Abstract

The article is an ethnographic travelogue of time spent in Oman in 2018 with the Ediacaran subcommission. This is a collective of Earth scientists who globe-trot in search of particular rocks that might be reliable markers for subdividing the long stretch of the Ediacaran period (which lasted ninety-four million years) into intervals that mark global transformations in Earth history. To do so, these scientists are reliant upon the amenability of Petroleum Development Oman, which Omanis credit with ushering Oman into “modernity.” In recent years, critical theorists, cultural historians, and science-and-technology-studies (STS) scholars have argued for the necessity of forging new ways to tell stories that can scale between planetary history and the more familiar scales of human political action. In this article, I do not suggest that geological thinking is the right way to periodize sociopolitical or cultural history. Rather, I intend it as a provocation for us to recognize that periodization—and in particular the work required to nominate periods of duration and succession, unconformity and break—is a theory already built into the world, one which has disseminated across it to correlate time to place unevenly. As such, stratigraphy functions doubly in this article. First, stratigraphy is an object of inquiry: I address where geological timescales come from, and how stratigraphers calibrate eras, epochs, and periods dividing planetary history. Second, it is also an analytic with which I interrogate how thinking stratigraphically might inform how we, as critical theorists, historians, and the like, might think about those problems of periodization.