How does an 1838 Queen Victoria Coronation medal end up in a small coastal fishing village in Texas? This talk explores globalism during the Republic and Early Statehood periods through findings from excavations at the TJ Chambers House along the upper Galveston Bay of Texas. Chambers was many things: a Texas pioneer, judge, general, would-be empresario, and above all a confidence man known for his vanity and litigiousness. His peregrinations in search of empire took him throughout America, Mexico, and perhaps beyond. Artifacts that include English gun flints, ceramic tableware, and tobacco pipes abandoned at his home reflect how rooted transatlantic trade and social networks were during the state’s formative years.

This presentation explores how contemporary trash can be understood as a material expression of globalization through a case study on the island of Barbuda, located in the Lesser Antilles. Waste accumulation across the insular landscape reveals the complex interplay of local and external actors on an island facing major territorial rights challenges. Trash, as contemporary artefacts, provides insight into shifting consumption patterns, external dependencies, and the cultural and environmental consequences of global economic systems. By analyzing the spatial distribution and composition of trash on the island, the study uncovers how globalization manifests in everyday life and material culture. This paper presents key findings from an ongoing ethnoarchaeological doctoral project, demonstrating how contemporary trash serves as a powerful lens for interpreting social, political, and environmental dynamics on the island of Barbuda.

Mobility and shared, communal access to the entire island of Barbuda are central to the preservation of Barbudan heritage. From the unique origins of their land-based knowledge during the period of enslavement under the British to their contemporary system of communal land ownership, the history of Barbudans’ traditional land use reinforces a deep connection between people and place. Shared access to the diverse heritage resources of the island have supported the stewardship of critical island ecosystems as well as the transmission of cultural knowledge through the continuity of practices such as camping, hunting, fishing, and craft making. Following the devastation caused by Hurricane Irma in 2017, Barbudans have confronted the damaging impacts of tourism development. The ongoing construction of luxury amenities is restricting the community’s ability to move freely across the island. These changes threaten Barbudans' ability to use and preserve the heritage landscapes that maintain traditional systems of knowledge.

The Andaman Islands, strategically isolated yet geopolitically significant, were employed by the British Empire as a spatial fix to resolve the overlapping crises in South Asia. The mid-19th-century colonial efforts in South Asia faced crises of political rebellion, penal overflows, and capitalist surpluses during the 1857 Indian Insurrection. In response to these crises, the British state restructured the peripheral geographies to absorb surplus capital, labor, and populations. Preliminary archaeological reconnaissance of Port Blair and its environs suggests how the spatial fix materialized in the landscape through analyzing settlement location, sites of labor, and their environmental affordances. Drawing on Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work on carceral geographies, I argue that the Andamans were not merely sites of exile but instrumental in imperial strategies of spatial reorganization. Moreover, the Andamans were also zoned to maintain racial and administrative hierarchies, segregating convicts, colonial officials, and indigenous groups into legible and governable categories.

During Japan’s fifty-year rule of Taiwan (1895–1945), police outposts in remote Indigenous regions functioned as crucial extensions of colonial governance. In this presentation, I focus on several police outposts established in Bunun territory between the 1920s and 1940s. These sites were not only centers of policing and surveillance but also hubs of administration, education, and development aimed at assimilating Indigenous communities. Drawing on archaeological and historical sources, I examine the material dimensions of daily life—including the use of imported Japanese goods, culinary practices, and household routines—to explore how officers and their families embodied a dual identity: as agents of imperial expansion and as settlers attempting to recreate familiar aspects of life from Japan. This approach allows me to reflect on the lived experience of colonialism from the margins of the empire.

During the early 20th century, the forced labor camps of the Soviet Union, collectively known as the gulag, were witnesses to the unjust treatment and mass movement of over 24 million people “needing reform” in the eyes of their government. Karlag, one of the largest divisions of the gulag system encompassing an area the size of Wales, had over 70 camps spread across challenging and environmentally diverse landscapes in central Kazakhstan. Using satellite and pedestrian surveys to identify and document the remains of these camps and their surroundings is vital for understanding how prisoners moved within and experienced these landscapes, and is a key aim of the interdisciplinary project, Central Asia’s Gulags. Local communities whose ancestors came from thousands of miles away and were forcibly retained after Karlag’s closure, inherited this dark legacy and offer insights into the future of gulag heritage in Kazakhstan.

This paper discusses archaeological research on the landscapes of trans-Atlantic trade in Peki, a frontier Ewe community in southeastern Ghana. From the 17th to 19th centuries, Peki and nearby interior communities became deeply entangled in the global commerce and local power struggles within the trans-Atlantic economy in the Gold Coast in ways that challenge a clear dichotomy between Indigenous victims and perpetrators of the trade in enslaved people. I present findings from my multidisciplinary research on the distinctive social power-building strategies employed by the Peki community to survive the aggression of more powerful states. I argue that archaeological studies of slavery and the trans-Atlantic trade in the African interior—despite the poor preservation of sites—are both feasible and crucial for diversifying the narrative of the Atlantic experiences of the African interior. Nonetheless, this work requires collaborative and community-engaged approaches that involve learning with Indigenous people rather than about them.