Advancing Frontiers in the 21st century: Reconsidering Colonial Encounters in the Atlantic World

Part of: Society for Historical Archaeology 2017

This session takes as its point of departure the conference theme, "Advancing Frontiers," a phrase inviting archaeologists to imagine the nature of our research in 50 years. It may also be a play on the discipline's first 50 years, which drew on the notion of the "frontier" as a framework for documenting and interpreting colonial encounters. This framework soon came under fire as one that reproduced rather than challenged colonial relations, in the past and in the present. In this session, authors build on these critiques through the lens of postcolonial theory, rethinking frontiers as locally constituted by specific spatial, material, discursive, and representational practices, while defined broadly by fluidity, violence, and conflicting visions of the post-frontier future.