The Antarctic Archaeological Reconnaissance Project: Preliminary Results

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The conventional wisdom that Antarctica was untouched by humans prior to its discovery by British mariners in 1819 is not based on archaeological evidence, but instead is rooted in a tacitly racist belief that Indigenous peoples who lacked European sailing technologies were simply unable to get there. Yet just 500 miles north of the ecologically rich Antarctic Peninsula, maritime hunter-gatherers occupied Tierra del Fuego throughout the Holocene, and may have followed the annual migration of animals to Antarctica each austral summer. Evidence of seasonal hunting expeditions could be preserved on ice-free beaches and rock shelters, and numerous archaeological sites have been cursorily recorded on Antarctica’s South Shetland Islands, but none have been well documented or securely dated. This paper presents preliminary results of a new archaeological project that is undertaking a systematic survey of the Antarctic Peninsula region, better documenting known sites, prospecting for previously undiscovered sites, and collecting scientific dating evidence. Results are reshaping our understanding of the human history of Antarctica, challenging longstanding ideas regarding the region’s ecology, the colonization of the Southern Oceans, and global human migration more broadly.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53462