Considering Frontiers Beyond the Romantic: Spaces of Encroachment, Innovation, and Far Reaching Entanglements

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Considering Frontiers Beyond the Romantic: Spaces of Encroachment, Innovation, and Far Reaching Entanglements," at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

So-called “frontier” landscapes stage interactions between multiethnic Indigenous and colonial populations. These landscapes afforded a fluid space for frontier populations to negotiate the creation and expansion of economic networks, technological hybridization and innovation, and amend expected gender and societal roles. Persistence and shifts in consumption patterns, social organizations, and habitual practices by these communities through conflict and confluence frequently leave behind a defined material footprint of these dialogues and their far-reaching entanglements with other peoples, places, and legacies of previous encounters. In this vein, we follow William Cronon and others that conceptualize frontiers not as isolated space unmoored from the rest of the world, but as entangled in a mutually constituting relationship with the “metropoles” that they are influenced by and have influence over. This session broadly examines the architecture, material culture, and landscapes created through ambivalent, cooperative, and violent interactions between the diverse populations spanning frontiers and metropoles.