Paper short abstract:

The presentation describes the process of assembling the Tara Hategului Dinosaurs Geopark (Romania) and problematizes conventional understandings of actors, levels of inquiry, knowledge and nature in the anthropological literature on protected areas.

Paper long abstract:

In a movement between ethnographic material and actor network theory, the essay describes the Geopark as an assemblage of human and non-human actors, or, in other words, as a territorialization of a global form, conservation. The transformative work undertaken within the Ţara Haţegului Dinosaurs Geopark is geared towards unearthing and exhibiting the 70-million years old Haţeg Island. Former sites of geological field research are undergoing a process of conservation that turns them into treasures of the Earth under juridical protection substituting a particular understanding of landscape for one that is geared towards conservation: the deep time of the Island becomes an asset that co-interests other agents, be they international funding bodies, the University of Bucharest, local administrations, various profit and non-profit organization. Yet materiality entrenches the compromises of translation. While from a conservational perspective mattering refers to managing and protecting geological sites, the concerns and claims over the fossils, the zoning or the park and the custodianship over the natural patrimony are rather ambiguous and conflict-ridden in the case of the surfaces beneath the soil.