Where is the Burgess Shale?: Fossils and Deep Geologic Spacetime

The article explores the concept of “place” through Deep Time using fossil discoveries from the Burgess Shale, a 508-million-year-old fossil site which preserves some of the earliest lifeforms on Earth. I apply a performative analysis of semi-structured in-depth interviews and to ethnographic data collected on hikes to the shale; at museum exhibits, paleontological symposia, and conferences; and at two major North American paleontological collections. A performative analysis of place uncovers how places are always made and remade in actions upon and through materializing bodies and nonhuman entities. The present article addresses doings and makings of place through Deep Time, or vast passages of time that are unintelligibly long to humans. Place is not just a spatial and cultural concept, but also a temporal one, and the timeline is nonlinear. I argue that fossils contribute to the relativity, contested nature, and multi-synchronicity of place. With a focus on “place-making,” I argue that the shale is a process which never attains a fixity or finality to its meaning, but is rather negotiated and often, a site of struggle. As time-travellers from Deep Time, fossils are strictly traces of ancient critters and environments, so their meaning is contingent upon social, cultural, historical, and political conditions under which they are interpreted. Fossils are therefore sources of resistance on a changing and maybe-dying planet.