Pre-Recorded Video Presentation Things and the Global Antarctica

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Pre-Recorded Video Presentation Things and the Global Antarctica," at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

While Antarctica has received uneven attention in global historical archaeology, it is a vital region for understanding the modern world on a global scale. This symposium aims to examine, for the first time at this conference, myriad approaches to the significance of materiality in Antarctica. In this session we explore two central questions: how do human-things relations in Antarctica contribute to our understanding of the ways humans have explored/transformed/exploited distant/remote/uninhabited places from the nineteenth century to the present? and what do these ways of being in Antarctica say about large-scale processes such as modernity, colonialism, and capitalism? This symposium brings together scholars working on any aspect of human-thing relations in Antarctica. It aims to showcase some of the many approaches to Antarctic studies that have emerged in recent years, including but not limited to terrestrial and maritime archaeology, heritage studies, museum studies, archives studies, history of technology, and environmental history.