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World-building Amidst Climate Instability: Geoaesthetic Practices in Ancash, Peru

Speaker
Beth Grávalos
Date
Mon January 27th 2025, 3:30 - 5:00pm
Location
Building 50, Room 51A

This talk examines the ways in which Andean people, past and present, learn to live on a new earth through geoaesthetic practices. Here I define geoaesthetics as making aesthetic sense of landscape and environment through affective material practices. Common archaeological tropes such as “abandonment”, “disappearance”, and “collapse” contribute to the persistence of harmful narratives that negate Indigenous histories of survivance, inhibiting world-building in the present-day. Archaeologists often apply such terms when there is a drastic shift in material culture patterning during known periods of climatic, economic, and political difficulty. I propose that thinking with geoaesthetics can help to overcome this issue. Using the archaeological site of Jecosh as a case study, I evaluate differences in ceramic petrographic data to reveal the specific, intentional geo-practices involved in making and using pottery amidst environmental vulnerabilities. I analyze Aquilpo style ceramics dated to the Late Intermediate Period (ca. 1100–1450 CE), an era of known climatic instability. Rather than suggesting that the Jecosh community “disappeared” due a change in ceramic technology, I argue that the incorporation of new geomaterials into pottery and the return to Jecosh to use such pots was a geoaesthetic choice meant to attach people to an ancestral place. People coped with difficult circumstances through such affective practices, ultimately creating new political possibilities and futures. I conclude by thinking about the implications of world-building narratives of the Andean past for descendant communities today, many of whom are confronting ongoing water scarcity due to glacial recession and unpredictable weather patterns.