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This paper argues that geological materials, which modern European thought views as inert, were understood as lively or animated by indigenous people living between 700 and 1200 AD in what today is the nation of Honduras. Spanish colonial petitions, and oral traditions collected as folklore or ethnographic narratives from the descendants of these indigenous people present earthly matter as animate. Exploring the liveliness of geological materials before European invasion leads to the displacement of a traditional archaeological notion of spatialization organized around an opposition between settlements, treated as the locus of cultural activity, and their surroundings, identified as a contrasting ‘nature’. Identifying the co-presence of geological materials in specific zones of mountainous terrain and recognizing their mobility from mountains to floodplains leads to a new understanding of spatialities and …