How might we understand geological materials that contemporary western thought treats as inert as lively or animate? I explore this question through the activity of four materials entwined with indigenous people living on the Caribbean coast of what today is the nation of Honduras between 700 and 1200 AD. I argue that the activity, the animacy, of multiple inorganic materials that constituted Honduran sites contemporary with medieval Europe was recognised by the people who engaged with them, a recognition made evident by the anthropomorphic faces confronting these human co-actors, brought to visibility on the surface through intra-action with humans incising, carving, and modelling these materials (Figure 1).

Figure 1
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Drawing of an Ulua Marble vase showing the frontal face emerging from the stone (courtesy of Christina Luke)

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In the sixteenth century, European colonial powers invaded this region and pursued engagements with geological materials previously inactive in human relationships, notably gold and silver. I want to consider the ways the people of this place and time understood geological matter as active before their understandings were displaced by the scientific concepts of modern geology that provided the tools to guide my own archaeological research. I hope that by doing so I can push against the constraints of that modern perspective. I describe this as shifting from a geoarchaeology of predefined minerals arrayed passively on a landscape, to an alchemy that considers substances as animate.

One of the central questions I confront is whether we can reinstate a sense of the way that ancient Hondurans viewed, recognised, and tested the properties of these substances as well as how the vitality inherent to each created conditions for relationships among them, and not only human relationships with them. The four materials I consider, clay, obsidian, marble, and copper, each started their lives in the mountainous terrain surrounding the floodplain of the Ulua and Chamelecon rivers, where people lived in hundreds of small villages and towns (Figure 2).

Figure 2
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Map locating geological substances active in the Ulua river valley (by the author)

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Clay is a product of the weathering of metamorphic and igneous rocks in the mountains rising along the west of the floodplain, transported by the rivers flowing along alignments created by tectonic faults. Obsidian entered sites in the valley from the same mountainous terrain, originating as nodules embedded in a fine-grained, light-coloured volcanic rock. Limestone in the same area metamorphosed partially or completely into marble through the juxtaposition of sedimentary rocks with volcanics over long spans of time. The oldest of these, the only geologically unequivocal marble, emerged from the pressure exerted on limestones in the northernmost mountains by movements of underlying tectonic plates. Copper, the latest of these substances to exhibit activity in intra-action with humans, emerged from blue and green rocks formed through the same processes that shaped the igneous rocks through this area, which were minerals concentrated in distinctive veins and pockets.

When I began to consider whether minerals were active, I found that the philosophical grounding I needed was provided by the Lenca people who continue to live in the mountainous interior of Honduras, descendants of the indigenous population that occupied the territory up to the Caribbean coast in the sixteenth century. Lenca people recognise the animacy of mineral material as inherent to it, as part of its being. Far from a conception of minerals as inert raw materials, they are recognised as co-actors and as such, they require and receive communication and participate in shared meals intended to repay them for their participation in social life.

In order for the Lenca world to continue, animate beings require compostura (Chapman 1985; Tucker 2008). Literally, this word means ‘repair, fixing.’ This is a way of talking about the maintenance of the world familiar from other indigenous societies of the Americas. Among the Karuk of northern California, for example, Carolyn Smith (2016, 40-43) describes the inter-generational maintenance of basket making as an instance of world repair, captured in the term used for weaving, pikyav, ‘to fix it.’

This relationship of care has deep roots, as is evident in colonial archives. In 1679, Lenca ancestors in one town, Jetegua, asked Spanish colonial authorities for help in caring for the animate, suffering earth:

with the fruits of cacao that god gives us we give succor to all the earth ...we are in fear that a second invasion at this time will lose the harvest of cacao that god gives us so that this time the earth will suffer... otherwise all of those of the partido will have to go away to seek a place to resettle, leaving uncared for our haciendas of cacao that we have, with which the earth would be left lost and lacking the fruits that god gives us, and the poor earth lost. (Joyce and Sheptak 2022, 58)

These petitioners were people who maintained pragmatic practices using minerals like obsidian, alongside an ontology in which materials, including inorganic ones, do not belong to humans but possess their own animate capacities and engage in relations among themselves. The trans-material animacy that colonial Lenca-speaking people engaged is visible today in the practices of their descendants. They offer plants collected in the forest or plant forms created from other organic materials, saints’ images, and wooden crucifixes, to host visiting spirits invited to payments for their engagement with people in everyday life. One Lenca woman from the town of La Campa told an ethnographer

We should pay the earth, because if someone gives you a gift, shouldn’t you repay that gift? Wouldn’t you return it? Of course. It's the same with the earth: it gives us food. And it seems to me we should pay back the gift. The earth has owners, each place has spirits that live there, and the water has owners too (Tucker 2008, 42).

Materials for which modern Lenca arrange payments to spirits include minerals, the clay, and sand used in traditional pottery making (Chapman 1985, 154-155; Tucker 2008, 48). Other composturas address the spirits of mountains, urging them to come and ‘enjoy the smell of this delicacy, leave a blessing at this point, in this place, so that there are no bad illnesses, so the ill winds blow away’ (Chapman 1985, 163). Mountains are far from inert; the spirits of some mountains are active at night, and people in neighbouring towns report they ‘heard a noise of rolling stones when the weather is going to change’ (Chapman 1985, 170). Another mountain ‘grew and grew; it was going to become a volcano’ until it was pacified with a ceremony. ‘That mountain is alive,’ Arcadia Bautista told the ethnographer (Chapman 1985, 170).

Where the historic and contemporary Lenca see the earth, the mountains, clay, and sand as alive, archaeology has proceeded from quite different assumptions. The conventional spatial imagination of geoarchaeology is organised around an opposition between settled places and their surroundings, represented as ‘nature.’ My examination of the entanglements of humans with geological substances is enabled by a more expansive notion of substances coming together without predefined spatial scale, provided by a concept of ‘site ontology’ developed by human geographers (Jones III, Woodward, and Marston 2007; Marston, Woodward, and Jones III 2005; Woodward, Jones III, and Marston 2012). This site ontology incorporates as co-actors humans and long-lived mountains far removed from settlements, entities that today continue their slow decomposition into clays, as they have done for the entire period during which humans lived in this area. These slowly acting mineral beings are united to human settlements in the valley by water, flowing from the mountains carrying fine sediments, and by gravity, eroding blocks of stone that give humans surface access to specific mineral actors. My ‘site’ is created by these activities of the mineral.

My discussion of how geological substances are active builds on a discussion of lead and mercury in the contemporary world by Mel Chen (2012). Chen engages with a linguistic concept of animacy hierarchy, considered to be a universal attribute of human languages but not to manifest as a singular universal structure. An animacy hierarchy is a ranking of entities based on their perceived capacity to act. An animacy hierarchy in modern English places humans and non-human animals as more animate than plants, with geological materials as least animate, practically inanimate in popular understanding. Chen shows that even this modern animacy hierarchy is flexible, exploring how lead and mercury took on a capacity to threaten humans in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Stone has long been relegated to the lower animate end of animacy hierarchies in European thought. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (2015, 211-222) describes the debate that occupied scholars in medieval Europe in the process of reworking Aristotelianism with Christianity, on whether stone had an animating spirit, literally a soul. The demonstration of the lack of souls, of the in-animacy of stone, was predicated on stone lacking three capacities of life: ‘digestion, change over time, and reproduction’ (Cohen 2015, 219). While stones do things that are like digestion, reproduction, and death, they do them in ways that are too alien to be seen as linking them to the animals and plants that medieval philosophers ranked below humans on a continuous scale of life and of soul. The greatest difficulty encountered in defending the lack of these capacities came from reproduction, since stones were understood to be the product of a ‘mineralising force’ residing in stone itself (Cohen 2015, 219). The argument against the ability of stones to give rise to new stones, which would be evidence that stone was living, capable of reproduction, was that the manner of their (re)production was unlike that of the already constituted class of living things, comprising plants and animals. Similarly, while stone demonstrably did change over time, even ‘perishing,’ the manner in which stone changed was too different from that of plants or animals to be allowed to be equated with organic death (Cohen 2015, 219). Some stones were even recognised to consume other matter, but again, this did not qualify as the kind of digestion that would be entailed in living beings.

One way to see the animacy of the geological is to replace the temporality of the human with a longer duration. The marble mountain that flanks the southwest margin of the Ulua valley is not eternal; it is simply very long lived, moving through time at a pace humans easily ignore. Like the mountains altering into clay among which it is placed, the marble mountain slowly breaks down into blocks visible on the surface, where human visitors pass what we now recognise as a quarry. On a geological time-scale, the marble quarry is a product of energetic ingestion, digestion, and transformation of mineral substances.

The long life of marble troubles the core distinction between organic and inorganic, living and not-living. Once, these stones were part of a reef composed of animals living in a shallow sea, beings whose microscopic fossil outlines can still be traced in some of the not-quite-marble that Honduran crafters sought out and carved into vases. The former reef, raised out of the ocean, subjected to pressure and heat as volcanic eruptions extruded beds of fine glass through vents passing through pre-existing rock, is still in motion today, both through its production of marble boulders and through the collecting practices over the past 150 years, through which human actors have scattered carved marble blocks across museums in North America and Europe (Joyce 2018).

That the geological substances in the mountains of northwest Honduras are active is indisputable: stone formations alter and produce new materials, even if they do so at a slow pace and on a longer time scale than the individual human life. A shift from matter as substance to matter in action is critical here. Physicist Karen Barad (2003, 822), outlining what she calls ‘agential realism,’ insists that we consider matter as ‘substance in its intra-active becoming – not a thing, but a doing, a congealing of agency' (emphasis original). Matter, she tells us, is not a ‘site passively awaiting signification’ (Barad 2003, 821). Instead, she characterises matter as ‘the world in its open-ended becoming,’ an ‘ongoing historicity’ that includes the ‘emergence of the “human”’ (Barad 2003, 821). Through ‘material (re)configurings of the world through which local determinations of boundaries, properties, and meanings are differentially enacted,’ matter becomes, and part of what it becomes is a ‘congealing of agency’ (Barad 2003, 828). For Barad, ‘temporality and spatiality emerge in this processual historicity’ (Barad 2003, 817-818).

The origin point of my alchemy of Honduras is consequently the intra-action, the becoming through which humans and non-humans together reconfigured the world. I re-centre this account on the demands that rocks made on humans passing through the mountainous terrain, evoking human attention to the textures and colours, and likely the sounds and perhaps even tastes of mineral matter. Walking in the mountains today, during the rainy season a human body struggles to avoid slipping on saturated clayey soils weathering from the rocks. The eyes of the passing person are caught by the brilliant white colour of marble, the flashing light from black volcanic glass, the oranges and yellows of some of the ignimbrites and the light cream to grey of others. In streams and in veins in some of the rocks, brighter red and green catch the eye, while shiny gold particles reflect the sunlight from their bedding in rocks or the soils forming adjacent to them.

The oldest traces we have found of humans traversing the geology of this region show them crushing some rocks, decomposing them into multiple bodies. Crushing reveals the heterogeneity contained in ignimbrites, sheets of material that emerged from volcanic eruptions. Crushed ignimbrite produces a mixture of fine-grained, lighter coloured particles, and striking black pebbles of obsidian (Figure 3).

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Obsidian nodules released from crushed ignimbrite, with light particles still adhering (photograph by Russell N. Sheptak)

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Applied to clay dug from beds in the river floodplain, crushing facilitated a similar division between the finer components, clay particles, and the coarser non-plastics incorporated with them by water transport. I argue that humans engaging with clay in the river floodplain would not have seen, as modern academics do, something lifeless. Instead, they witnessed elusive forms of liveliness waiting to be coaxed out of rock through a myriad of engagements of human and nonhuman bodies, clay in intra-action with water, shifting from saturated to dry, wet to solid, by its own volition, through its own intra-action with the water flowing through the valley.

Exposed to fire, some minerals changed colour, others became harder, others shattered, some formerly flexible became rigid. And some did even more: they volatilised, they decomposed, they produced liquids that ran along, shining, resisting collection or subsiding to renewed solidity as they cooled. Human engagement with these mineral beings produced extreme transformations in colour, texture, and state. Crushing reduced malachite and azurite, heterogeneous green and blue stones encountered in the same terrain as marble and ignimbrite, to a consistent texture, producing a material which when heated melted and emerged as concentrated copper. The metallic surfaces of the objects cast from this metal remained active, altering to darker greenish colours over periods of time much more consistent with human temporalities.

What I am considering as alchemy is the understanding of the transitions and transformations matter is capable of, which emerged in a particular place, over a particular period of time, and through engagements that involved the recognition of substances as capable not merely of generic action but of specific kinds of mattering. Regarding faces, especially frontal faces produced through technologies that enable their emergence from the ground, as revealing the animacy inherent in materials, transforms my understanding of these materials as invested with spirit, aligning it with Lenca ontologies. As I turn to the volatile processes through which stone, crushed and burned, became copper, I can recognise that the voices of bells were also expressions of spirits beyond the human. In copper casting, wax applied to the surface of bells turned into feline and avian features emerging from the sounding chamber, giving animal form to the animacy of these mineral beings (Figure 4).

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Copper bell with feline features (photograph by Russell N. Sheptak)

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The engagement of people in northern Honduras with specific minerals makes evident an aesthetics in which certain colours (initially white and black, later green) were valued, across substances conventionally separated in modern analyses. In Honduran antiquity, marble vases were animate crystal entangled with human bones and flowstone, the epitome of animate white rock, found in caves. After centuries of intra-action with humans, marble vases displayed their emergent spirit as frontal faces implied by the material's own activity (Luke 2012; Figure 1). Later, copper bells, some carrying with them similarly emergent bird, feline, or anthropomorphic faces, all manifesting animate spirits in the voices of the bells, replaced marble vases in caves where humans engaged with mineral agencies still to be found in these mountainous spaces.

Thus, I propose that what ancestral indigenous people saw when they went into the mountains bordering the Ulua valley were not inert geologic resources. They saw matter with varying potential to be active. If we take this Lenca ontology seriously, black obsidian nodules embedded in the white matrix of ignimbrite need not have been seen as two different kinds of geologic matter, but as one animate being made available in two forms. For ancestral Lenca, permission to use obsidian and crushed rhyolite would have been subject to the assent of the animate spirit of the material itself. That animating spirit, I argue, is what anthropomorphic features emerging from these materials make patent for human viewers, who lack the capacity to recognise the animacy of stone as it acts on its own slow, expansive, scales of time and space.