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Abstract Vernacular earthen architecture presents a series of relevant conservation challenges that involve designing solutions for different kinds of alterations and degradations. Other challenges of a social nature simultaneously arise and are related, among other factors, to the participation of local communities and the actions of different institutional actors. Understanding these phenomena has generally been approached from perspectives that take technical considerations and social dynamics as separate fields. The current global context has resulted in an acceleration of changes in these dynamics, in terms of both techniques and management models, giving rise to the need to develop comprehensive conceptual and methodological approaches through which these challenges should be addressed jointly by recombining the technical and the social. This paper will analyse the main problems affecting vernacular architectures in three communities in northern Argentina, where earthen techniques have been very relevant. We will reflect on various potentially useful theoretical frameworks, incorporating concepts from the anthropology of technology and methodological approaches from an ethnography of conservation as a way to work with multiple ontologies.