Many New Worlds: Alternative global histories through material stories

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.