Curating an AC Courses pathway that, for the most part, traces the course of a river—that is, the Anthropocene Curriculum’s 2018-19 fieldwork along the Mississippi River—prompts one to wonder about the fluidity and flow of that pedagogical experience. I was invited to sift through the project’s archived materials to identify where the nature of the archive itself is called into question. And as various events and texts within the Anthropocene Curriculum testify, an epoch characterized by shifting terrains and phase transitions—receding shorelines, carbonizing oceans, melting ice—requires that we think differently about what constitutes an archival record. Thus, I searched for phase shifts: evidence that geological and climatic transformations, along with related political-economic and social upheaval, have precipitated parallel phase shifts—material, political, and procedural—within the archives.

We begin by examining the indigenous landscape as an archive through Jennifer Colten and Jesse Vogler’s “Significant and Insignificant Mounds: An Essay,”1.1.1 then consider how the same field site—the American Bottom, the Mississippi floodplain in Southern Illinois—is home to a twentieth-century corporate archive of chemical transformation. Colten and Matthew Fluharty’s “Monsanto Town”1.1.2 asks how global agribusiness creates bureaucratic and terrestrial archives of contamination. Patrick Nunnally’s “One Place, Many Names”1.1.3 then inquires about how these layered indigenous and industrial histories create archival challenges—particularly regarding what languages different communities use to label their maps and describe their records. The fundamental principles of both conventional Western cartography and archives rely on the reification of settler-colonial notions of property, as Sarah Lewison describes in “Measuring Loss: Claims/Property Seminar Reflection”1.1.4 and as Jarrett M. Drake explains in “RadTech Meets RadArch.”1.1.5 Drake, along with myriad other progressive archivists, calls for a more capacious and just understanding of provenance—one that encompasses shared stewardship and collectively generated and curated community histories, as Treasure Shields Redmond models in “River Memory”1.1.6 and as Maya Indira Ganesh, Sadie Luetmer, and Shana M. griffin, discuss, particularly through griffin’s practice, in “Extracts and Exclusions.”1.1.7

Shift and flow characterize these modes of record creation and preservation. The flow of the mighty Mississippi River itself, as Thomas Turnbull explains in “A Suspended Archive,”1.1.8 constitutes a riparian archive. Tahani Nadim, in “Data Flow,”1.1.9 then turns our attention to the flows of corn as a commodity and data stream: a product of networked copyright and patent laws, logistical streams, and development policies. Lynn Peemoeller and her fellow conversants, in their “Lost Crops Conversation,”1.1.10 then remind us of the Indigenous practices and cultural histories that embody another reservoir of botanical and agricultural knowledge. In one of my own essays, “The Big Data of Ice, Rocks, Soils, and Sediments,”1.1.11 I discuss how Earth itself constitutes an archive, and how soils, sediments, ice, and rocks serve as critical records in climate science. Rather than using the term “archive” merely as a metaphor, it’s important that we acknowledge the archival labor necessary to transform these shifting forms—modified earth, rivers, seeds, and rocks—into archival records. Michelle Caswell, in “‘The Archive’ Is Not an Archives: On Acknowledging the Intellectual Contributions of Archival Studies,”1.1.12 and Jessa Lingel, in “This is Not an Archive,”1.1.13 remind us of what makes an archive an archive. We must also consider the phase shifts that archival practice is undergoing in this age of anthropocenic and anti-colonial reckoning. My “Glimmer: Refracting Rock”1.1.14 and Nora Almeida and Jen Hoyer’s “The Living Archive in the Anthropocene”1.1.15 compel us to formally acknowledge, and perhaps redress, the colonial contexts that condition both the archive and the changing world it serves to document.

I continue tracing these shifting materialities and terrains—and attendant institutional transformation—in “Archival Phase Shifts.”