For nearly a century, seasonal, often female, manual labor remained fundamental to making peat available for industrial enterprises and electric power plants. Focusing on the trajectories of peat workers, this chapter discusses the seasonal nature and gendered organization of labor. It reveals that, as an embodied, more than-human activity, peat extraction was an experience marked by social inequality and difference as well as by the uncertain material environments of extraction sites, where the weather, dysfunctional technology, and the physical interaction with peat caused injuries and accidents. Examining the overlapping temporalities, modes of production, and agencies (human and nonhuman) in the making of peat fuel, this chapter foregrounds the forgotten margins of Russia’s fossil economy as focal points of the intertwined exploitation of humans and nature upon which it relied.

In view of the enduring colonial and nationalist legacies that permeate current archaeological practice, we reflect here on ways to reimagine archaeology as decolonizing action. What is it in archaeology itself ‒ in its origins, in its methods, in the way archaeologists think and act ‒ that must be reimagined and redesigned?