Assemblage, archive, and ancestor: Developing more‐than‐human historical geography with salmon

Abstract This article develops concepts and methods for a more‐than‐human historical geography. It does so in response to the concept of the more‐than‐human archive that has begun to emerge in cultural–historical geography and the environmental humanities. Cultural–historical geographers interested in the more‐than‐human archive have argued that animals, plants, rocks, and other ecological phenomena have important agencies that are overlooked by culturally dominant anthropocentrism. I argue, however, that this literature has often relied upon ungeographic theories and methods of history that downplay the role of spatial politics in shaping the temporal rhythms of the more‐than‐human world. The ungeographic ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies informing more‐than‐human archive literatures have resulted in the archive, a Eurocentric construction with a violent genealogy, being incorrectly taken as an unproblematic metaphor for narrating historical geography. To develop a more critical spatial–historical reading of the more‐than‐human, I turn to my own research on Atlantic salmon. I propose three conceptual figures of more‐than‐human historical geography based on my encounters in the salmon rivers of southwest Britain: the assemblage, the archive, and the ancestor. This tripartite conceptualisation of more‐than‐human historical geography evidences the difference a more‐than‐archival, spatial–historical approach makes to the way we understand ecological politics.