Many New Worlds: Alternative global histories through material stories

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Many New Worlds: Alternative global histories through material stories" at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Popular understanding of global histories continue to be dominated by historical text-based narratives of a modern world. This session seeks to highlight how narratives based on high resolution and often hyper-local material analyses provide alternative, and often antithetical, narratives surrounding the actions and agencies of individuals and communities during times of global ‘encounter’. Building out of an AHRC project of the same name that tracks how within days of arrival in the Caribbean, Europeans are eating indigenous foods, wearing indigenous clothing and sleeping in indigenous hammocks. This session opens out such material dialogues to archaeologists working around the world on themes of alternative pasts and futures related to colonial trajectories. We welcome conversations revisiting the early modern world through alternative lenses. Seeking in particular to consider how these material stories can be most effectively shared and communicated out to broader audiences to help re-write popular understandings of global history. Contributors at the frontline of material science provide their alternative starting points to help imagine different realities. This session seeks to position such work as central to understanding the many new worlds that exist, rather than the literary one on which so much of global history is understood.

Other Keywords
Indigenous • Archaeometry & Materials Analysis • Cultural Resources and Heritage Management • Worldwide

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-8 of 8)

  • Documents (8)
Documents
  • Archaeology of Sixteenth-Century Spanish Colonial Expeditions in the North American Southeast: Countering the Popular Narrative (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Vernon Knight.

    This is an abstract from the "Many New Worlds: Alternative global histories through material stories" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the middle of the sixteenth century, the North American Southeast witnessed several large, well-funded Spanish colonial incursions. Recent archaeological research in the Black Prairie of Alabama is within the zone of convergence of two such expeditions, those of Hernando de Soto (1540-41) and Tristán de Luna...

  • Colonial Expulsion and Assimilation in the Town of Tequesta, Miami River, Florida (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Carr.

    This is an abstract from the "Many New Worlds: Alternative global histories through material stories" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The indigenous town of Tequesta on the mouth of the Miami River was the site of two attempts of colonization and Christian conversion by the Spanish. The first was in 1567 by Pedro Menendez and the second in 1743 by Jesuits. Both attempts ended largely in failure that included rebellion and the abandoning of the...

  • Globalized Histories Through Local Material Stories: The Micro and Macro Narratives of Portuguese Global Connections (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Tânia Casimiro.

    This is an abstract from the "Many New Worlds: Alternative global histories through material stories" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The history of Portuguese globalization is often dominated by grand narratives of exploration and discovery, perpetuating a Eurocentric view of global encounters. However, material evidence from archaeological sites, together with historical evidence, offers alternative perspectives that challenge these official...

  • How to talk to materials? Dialogue between researcher, analytical chemistry and drug paraphernalia (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Judith Margarita Lopez Aceves.

    This is an abstract from the "Many New Worlds: Alternative global histories through material stories" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Intoxicant consumption is a practice that was reported by the European colonizers when they first arrived in the Caribbean, however, their reports were often vague and lacking detail, leaving material evidence as the only tangible evidence of this consumption. But what if the material evidence we have does not align...

  • The Power of Many: Alternative Social histories in the relationship between Crete and Egypt in the Bronze Age (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Borja Legarra Herrero.

    This is an abstract from the "Many New Worlds: Alternative global histories through material stories" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The discourse surrounding the presence of Egyptian artifacts on the island of Crete has predominantly centred on the concept of cultural transmission. Recent models challenge traditional colonial interpretations by recognizing the agency of local Cretan communities in integrating Egyptian materials into their own...

  • TBD Indigenous peoples and Africans in the Greater Antilles. Interactions and identities (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Roberto Valcárcel Rojas.

    This is an abstract from the "Many New Worlds: Alternative global histories through material stories" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. <html> <b>The arrival of Europeans in the Caribbean also meant the arrival of Africans. From very early on, they were involved in the colonial process, mostly as enslaved labor. Their link with the Indigenous societies was early and multiple, although it is a minimally studied topic. Using archaeological and...

  • Whose worlds anyway? Multispecies and non-anthropocentric approaches to Caribbean histories (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Alice Samson.

    This is an abstract from the "Many New Worlds: Alternative global histories through material stories" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Drawn on a wall between two crosses, this is how an Indigenous zemi (object-person) appears in a cave shrine. In a midden surrounded by fish bones and thimbles, this is how a pig’s head ended up in an encomienda household. Wrapped in hammocks against the insects, this is how labourers, enslaved people, and...

  • Worlds of Many People: Following Amazonian Indigenous People towards Archaeologies Beyond Humanity (2025)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Mariana Petry Cabral.

    This is an abstract from the "Many New Worlds: Alternative global histories through material stories" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Amazonian archaeology has produced narratives about the past of Indigenous peoples for over a century, and it has recently attained to Indigenous knowledge systems. Archaeologists working with and for Indigenous communities, as much as the first generation of Indigenous archaeologists in the region, have been...