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In the 1550s, Spanish conquerors learned of an Andean Pacific Coast burial site, believed by natives to house ancient giants' vestiges. I explore how Indigenous and Spaniards decoded the deep past through these fossils, creating new interpretative archives, and imagining an unknown Andean giant era.

Paper long abstract:

Wari/Vestiges – The Invention of the Andean Age of Giants

During the 1550s, Spanish conquerors were drawn to a puzzling site along the Equatorial Pacific Coast. Indigenous accounts suggested that this location served as the burial ground for ancient giants who had once invaded the region in distant times before being exterminated by a skyborne creature. The surrounding landscape also bore evidence of these giants in natural and material remnants. Seeking an ancient tomb to plunder, Spanish officials excavated the area, discovering not treasures, but the very fossilized remains of these giants.

This paper explores how both Indigenous and Spaniards in the Andes grappled with the epistemological challenge of exploring the Santa Elena fossils in the Andes. They meticulously examined the enigmatic materiality of these remains, aiming to decipher ancient times through direct observations of their physical attributes. This process involved comparing the fossils not only with indigenous artifacts and narratives linked to the landscape but with Biblical and Classical sources. The research investigates how unraveling this pre-Columbian historical panorama necessitated the creation of novel interpretive practices and archives. Consequently, the fossil site transformed into a site of memory of a hitherto unknown era of giants in the Andes.

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Integrating colonial records (17th-18th cen.), archaeological and ethnohistorical data, we provide historical context for interpreting and ultimately preserving Indigenous stone landscapes in the Minisink region of today's New Jersey, USA.

Paper long abstract:

The highland region known as Minisink (today northwestern New Jersey, USA), is well known among archaeologists and Munsee-Lenape communities as an important Indigenous place, featuring a complex of stone landscapes. Here we examine colonial sources from Dutch, Swedish, and English writers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to provide historical context for interpreting and ultimately preserving these sites. We suggest that the Minisink region emerged as a borderland beyond the periphery of imperial knowledge but still recorded in visual and written colonial documents. Reliant upon Indigenous informants, colonists represented Minisink as a site of speculation and potential mineral wealth. As colonial violence destabilized the wider region, Minisink’s unknowns became a source of anxiety and a real threat to colonists. Bringing together colonial speculations, Indigenous refusals, ethnohistoric and archaeological data, we re-read this borderland as a record of Indigenous land defense that suggests the significance of ceremonial landscapes to Munsee peoples.

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This paper explores the entanglement between geology and the inter-imperial legal battles over talc and magnesite in Manchuria in the early 20th century. It asks how we can incorporate changes at vastly different scales and rates into the same narrative about the environment in the Anthropocene.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines how a group of magnesium-based minerals – talc, magnesite, and periclase – gave the native landowners of southern Manchuria outsized agency in their engagements with Japanese and Russian colonizers over mining rights in the early 20th century. During that time, Manchuria was an inter-imperial borderland between the great states of China, Japan and Russia. Each of these states aimed to control the resources of the region through a state-centric regime of resource laws and treaties. Drawing on new archival sources from all three states and recent advances in the earth sciences of Northeast Asia, I argue that these legal instruments of the state had unintended effects because of the entanglement between the geological, technological, and juridical environments. Geological events in deep time shaped the peculiar ways talc interacted with humans and their empires through the mediation of local technologies of extraction. Whereas the mining of coal helped create a juridical space of the state, the excavation of talc and magnesite facilitated the development of a non-state world of transnational legality. Incorporating the geological and environmental sciences into the history of law and empire, I aim to explore how legal structures of the Anthropocene mapped onto environmental transformations in the deep past, even as those legal regimes enabled the rapid depletion of resources millions of years in the making.

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This paper focuses on the extractive history of enslaved Africans exported to the Americas through Fort Amsterdam, Ghana, in the 18th century. It is a history that engages the hidden relationship between ritual execution and the transmutation of enslaved captives into human commodities.

Paper long abstract:

The slave forts and castles that punctuate Ghana’s historic Gold Coast stand as monumental reminders of the rise and fall of Atlantic slavery, beginning with the construction of Elmina Castle by the Portuguese in 1482 and ending, at least officially, with Britain’s Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1807. Built as “factories” for bulking enslaved Africans for sale and transshipment to the Americas, they served as highly regulated sites of Afro-European exchange and interaction when the English, Dutch, Swedes, Danes and Brandenburgers entered the so-called African Trade.

In this paper, I focus on one critical link in this transatlantic value-chain where enslaved captives from Ghana’s hinterland were brought to Fort Amsterdam (formerly Fort Cormantin) and auctioned off to European traders en route to the Americas. Known as Otsir grove in the town of Abandze, it is easily missed on the Accra-Cape Coast highway where it is overshadowed by Forts Amsterdam and Anamabo, which rose to prominence in the mid-eighteenth century. Located within a subcommunity of a subcommunity, however, Otsir’s sacred grove congeals an extractive history of profound significance within its trees, throughout its grounds, and beneath the earth. It is a history that speaks to the autochthonous layers of an occupied territory, historically labile sovereign centers, the core ritual template of the eighteenth-century Fante state, and the fundamental relationship between the ritual execution of criminals and the transmutation of enslaved captives into human commodities.

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Drawing on a case study of geological exploration in colonial French West Africa, I ask how geological understandings of ethnicity, history and human-nature relationships shaped colonial ethnography and its codification in colonial rule.

Paper long abstract:

Scholars have long attended to how anthropologists shaped colonial understandings of African “tribes” and “customs.” Earth scientists, employed by colonial states to survey the territory’s resources, also generated ethnographic knowledge that shaped colonial policy and practice. This paper centers on geologists who carried out mineral prospecting in the federation of French West Africa (Afrique Occidentale Française) in the early decades of colonial rule. As geologists deepened their knowledge about the land, they also learned regional languages and histories. Contrary to the emphasis placed by colonial-era anthropologists on the supposed origins of isomorphic and homogenous “tribes” in the federation, geologists underscored how histories of forced migration and violence created ethnic diversity on the land. French geologists, for example, wrote about how the legacies of Atlantic-era enslavement encouraged multiethnic settlements, or maroon communities, in the highlands of Cote d’Ivoire. Drawing on this case, I ask how geological understandings of ethnicity, history and human-nature relationships shaped colonial ethnography and the ways in which ethnography became codified in colonial rule. This inquiry takes part in a multi-disciplinary project to interrogate how the earth sciences—and vernacular geological knowledge—have shaped political power in the formerly colonized world.

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This paper considers the creation of borderland spaces of gold extraction and notions of the environment in the Guianas— the territory between contemporary Guyana, Venezuela, and Brazil. It centers on the imbrication of shamanic time and the legal construction of a disputed borderland territory.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers the creation of borderland spaces of gold extraction and notions of the environment in the Guianas— the territory between contemporary Guyana, Venezuela, and Brazil. It centers on the imbrication of shamanic time and the legal construction of a disputed borderland territory. An ex-miner turned vehicle operator and speculator reflected once that ‘gold is a jumbie’ —where jumbie is the Creole term for a malevolent spirit and corresponds to Karinya (Carib), Lokono (Arawak), and Warau notions of spirit entities. His explanation that such spirits live deep within the earth and need to be summoned with the appropriate offerings—women’s bodies, alcohol, and blood—provides an important way of conceptualizing the environment and the ethics of borderland extraction. Making life in these borderland spaces seems to necessitate operating fluidly across three time-scapes—negotiating the Amerindian, African, and European material past of a trafficking frontier, the shamanic past and astral planes of the otherworld, and the geological past of mineral deposits. Methodologically, the paper places indigenous and diasporic cosmologies around minerals and their presence in this region in relation to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European discussions of “terra nullius” and the specific regional history of the discovery and expansion of gold mining. By privileging the vision and worldviews of those who dwell in these lands, the paper also reflects on how local borderland ecological thinking impacts the broader international economic, legal, and environmental struggles around mineral resource extraction in the region today.

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This essay argues for attending to other cultural understandings of conceptualizing the political and economic divide between nature and culture and sacred and profane, by thinking through the implicit knowledge excavated through deep histories of material culture.

Paper long abstract:

The ravages of Latin American colonialism commenced on the island of Hispaniola with gold mining and the use of Taino forced labor. In response to the demographic collapse, enslaved Africans replaced them as the primary labor force on the Island, providing the foundation of the plantation economy. As Elizabeth Deloughrey (Allegories of the Anthropocene) has noted, it is only through the elision of indigenous histories that the current climate crisis can be seen as a novel problem. This essay considers how “backstreaming” contemporary ethnography can offer a useful heuristic for excavating implicit popular knowledge about the environment enabling historians to see the operations of Indigenous and Diasporic technologies across time and space. Also, this approach might enable us a more ground-level and local perspective on the Anthropocene than much of the big data research which has been dominated by the global north. Centering upon modes of interaction with the natural world such as the use of ritual stones, plants and earth derived from Indigenous and Diasporic practices in the borderlands, this essay uses the capacious definition of technology defined by Bauer and Norton to expand our understanding of time and space in the natural world. It argues for attending to other cultural understandings of conceptualizing the political and economic divide—and if it all there should be one—between nature and culture and sacred and profane, by thinking through the implicit knowledge excavated through deep histories of material culture.

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This paper examines the creation of a natural historical model of planetary extraction through the archives of colonial anthropologists studying tribal and outcaste iron-working groups in the Indian subcontinent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the ethnographic documentation of what would come to be called “primitive industry” by colonial anthropologists studying tribal and outcaste iron-working groups in the Indian subcontinent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While historians of empire have long noted the ideological significance of machine technology within European constructions of a temporally-advanced modernity, the recognition that the most “primitive” colonized subjects possessed both geological and metallurgical knowledge escaped colonial accounts of a unique technological culture. I show how the evidence of such practices shaped emergent universalizing ideas about humanity’s extractive relationship to the natural world, which became assimilated to both evolutionary anthropology and the early disciplinary practices of human ecology. Such ideas have gained new currency in the present moment as advocates of the so-called Anthropocene have turned to models of natural history to explain a putative universal human propensity towards extractive and energy-densifying ecological relations. Returning this model of human behavior to its historical origins challenges a transhistorical rendering of technological practices removed from their conditions of social valorization under global capitalism.