The Antebellum Kanawha Salt Business and Western Markets by John E. Stealey III (review)

The timing of Endless Caverns’s publication coincides with a rise in interest among geographers, anthropologists, and historians in the vertical and volumetric qualities of space (see for example, S. Elden’s 2013 article “Secure the Volume: Vertical Geopolitics and the Depth of Power” in Political Geography and/or A. Kinchy, R. Phadke, and J. M. Smith’s 2018 article “Engaging the Underground: An STS Field in Formation” in Engaging Science, Technology, and Society). This includes, of course, the subterranean. Much of the recent literature on this topic, however, has focused on the extractive economies of the subsoil (e.g., mining) or the built environment in urban contexts (e.g., bunkers, sewers, tunnels). In either case, the underground typically spells destruction, death, or doom (the June 2018 episode of the Tham Luang Cave rescue in northern Thailand does not help to counter that narrative). Show caves are extraordinary in the ways that they challenge any simple descriptor of the underground. Indeed, they are themselves the result and container of dynamic and complex geological, ecological, and cultural processes, all of which are recorded within. María Alejandra Pérez West Virginia University