“Under
the Volcano”: Complicated Causality and Volcanic Matter at San Pedro
Aguacatepeque, Guatemala.
Guido Pezzarossi
Syracuse University
The site of San Pedro Aguacatepeque, a
multicomponent Kaqchikel Maya community occupied from about 600 to 1814 CE, is
located on the eastern flank of the Volcan de Fuego, one of the most active
stratovolcanoes in the world. The relationship between this community (now an
archaeological site) and the volcano it resides upon is critical to
understanding the unique unfolding of history at the site, particularly after
Spanish colonization, which is the focus of my research.
To ignore this relationship, and the
various consequences that emerge from human/volcanic engagements, is to
overlook a variety of agents –from the volcano itself to its ejecta to its
resident spirits- all of which play(ed) important roles in structuring life and
experience for the human inhabitants of San Pedro. Emerging new materialist
approaches have helped me to develop an approach flexible enough to account for
materialist AND constructivist theories in productive dissonance, leading to
more complicated, thoroughly contingent, multi-stranded, non-linear and
non-deterministic but hopefully more inclusive and thorough re-constructions of
the unfolding of past events.
At issue in much of this, and of
particular salience to archaeologies of colonial encounters, is the
problematizing of agency and causality that emerges from the move beyond
human-centric models that conflate agency and intentionality and situate the
causal locus of historical unfolding solely within the purview and actions of
human agents. In addition, care must be taken to avoid situating agency in
analytical abstractions, such as Capitalism, which is frequently enlisted as
some form of an actant in archaeological interpretations, a real “thing” that is/was
internally coherent and contains its own set of internal logics and processes
that are seen to exist outside of human practice and the “primary human [and
nonhuman] actors” that play a part in carrying them out (Ho 2005; Mitchell
2002).
This paper moves from theory to a brief
discussions of the case study at San Pedro, via the lens of the communities entanglement
with the volcan de fuego, an entanglement that is “leaky,” both analytically
and historically, and thus leads to other entanglements that played critical
roles in maintaining and later untying the “knot” or “bundle” (Pauketat 2013?) of
flows of which San Pedro was comprised.
The Problem of Agency
One of the main critiques leveled against
materialist approaches, is the potential problems of going “back” to things.
This move is argued to remove the focus on people and their agency and thus water
down their responsibility for the violence of colonialism while downplaying the
resilience of colonized populations. I think this critique misrepresents the
goals of new materialism, which is not to take the focus away from people but
in fact to better contextualize people in the past in the broader sets of
relations –both social and material- that played important roles in shaping the
outcomes of colonial entanglements.
At the root of this critique is the
primacy given to human agents due to their sole claim to what Gell called
“primary agency”, namely agency distinguished from the “secondary” agency of
objects by the human intention and thus sentience, behind it (see Pauketat
2013). As Pauketat (2013:28) cautions, conflating intention, sentience and
”real” agency is highly problematic. Leaning on intentionality can entrap us in
a modernist mindset rooted in Aristotle’s “hylomorphic model” of agency; a
model that posits the rote transferal of form onto inert matter in direct
accordance with the intentions of the human agent. In this model, to act
becomes to act and do as one desires, regardless of the medium one is engaged
with, such that a human acts and a thing is acted upon, in essence building a
conceptual foundation on an problematic active/passive, nature/culture dichotomy.
As Timothy Mitchell (2002:10) points out, human
intention and agency is distributed among a vast social/material field. As one unravels these interwoven forces, human
agency appears less as a calculating intelligence directing social outcomes and
more as the product of a series of alliances in which the human element is
never wholly in control. In Ingold’s
words: “As practitioners…the cook, the alchemist and the painter are in the
business not so much of imposing form on matter as of bringing together diverse
materials and combining and redirecting their flow in the anticipation of what
might emerge” (Ingold 2008:15).
This perspective intersects with Andrew Martindale’s
approach to colonialism as an always incomplete processes of entanglement and
“tinkering” and that in the long run can help archaeology further break from
essentialized active/passive models of both human/thing, and colonizer and
colonized.
In fact, a focus on things as dynamic
assemblages, that are already living and doing as active participants in the
unfolding of history holds interesting potential for archaeologies of colonial
encounters, as I think this subtle re-framing can be extended to how we deal
with the “agency” of colonial populations. Rather than searching out and
artificially ascribing active agency and intentions to the colonized as
exceptional moments punctuating an otherwise passive existence, I argue that
opening up analyses to a consideration of the continual and expansive flows of agencies colonial populations jointly
and continually navigated, more effectively situates all colonial populations
as thoroughly embedded constrained participants in the emergence and
constitution of the early modern world, and thus not as outsiders looking in or
isolated entities existing in a state of suspended animation awaiting a dusting
of agency through interpretation.
Problematizing Agency and
Causality in the Archaeology of Colonialism
In
colonial contexts, entanglement with materials can be analyzed through the
disruptions and new productions that emerge from the introduction of new types
of materials and things, as well as new forms of knowledge about ways to
interact and work with existing things. Micro-scale
practices and the creative productions they entail conglomerate into the
long-term processes observable in the archaeological record. By focusing on micro-scale
negotiations with the material world we get at the creative improvisations of
practice in the past that helps avoid falling into the potential determinism of
structural approaches (see Hodder 2000; Martindale 2009), as well as monolithic
model based approaches to history, such as histories /analyses of
capitalism (i.e. Capitalism; see Delanda
1996; Pezzarossi 2014).
At
the micro scale, the non-linearity and emergent nature of systems and their
matterings makes it impossible to “predict outcomes in advance or repeat an
event…[as] terminal effects cannot be construed as possibilities that were
already latent in some initial moment” (Coole and Frost 2011:14). Emphasis is placed
on the contingencies of historical happenings for explaining outcomes or
historical unfolding, rather than building models with which to explain in
advance the causes and effects that played into the specific historical
unfoldings explored archaeologically. This view of the past as made up of
events emerging from the agency of “assemblages” and not only people may be
seen as diluting blame or responsibility for past injustices. However Bennett
(2010:37) via the analysis of the 2003 NE Blackout, has argued that while this
approach may entail keeping people from being fully responsible for their actions,
it necessarily expands out responsibility to all participants in a manner that
all elements can be held accountable, rather than scapegoating or concentrating
blame on actors whose actions/intentions were never fully in their control. This
point intersects with theories of agency that critique conflations of agency
with free will or intentions. The radical approach advocated by Bennett extends
the critique of dualisms to ethics and moralism by problematizing the easy
ascription of good/bad that holds sway in many interpretations of environmental
disasters and policies and that I argue, is very much present in archaeological
discourse of colonialism, capitalism and resistance.
The
goal is to disperse the abstractions and dualisms that have clouded
interpretations of the “details” of history in colonial and capitalist contexts
by refocusing on the numerous engagements on the ground that constituted the
practices and processes that have come to be abstracted into monolithic models
and processes, such as Capitalism.
These
engagements, however, were not solely between humans, and if we hope to tell
the kinds of complicated and messy histories that better present the past as it
was (and was experienced) analytical scope and methodology must expand to
account for and explore the role of the nonhuman –broadly conceived- in the
unfolding of history. The following section
seeks to reinterpret the impacts of colonization and capitalism in colonial
Guatemala, and on the practices and experiences of San Pedro’s inhabitants as
the effects of assemblages of human and nonhuman agents, bound together through
unequal relations of power and the affordance/capacities of the things (both
present and absent, material and conceptual) circulating through and containing
the colonial milieu.
From
Capitalism to Assemblages and Antimarket Effects
Rather
than delving into an analysis of capitalism as an entity defined on the basis
of one or another trait, I advocate moving beyond the baggage-laden concept of
capitalism all together and turning analyses of capitalism “on their head” (see
Wallerstein 1991). As DeLanda (1997,
p. 48)
argues: “the conceptual confusion engendered by all the different uses of the
world “capitalism” (as “free enterprise” or as “industrial mode of production”…as
world-economy”) is so entrenched that it…has reached the limits of its
usefulness.” Instead, I draw on the materialist historical framework of Fernand
Braudel and its recent new materialist interpretation by Manuel De Landa to
approach capitalism not as a system or totality defined by free markets or
other practices, but rather as the varied social and material consequences and
effects of the operation of unfree “antimarkets”.
Antimarkets
in this perspective are defined as power/violence manipulated market-based
commerce and exchanges, counter to the “free” markets of neoliberal notions of
capitalism. The point is not redefining capitalism as a totality whose essence
is the antimarket, but rather dispersing the term all together and instead
focusing on the tangible outcome of the assemblages of human and nonhuman actors,
inhabiting topologies of unequal power sustained by violence, that we have come
to know as capitalism. In essence, what
we know as capitalism is in fact an “effect” (see
Coronil 2007; Pezzarossi forthcoming) of the operation
of antimarkets, or “monopolies [that] were the product of power, cunning and
intelligence” that exploited through “unequal or forced exchange” (Wallerstein
1991, p. 356 emphasis added).
Volcanic
Matter at San Pedro
Very
briefly, at San Pedro as in other colonial period Maya sites, consumption of
market acquired goods rapidly comes to dominate the ceramics used on a day to
day basis in the early colonial period. Recently completed INAA-based
diachronic ceramic sourcing study at San Pedro indicates a clear decline of
locally produced ceramics at the community in the colonial period. The ceramic
assemblage of precolonial occupations of the site (Classic and Postclassic)
show upwards of 15% of recovered ceramics were likely made from locally
available clay sources. The colonial assemblage on the other hand shows only
0.6% locally made ceramic artifacts, with the assemblage dominated by lead
glazed jars, flat griddles or comales and polychrome decorated ceramics known
to have been produced in Spanish potteries and in native potting communities
across southern Guatemala and acquired at local and regional markets.
Explanations
for such emerging market based consumption that grades into outright
dependence, have recourse to look for the impact/influence of “capitalism”, as
indeed market dependence for subsistence has been held up as the “differentia
specifica of capitalism” (Brenner 2001; Wood 2002:50), emerging from
dispossession of the means of production for subsistence. At San Pedro, a dual
market dependence emerged, both for ceramic artifacts acquired at market AND as
an outlet for the cash crops, mainly sugar, produced at the site explicitly for
sale at market (Pezzarossi 2014).
This
emerging dual market dependence, rather than simply being the inevitable
outcome of capitalist incursion or the emplacement of capitalist relations onto
Maya populations, emerged from the friction brought about by Spanish colonial
policies, antimarkets and practices becoming entangled with existing Maya
practices and responses to the constraints and emerging opportunities of the
colonial and global economy and the material conditions, capacities and
affordances of highland Maya social/material contexts.
Of
these material conditions and nonhuman actants contributing to the emergence of
market dependence, the Volcan de Fuego, literally, looms large, affecting
Spanish colonial policies, the settlement and longevity of the site, climates,
the presence of the community, and even the current composition of the
archaeological site, covered as it is by high altitude coffee plantings that
thrive in the environment built in part by volcanism.
First,
volcanic activity dating to the at least 230 kya bp associated with the La Horqueta
volcanic complex, of which Fuego is a part, in Pacific Piedmont Guatemala (SI
Global Volcanism Program, accessed 2015) has created the landscape where San
Pedro is located, rising dramatically from coastal elevations to 1200m and up
to over 3000m at the summit of Fuego. Within this elevation rise, the deeply
eroded passage of the Achiguate River that cuts between the Volcan de Fuego and
the Volcan de Agua, its physical and mythological counterpart/Heroic Twin
(Barrie-Sweets 2008). This passage provides a gradual, less costly path between
coast and highlands that served and continues to serve as a critical access
route across regions and ecological niches. In the colonial period, this pass
served as an important trade route that funneled various entities through the
notch between volcanoes: native porters, various merchants, forced migrants,
repartimiento laborers, mules, carts (at times), and a variety of other things:
cacao, cotton, fruits, seafood, sugar, wood, maize, ceramics, chickens and
more.
In
part, this flow of goods and people was afforded by the agriculturally rich,
well drained sandy soil, regularly renewed by ash deposits from Fuego that
mimicked the ash deposition of swidden agriculture practiced by Maya
communities (see Barrie-Sweets 2008). And yet this same life giving ash also
provided an ever present danger to the community and others situated to take
advantage of its benefits, as San Pedro was destroyed by an eruption from Fuego
in 1582. Excavations at San Pedro yielded sparse evidence of this eruption, as
a very thin lens of fine sand/ash was identified between colonial deposits at
the site, possibly correlated to this event (Pezzarossi 2014). No evidence of
pyroclastic flows or other more dramatic impacts to the site were identified,
hinting at a less intense ash deposition that may have collapsed roofs and
killed crops (Escobar Wolf Personal Communication, 2012), as happens from time
to time at the current functioning coffee plantation within which San Pedro is
located
The
assemblage that the soils comprised were complemented by a unique microclimate,
itself a product of the towering volcanoes that contain and produce it via the
rapid rise of Pacific coastal clouds that precipitate regularly and intensely
on the southern portions of the Volcan de Fuego, and within the valley created
by Fuego and Agua. GIS based agrosuitability analyses have identified the
region where San Pedro is located as suitable for the cultivation of much
prized cacao, due to the increased precipitation and warmer temperatures
despite the high altitude of the site at 1200m asl. Volcano influenced climate,
coupled with well drained volcanic soils, rich as they were, provided an
especially fertile assemblage for cultivation of cacao that came to define San
Pedro’s practice prior to colonization (as it served as a cacao growing outpost
for highland Kaqchikel Maya communities) and afforded the continued cultivation
of cacao and new cultivation of sugar cane, another heat/moisture amenable cash
crop, after colonization (while affording the continued lucrative exploitation
of the communities labor and craft by colonial officials).
As
I’ve detailed elsewhere, including a session earlier today, San Pedro’s shift
to sugar production, and abandonment of cacao production, was multiply
influenced, from the affordances of the community’s ecological setting, to the
historically influenced agricultural crafting practices they were so familiar
with as a cacao growing outpost that predisposed them to embrace a new,
introduced cash crop, to the biological needs of cacao –a delicate tree, with
long-delayed (5 years) returns on initial planting that requires continual
tending, weeding, shading, and maintenance. Labor shortages in coastal and
piedmont cacao growing regions, catalyzed by the greater abundance of disease
vectors in the hot humid region where cacao thrived, impacted the viability and
productivity of cacao groves. Colonial policies, informed by humeral medicine
frameworks, sought to restrict population migration across the climatic zones
created –in part- by the mass of the Volcan de Fuego and Agua. Movement across
climates was perceived as a danger to the health of migrants, and may have
further slowed much needed migrations of laborers to the coast and Piedmont.
Moreover,
Spanish colonial labor and tribute policies –requested in kind, in currency and
in labor- also played a role in pushing San Pedro to embrace more intensive and
quicker yielding cash crop cultivation of sugar and sugar products explicitly
for sale at market, as a way of meeting onerous tribute and tax demands and
getting out of laboring in far flung locations, to the detriment of local
subsistence, agricultural and craft practices. In turn, this combination of
factors, many centered on the volcanoes, contributed the transformation of
practice at San Pedro and the emergence of the dual market dependence described
previously.
The
Immaterial Material: The Ghost in the Volcano
Finally,
the presence of a spirit within the volcano provides an additional
consideration of the variety of roles the volcano and the various entities it
spawned played. Yet it does so from a decidedly immaterial materialiaty,
providing us with an case study in how the absent (Fowles 2013?) or immaterial
and spiritual (Espiritu Santo, and X) can play a critical and acknowledged role
in community histories and their variable unfoldings in very stark material
terms.
Coole
and Frost (2011:10) argue that in the new materialism’s “multiply tiered
ontology, there is no definitive break between sentient and nonsentient
entities, or between material and spiritual phenomena.” This last point of
emphasis, between material and spiritual phenomena, is an exciting element of
new materialist approaches that drops out to a degree in more rigid object
oriented ontologies (OOO)’s that fixate on objects as entities to be dealt with
as discrete “units” (see Bogost; Whitmore 2014), rather than as assemblages and
things broadly conceived as entangled knots of disparate material/social flows,
in the process of becoming (see Braidotti…Joyce…Ingold…De Landa). Donna Haraway
brings this into dramatic relief by stating: “No objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves; any component
can be interfaced with any other if the proper standard, the proper code, can
be constructed for processing signals in a common language” (Haraway 1989: 187).
In
this light, a focus on objects, as “real” things, rather than the flows that precede/construct
them variously (cf. Whitmore 2014), serves to mark objects/things as sacred, to
be understood as symmetrical participants to human action, yet as discrete
entities, frozen/changed flows that make them analyzable on their own without
recourse to their inherent instability, assembled nature and subsequent
vibrancy resulting from the interacting “parts” of the assemblage that can
construct them one second and leak through or assemble elsewhere with other
parts the next.
A passage from the Kaqchikel
Chronicles, a late 16th-early 17th century Kaqchikel manuscript detailing
origin stories and history, indicates that the economically crucial path
between the Volcan de Agua and the Volcan de Fuego was guarded by Saqik’oxol,
the “spirit” of the Volcan de Fuego who resided within the volcano. This spirit
was encountered by the ancestors of the Kaqchikel as they spread out across the
landscape after their exodus from Tulan, a place that came to serve as a
mythical origin place for highland Maya people.
From this story, the Heart of the
Hill, a spirit, lived within the volcano, in close proximity to the known
location of San Pedro. As Bassie-Sweet (2008) argues, volcanoes, and
specifically the Volcan de Fuego (through analysis of the above cited passage) existed
as powerful gateways between planes of existence for highland Maya (Kiche and
Kaqchikel, people and were known to contain “sacred fire and lightning”, two
life giving/producing elements in Maya cosmologies.
Perhaps the nearness to this spirit and
its power may have directly influenced the long occupation of San Pedro, adding
an additional material, yet immaterial force playing a part in the communities
history, in conjunction with the potential influence of the climatic and
defensible properties of the community’s location, and the life giving (and
taking) ash of eruptions (Robinson and Pezzarossi 2013).
Conclusions
All together, these disparate
elements comprise the varied and dynamic assemblage that saw the community of
San Pedro emerge and persist over almost 1000 years in a deeply entangled
relationship with the volcano and its various offerings. New Materialist
approaches provide a framework for remaining attuned to such diversity of
actants and taking them seriously; from colonial policies, to ash enriched soil
to present spirits with the ability to influence and disrupt human and nonhuman
collaborations and vibrancies. Casting such a wide net provides great returns,
if in the form of more inclusive, messy histories of complicated causality and
unintended consequences within and outside human purview and interventions, to
great effect on the archaeological reconstruction of historical unfoldings.
