How do perceptions of and engagements with landscape impact practices of making things? How do definitions of landscape substances—created through these engagements—shape sociopolitics? And how do traditional archaeological interpretations—rooted in Eurocolonial ways of knowing and being—overlook Indigenous landscape histories, thereby negating Indigenous world-building in the present-day?

My book project, tentatively titled, Of Cloth and Clay: An Archaeology of Andean Making and Knowing, considers these questions through three case studies centered on the deep past of the Callejón de Huaylas valley (Ancash, Peru). Thinking through the sociopolitics of community formation, this project takes inspiration from the works of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Kathryn Yusoff, and Doreen Massey to develop an anti-colonial feminist archaeology of making, one that centers Andean epistemologies and ontologies. The first case study, “Making Floors, Tending Houses”, examines everyday knowledge in households and its relationship to ritual practice in the Andean Formative period (ca. 2000–400 BCE) through a close look at the materiality of earthen floors and how they were made and used. The second case study, “Pottery Geoaesthetics” investigates quotidian ceramics, comparing practices of production and geologic landscape knowledge, among diverse Huarás and Recuay communities (ca. 400 BCE–700 CE) to reveal how these nascent communities crafted new worlds amidst regional sociopolitical transformation. The final case study, “Woven Landscapes”, traces material procurement and making techniques of camelid, cotton, and vegetal fiber things, like woven cloth, plaited baskets, and 2- and 3-ply vegetal cordage, during the Middle Horizon (ca. 700–1000 CE), an era of heightened interregional exchange across the central Andes.

This project interlaces Western material science techniques, Andean ways of knowing and being, and feminist critiques of landscape to reveal how communities made and re-made their worlds through making practices and the creation of landscape substances into resources. By looking at domestic/ritual practice together and how material knowledge is distributed across these realms, I attempt to recover a feminist relational politics of the deep Andean past, which Western epistemologies and ontologies have failed to capture.