Chthonic Politics in Arkadia: Archaeological Pasts, Energy Futures, and Resource-Becoming

• In Event: STS Underground - II: Subterranean Timescapes

Abstract

Since antiquity, Arcadia has represented the mytho-historical, autochthonic homeland of the Hellenic peoples; an idyllic space where a lively nature and pastoral culture existed in easy harmony. The 21st century reality of Arkadia is something much different, however: a province affected by rural poverty, unemployment, population decline, and resource extraction.

Through the juxtaposition of two underground sites in Arkadia, the Mt. Lykaion archeological project and a lignite mining operation near the Megalopoli Power Plant, this paper seeks to intervene upon conceptualizations of “resource becoming.” These two types of excavation, one archaeological and the other sub-bituminous, serve to illustrate how various material agencies, knowledges, expertises, and nationalist political-economic discourses act on the underground as a site of contestation between capitalist futures and archaeological reconstructions of mytho-historical pasts.

Arkadia’s geographical location, mostly landlocked in the Peloponnese, hinders its capture of tourist capital. As an antidote, foreign archeologists at Mt. Lykaion seek to create a “Parrhassian Heritage Park” to secure future knowledge production. In the process of their archeological and space-making practices, they inscribe nature while presenting certain pasts and futures as valuable. Lignite is mined from the remains of an ancient lake in the Megalopoli basin, dated to 780,000-125,000 years ago. Similarly, this site inscribes nature and makes claims about which pasts and futures are valuable in its practices. Ultimately, by outlining the cultural politics of the past from the socio-material perspective of the Arkadian underground this paper seeks to complicate the STS Underground’s understanding of resource becoming.

Author

• Nathaniel T Stanton, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute - STS