

Our material draws on a heritage ethnography approach. As the wells are closing and gas infrastructure is being removed, we participate in a grassroots effort to create a memory infrastructure that preserves the narratives and traces of gas extraction, making subterranean worlds and their expansive temporalities visible. We explore examples of visual, artistic, and material strategies to think “from the ground up” and render geosocial formations of gas tangible. This approach combines multiple forms of knowledge—geologic, artistic, historical, experiential, and ethnographic—demonstrating a collaborative effort to understand the entanglements of human and nonhuman worlds beneath and above the surface.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper lends theoretical and methodological arguments for anthropological engagement with the Biological Philosophy of Technology and its postulates on InOrganic life. Implications are considered through an ethnographic tracing of Lebanese amber and its technologization in deep-time science.

Paper long abstract

Amber is a deep-time technology – a material that enables earth-history scientists (i.e., palaeontologists, geoscientists) to peer into the ecological relationships constituting planetary history, as well as a device deployed to model macro and micro projections of planetary change. The historical and ongoing technologization of amber is both a product and constitutive factor of the deep-time sensibilities at the heart of the Anthropocene.

Through amber, I outline implications for anthropological engagement with the Biological Philosophy of Technology (BPT), a foundational if not forgotten bedrock to many theoretical movements that have taken hold within anthropology, including the new materialism(s), multispecies perspectives, and recently, the geological turn. This paper engages this lineage in two ways beyond mere bibliographic exercise. The first outlines how technologies are regarded in BPT – diffuse and always-already more-than-human phenomena corresponding to the modes by which entities come into association. Foregrounding this approach is a position incompatible with a rigid distinction of bios/geos, as technologies and their associative milieux (Simondon 1958) criss-cross and transcend such domains, providing a more encompassing and analytically productive view of InOrganic life (Linder 2025; Dittrich 2011; Deleuze & Guattari 1980). BPT therefore deploys genealogical methodologies to trace how associative networks form and the kinds of feedback mechanisms they generate. This extends to the second intervention of this paper, as I argue this has implications for ethnographic method.

This paper is based on my ethnographic work on Lebanese amber, its circulations, and its technologization as one of the most valuable materials for deep-time science.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Mud challenges dichotomies, such as life/nonlife and past/future. Drawing on the 2019 Brumadinho dam collapse, this paper traces tailings mud across landscapes, affects, and law, showing how repair and responsibility unfold as ongoing negotiations with material temporalities beyond linear time.

Paper long abstract

Mud disrupts established dichotomies, such as those between life and nonlife, water and earth, nature and infrastructure, as well as past and future. Mud resists containment, measurement, and categorization, yet it simultaneously demands political and legal responses. Instead of treating mud as inert residue or mere ecological waste, this paper recognizes it as a sedimentary assemblage encapsulating deep time, extractive economies, and negotiations of human and nonhuman futures. In this vein, the paper anthropologically explores the mud spilled by the collapse of a tailings dam in Brumadinho, a mining community in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. The mud released in January 2019 profoundly altered the local landscape, infrastructure, and social relations. Seven years later, the tailings mud still lingers in riverbeds, as dust, in bodies, in legal files, and in everyday conversations about repair and responsibility. Against this backdrop, the paper examines how mud becomes tangible and subject to scrutiny or is neglected in sociolegal processes to achieve "full reparation" following the dam collapse in Brumadinho. By tracing the mud across scales—from mineral sediments to affective experiences—the paper reveals that repair and responsibility defy linear temporality. Rather, they emerge as ongoing negotiations with earthly materials whose temporalities extend beyond human planning and legal timeframes. Addressing mud as both matter and metaphor, the paper proposes an anthropology from the ground up, examining sedimented histories and uneven temporal alignments in the wake of extractivism and its collapse.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Sand at Mombasa’s urban depots “does not rot”. This paper examines how sand’s durability and trusted presence enable forms of urban everyday life grounded in granular rhythms, maintenance, and repetition rather than permanence or security.

Paper long abstract

Taking sand as a material through which to think from the ground up, this paper examines how geological matter mediates social relations in Mombasa, Kenya. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at urban sand depots, it follows sand after extraction to the sites where it is stored, trusted, and lived with, shifting attention from extraction and circulation alone to moments of accumulation, temporary fixity, and place-making.

Unlike perishable goods, „sand does not rot“, as my interlocutors repeatedly noted. It can be piled, left to wait, and mobilized when demand arises, holding value across uncertain futures. Amid ecological degradation and economic hardship, this material durability generates a form of trust. Through daily acts of placing sand, brokers, loaders, and drivers align their own temporal horizons with those of a material shaped by deep geological time yet embedded in everyday urban livelihoods. Their lives are synchronized with fluctuating construction cycles, seasonal rains, fuel prices, infrastructural projects and political instability.

Rather than treating sand simply as a commodity, this paper approaches it as a sedimentary companion to urban life whose durability makes certain forms of staying possible. Sand’s capacity to be accumulated, paused, and reactivated enables people to inhabit urban space through waiting, maintenance, and repetition rather than permanence. Attending to these granular practices foregrounds how emplacement in Mombasa is not secured through stability or ownership, but is continuously negotiated through trust in material endurance, everyday labor, and alignment with granular rhythms.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

The recycling economy of rubble and earth in Nairobi, Kenya interrupts sedimentary processes in the ground and challenges sociocultural dynamics of the city. Materials from wealthy areas are used for flood defences and home improvements in poor areas creating a material proximity between two poles.

Paper long abstract

Nairobi, Kenya is a polarized city. Wealthy business elites, political dynasties and an international community of consultants move in cars and elevators cleaned by those on low incomes living in unofficial settlements, often in riverine locations susceptible to flooding. The entanglement of these economically disparate groups is also bound up with the earth of the city, and surrounding area. When constructing new high-rise buildings in affluent areas, the walls of old bungalows and the earth from excavations enter a recycling economy that sees those materials put to use in flood defences and self-directed housing improvement projects in low-income communities. Periodic government evictions and floods bring down the recycled structures and the enfolding continues - if not into new construction then “waste” earth fills the quarries from which some of it first came. This movement of earth, and rock and sand (in the form of concrete) is altering the stratigraphy of the city.

In this paper I explore how the crises of rapid urbanisation and climate breakdown (manifest here in flooding) are altering Nairobi in new, material ways. I suggest that these are the actions of the Anthropocene, the movement of earth and rubble each time in new configurations, creating a “palimpsestuous landscape” (Ly, 2020). The Anthropocene is marked not a single layer but an ever-changing layering and re-layering of materials. Reading them offers a new perspective on this moment in time.

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract

This paper contributes to the field of geological anthropology by elucidating how architects, urban planners, and engineers engage with geological formations under the guise of “development”, revealing how geological movements are intertwined with neoliberal future-oriented urban imaginaries.

Paper long abstract

The Lower Danube terraces are inherently unstable geological formations, characterized by young loess and paleosoil, which naturally tend to slide toward the river. This fragility is further intensified by small creeks and shallow groundwater permeating the area. Over the past two decades, the city of Galați in Southeastern Romania has seen the emergence of two upscale residential neighborhoods on the river’s second terrace. While pre-socialist authorities avoided construction on these vulnerable slopes, both socialist and postsocialist regimes have ignored the city’s history of landslides, allowing high-value apartment complexes to rise within a hundred meters of the terrace edge. Recent “modernization” plans by the city hall seek to stabilize the terraces, aesthetically enhance the promenade along the Danube on the first terrace, and implement concrete infrastructures to combat the accelerated erosion of the riverbank. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this study examines how geological formations, soil materiality, and the dynamics of the Danube River are interpreted and managed within the framework of techno-scientific projects.

This paper contributes to the field of geological anthropology by elucidating how architects, urban planners, and engineers perceive and engage with geological formations under the guise of “development”, revealing how geological movements are intertwined with neoliberal future-oriented urban imaginaries. Our findings contribute to broader debates on how technoscientific aesthetics mediate relations between the political economy of development and the agency of geological matter in Southeast Europe.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Bhasan Char became a camp twenty years after emerging from the Bay of Bengal, decades before such islands are considered habitable. I follow how sediment's material instability participates in governance and settlement, troubling boundaries between land/water, life/nonlife, permanent/temporary.

Paper long abstract

Coastal researchers and settlers consider that chars (silt islands) require thirty to forty years before becoming suitable for habitation. Bhasan Char, a sedimented island in the Meghna estuary of Bay of Bengal, was transformed into a refugee camp for Rohingyas within twenty years of its emergence. This temporal disruption offers a productive site for rethinking how human politics align with deep time processes, a central concern of recent work on geological matter in anthropology (Povinelli 2016; Yusoff 2018; Oguz 2020). This paper explores how sediment's material instability participates in producing particular forms of governance and settlement. I trace movements of granular materials across the island: construction sand and eroded embankment dust contributing to farming practices while salinity causes plants to die with scorched leaves, crops struggling in soil that resists growth. Farming happens through ongoing transformation of geological matter. Attending to sediment's materiality raises questions about temporal and spatial politics. The char's geological processes operate across decades, while refugees hold temporary status, NGO projects last one to two years, and infrastructure decays within months. How do these different temporalities meet in the same unstable ground? What does it mean when neither earth nor people can claim permanence, yet both are expected to produce: crops, livelihood, territorial order? By following granular materials as they move, transform, and accumulate, I explore how sediment's ongoing incompleteness troubles fixed categories: land/water, permanent/temporary, life/nonlife, natural/built. Rather than backdrop to refugee politics, sediment actively participates in shaping relations between state speculation, humanitarian projects, and survival practices.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper traces how learning emerges through socio-material engagements with contaminated sediments and spontaneous ecologies at the urban water infrastructure of Floating Berlin. It argues that sedimentary dynamics actively shape how humans and more-than-humans cohabit and learn with the site.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how learning and cohabitation emerge “from the ground up“ by tracing socio-material engagements with contaminated sediments at Floating Berlin, a natureculture learning site situated in a rainwater retention basin adjacent to Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport. Constructed in the 1930s as hydrotechnical infrastructure and built on rubble, sands and muddy sediments, the site materializes layered histories of wartime destruction, post-war reconstruction, urban development and shifting governance structures. It functions as a sedimented assemblage and archive of infrastructural, political and environmental change.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I conceptualize the basin as a “feral landscape“ (Bubandt and Tsing, 2018), where managed infrastructure operates simultaneously as regulatory apparatus and urban ecological entity. Although sediments washed into the basin contain heavy metals and persistent organic pollutants above safety thresholds, spontaneous ecologies such as algae, reeds, amphibians, microbes have emerged from this contaminated matter. Cyclical transformations — algal blooms and collapse, sediment accumulation and decomposition — produce non-linear ecological rhythms in which degeneration and partial regeneration are mutually entangled, unsettling modern ideas of ecological purity. These processes blur distinctions between nature and infrastructure, life and decay.

I argue that these sedimentary dynamics actively shape how humans and more-than-humans cohabit and learn with the site. Learning unfolds through sustained exposure to fluctuating material conditions and what I term “situated co-becoming“: a long-term process of relational attunement through care, attention and material encounters. By thinking and learning from contaminated sediments, the paper contributes to an earthly anthropology attentive to deep material times and urban infrastructural ecologies.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

While amber’s deep-time feature often underpins its contemporary value – from jewellery to paleontological specimen, focusing on amber from Fushun in northeastern China, the paper explores how a much shorter human history may get registered in amber in ways that are both social and material.

Paper long abstract

Appreciated as “nature’s time capsule”, amber is known for its capacity to reveal deep ecological pasts. While this deep-time feature often underpins its contemporary value – from precious jewellery to vital paleontological specimen, this paper looks at how a much shorter human history may get registered in amber in ways that are both social and material. Specifically, it focuses on Eocene amber from Fushun in northeastern China, where amber crafting and trade date back to the early 1900s. Locally known as 煤黄 (“coal yellow”), amber extraction and circulation in Fushun are closely intertwined with histories of Japanese occupation, coal mining, and (post-) socialist economic development. While amber is commonly categorised by colour, these layered histories produce social labels that simultaneously have material relevance. For instance, “Japanese-returned amber”, crafted in a characteristic style, evokes the history of Japanese occupation when it was sold to Japanese tourists in Fushun; it is also recognised and appreciated for the distinctive sheen it has acquired over time. Local traders differentiate between “old Fushun amber,” extracted directly from the coal mine, and “new” amber collected from coal waste; exposed to oxygen, coal waste generates heat that alters amber materially. Precisely, that amber is unstable provides room for these more-than-human histories to be inscribed. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in Fushun in 2025, this paper seeks to discuss how the social may interact with the geological through ways that are material.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Drawing on five weeks of participant observation aboard the Norwegian research vessel and icebreaker Kronprins Haakon, this paper examines coring as a way of “sensing” the deep sea, while reflecting on the socio-political stakes of making it knowable—or keeping it unknown.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on five weeks of fieldwork aboard the Norwegian icebreaker Kronprins Haakon, this paper examines coring as a way of “sensing” the deep sea, while reflecting on the socio-political stakes of making it knowable—or keeping it unknown. Beneath the waves, the deep sea holds stories written in mud, rock, and gas: records of past climates, tectonic shifts, and life itself. To protect it, exploit it, or reconstruct its deep-time histories, scientists must first core it—extracting sediments, minerals, and fluids that capture a snapshot of the present while enabling reconstructions of the past and projections into the future. These samples become portals through which the deep sea is rendered knowable and valuable.

A rock retrieved from the Fram Strait, for instance, may be a "window" of Earth’s mantle, yet it might also be "just" a fragment transported by ice and deposited on the seafloor. Collecting such materials is therefore not merely a scientific practice; it can shape territorial claims and geopolitical interests, turning sediments into instruments of power. This paper asks how coring technologies shape human encounters with the deep sea while themselves being shaped by material conditions—such as the yielding softness of deep-sea mud, which resists robotic movement—and what these encounters reveal about the limits of scientific knowledge. What tensions emerge between geological time, scientific temporalities, and short-term political agendas? And what does a “from-the-ground-up” anthropology of the deep sea disclose about today’s polarised world? By pursuing these questions, the paper traces the political dimensions sedimented on the Arctic seafloor.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines the sociospatial relations shaped by sediments in post-mining landscapes, focusing on practices of mitigation, river engineering, and environmental restoration. Drawing upon closed mines in Japan, it analyzes how these practices reorganize the geographies of ruin and life.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how the ends of mining are lived and unlived by tracing sediment movements in post-mining landscapes. It centers negotiations between abandonment and inhabitation to join anthropological research on material lives of pollution, from its transboundary movements (Murphy 2013; Fortun 2014) to the possibilities of life (Tsing 2015). Specifically, it asks: how do a closed or abandoned mine and its surrounding river basin become a designated site of restoration or deemed needless of repair, and how do practices of mitigation, river engineering, and environmental restoration constitute (as) boundaries of “natural,” “habitable,” and “toxic”?

Based on 29 months of multi-sited, patchwork fieldwork at a closed mine and river basin in eastern Japan, alongside comparative research at other mines, this paper examines how sediments from mining—and the infrastructure that produces, deposits, and contains them—shape and reshape geographies of ruin and life. It analyzes the murky boundaries of where ruination begins or ends: mines left unattended may be mobilized as natural resources, such as when acidic drainage fosters rare mosses or sulfurous deposits contribute to onsen tourism. Some mitigation dams are rewilded habitats for endangered species, where mining sediments are soils that support reed wetlands. At the same time, residue leakage persists, and flooding vulnerabilities are unevenly distributed, with the remains of displaced households submerged in dams.

Through mapping the sociospatial relations shaped by sediments in the afterlives of mining, this paper contributes to discussions on the tensions between repair and abandonment, return and leaving in late industrial landscapes.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper tracks how silt is classified, governed and revalued at Cochin port. Following dredging practices, it takes seriously the administrative vocabularies of geology to show how sediment is rendered legible and actionable through expertise.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines silt not only as geological matter but as an object of expertise and regulation within administrative imagination. Drawing on short term ethnographic research at the Cochin Port Authority, located on an artificial island of reclaimed land, I explore how sediment is rendered legible through technical vocabularies and management regimes. The port itself as a geological intervention, which was built by dredging, depositing and stabilising sediment, is a crucial point of observation.

In port governance, silt is continuously measured and classified, encoding a different relationship to the material - framing it as a threat, waste or resource. Maintaining navigable depths requires constant dredging, producing vast quantities of displaced sediment that must be relocated, stored, or sold. The Cochin port thus, depends on a permanent cycle of excavation and deposition, where geological processes are engineered into infrastructural routines.

I trace how engineers, port authorities, and contractors speak about silt, revealing a technocratic grammar that repositions geological processes as operational challenges. At the same time, this vocabulary, does political work by naturalising certain interventions while obscuring the upstream extractive economies (e.g. construction, deforestation) that intensify sedimentation.

Engaging anthropological debates on geology and material landscapes, I treat sediment management as a form of "bureaucratic geology". In dialogue with the panel’s interest in thinking ‘from the ground up’, I will highlight how ports such as Cochin port, offer a valuable perspective to observe how earthly materials are disciplined, valued, and made to serve various economies.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Approaching coal as remains unearths geological and historical layers underlying everyday life, labor, and environments today. In China, coal persists after extraction as dust, ash, and smoke that pollute air, degrade land, and damage bodies amid concerns of illness, care, and work.

Paper long abstract

Approaching coal as remains, rather than a sector or resource, unearths geological and historical layers that underlie everyday life, labor, and environments today. Based on ethnography in China's coal-dependent Shanxi Province, coal persists after extraction as dust, ash, and smoke that pollute air, degrade land, and damage bodies. Early historical accounts situate coal as an ordinary domestic fuel in China. Marco Polo (ca. 1298) described coal as a “black stone,” abundant and cheap, sustaining baths and homes in densely populated cities. In Shanxi, where residents revere the mother goddess of the hearth and the mines, coal continues to be embedded in routines of warmth, care, and survival. Song Yingxing (1637) provided detailed instructions on the techniques, labor, and risks involved in coal's extraction and combustion. Similar understandings of coal and pollution persist as practical, experiential knowledge in Shanxi, where residents focus on handling coal and living with polluted air rather than abstract carbon metrics. Contemporary historians reframe coal within political economy. Pomeranz (2000) emphasizes coal as enabling industrialization by relieving pressure on land and labor in China, while Mitchell (2011) links coal to political formations, labor concentration, and democratic claims that are difficult to sustain in the People’s Republic. Today Chinese coal appears less as an enabling condition than as a substance that redistributes damage unevenly across regions and generations, as Shanxi becomes reframed as a site of managed post-industrial decline and low-carbon transition. Through these processes, geological time folds into households concerned with illness, care, and work.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how the geo/bios divide rendered the Lop Nur desert a sacrifice zone in China’s Cold War. Nuclear testing reworked deep geological time into contaminated strata, while tales of spirits register dispossession. Land and life became material witnesses of the nuclear Cold War.

Paper long abstract

Not all sands are created equal. The shortage of construction-grade sand—generally sourced from lakes, riverbeds, and quarries—has recently received growing attention, which serves as a reminder of the importance of materiality in the built environment and social life. Meanwhile, the undesirable desert sand, which exists abundantly, and has often been framed “valueless” and a threat. Yet, paradoxically, Deserts are frequently exploited as strategic spaces by military-industrial complexes worldwide.

Long deemed empty and lifeless, many desert regions do not simply contain oil and mineral reserves. They also served as proving grounds for military exercises and scientific experiments. From the American West to East Kazakhstan to Northwest China, deserts have been central sites of nuclear testing. These sites, mirroring one another visually and geopolitically, were central to the planetary rise of nuclear weaponry. Remarkably, all assertions of emptiness notwithstanding, the area is filled with stories of spirits and ghosts, along with ancient ruins.

This paper especially examines how the imagined geo/bios divide enabled the rendering of the Lop Nur desert as a sacrifice zone during China’s Cold War mobilization. It also shows how the persisting tales of spirits and supernatural forces reveal stories of dispossession and historical erasure. As nuclear tests violently reworked deep geological time, overwriting it with lasting contaminated strata, the land and surrounding life forms were made into material witnesses: an archive of the nuclear Cold War sedimented in radioactive debris, vitrified sand, and airborne dust that continue to shape the present.