The geopower of kaolin clay: Toward a political geology of archaeological ceramics

Emergent scholarship in political geology highlights multiple ways of knowing the earth and its materials. By examining the politics of Western knowledge production within the earth sciences, political geology queries who has the power to define geomaterials and the sociopolitical impacts of such categorizations. Simultaneously, political geology demonstrates how earthly formations cocreate politics alongside humans through their vibrancy, with societies and geomaterials transforming each other. Here, I develop a political geology of archaeological ceramics to move beyond Western categories that can sometimes hinder interpretations of politics due to their rigidity. I use the concept of geopower—how earthly forces engender new collectivities and political possibilities—to overcome the interpretative challenges archaeologists face when describing Recuay sociopolitical organization (Ancash, Peru, ca. 100–700 CE). Specifically, I show how so-called “impure” kaolin helped to temporarily organize otherwise insular villages through their emergence and meaningful position on the landscape. To recognize geopower in the deep past, I present a layered narrative framework that blends interpretations of earthly materials, thereby making space for the existence of many worlds. In this sense, political geology can learn from archaeology, particularly Indigenous archaeologies, which advocate for the integration of myriad knowledges of the earth and its histories.