This volume examines the materialities through which Antarctica is constituted, experienced, and imagined. It approaches Antarctica as inhabited and traversed by people but also co-produced by material forces that organize and shape human engagements. These materialities expose the complex entanglements between human and nonhuman agencies, presenting Antarctica as a landscape of ongoing material and conceptual negotiation.
Antarctica has been regarded as disconnected from the world and removed from cultural, social, and historical forces. Its isolation and extreme climate have nourished the idea of a unique and exceptional territory. The signing of the Antarctic Treaty in 1959 and the establishment of its international governance system reinforced this notion of a distinct space. It became associated with ideals of peaceful cooperation, scientific pursuit, and heroic endurance, all framed within the language of environmental preservation.1
However, this perception is the result of cultural processes that have created and reformulated narratives, values, and meanings. Heroic imagery, discourses of purity, and conservation policies have all contributed to consolidating the idea of a region existing outside of history. The chapters collected here examine objects and material traces to question these dominant narratives, showing that Antarctica has never been separate from global processes. Through materialities, it becomes possible to trace the links among science, politics, economics, and culture that have shaped its contemporary image.
In History and Archaeology, early approaches often treated physical objects as symbolic representations of human culture. More recent perspectives, however, recognize their generative role in social life: how materials, infrastructures, and traces shape expectations, enable actions, and create collective imaginaries.2 Attention has shifted from discrete things to materialities: the assemblages and relations through which the material and the social continuously constitute one another. In this view, materials act not because they possess inherent agency but because they are caught in networks and temporal flows that link human and nonhuman actors alike. This shift has led to contemporary approaches that emphasize the entanglement of matter and meaning, moving beyond dualisms of nature and culture, past and present.3 These perspectives reveal materiality as an active historical force and a key lens for understanding how worlds are created, connected, and transformed. Within this framework, Antarctic Materialities repositions Antarctica within, rather than outside, global historical processes.
Materialities hold profound power in shaping how Antarctica has been imagined. Furthermore, they expose the practices and representations through which values and meanings are produced and participate in the making of knowledge about the continent.4 Far from passive witnesses, objects act within these processes, transforming both the physical and conceptual landscapes of Antarctica and defining the frameworks through which humanity understands this region.
The construction of Antarctica as a natural reserve illustrates how material practices actively create and sustain powerful imaginaries. After the 1991 Madrid Protocol established the legal framework for environmental protection, efforts to minimize human impact often took the form of removing remnants of past activities that did not qualify as historic sites or protected areas.5 Post–Madrid Protocol decisions, whether to remove or preserve, determine which traces of human presence are remembered or erased, producing competing narratives of purity, progress, and belonging.6 The selective conservation of “Heroic Age” artifacts perpetuates the illusion of a timeless wilderness, while the erasure of more recent material remains obscures the continent’s social, political, and environmental entanglements.7 Together, these practices show how materialities construct human–environment relations and the production of knowledge, reinforcing certain histories while silencing others.
Antarctica is also constructed as a place for science: a laboratory where the pursuit of knowledge legitimizes continued human presence. Scientific stations, instruments, and research infrastructures materialize this vision, transforming the continent into a space where geopolitical interests appear as forms of collaborative inquiry.8 These scientific objects also embody ideals of neutrality, objectivity, and stewardship, reinforcing the notion of Antarctica as a site set apart for global scientific endeavor. Yet such objects also consolidate a particular image of the continent, one in which the production of knowledge is inseparable from the production of authority.9
Materiality lies at the heart of the Antarctic humanities and social sciences, and so does interdisciplinarity. Across the natural sciences, humanities, and arts, research on the Antarctic increasingly depends on collaboration among diverse fields and practices. Although the humanities and social sciences have only recently become established within Antarctic research, their growth has deepened the dialogue between scientific and cultural understandings of the continent.10 What unites these approaches is not a shared method but a shared geography and the challenge of studying life and matter under extreme environmental and cultural conditions. Over the past decade, scholars from different disciplines have come together to examine how human and nonhuman forces intersect in this environment, giving rise to new questions about knowledge, power, experience, and material change.11
This book broadens these perspectives by exploring how material things make it possible to question and reframe human interactions with the continent. It reflects a growing interest in the role of objects in shaping human–Antarctic relations and seeks to make these discussions accessible to a wider audience within and beyond the Antarctic humanities. Recognizing that the study of materiality takes different forms across disciplines, the volume brings together contributors who interpret it through the lenses of their own fields. From this diversity emerged a shared aim: to highlight the multiple ways materialities reveal and connect human engagements with Antarctica.
Rather than advancing a single, unified perspective, we sought to bring into conversation diverse approaches—including contributions from scholars for whom Antarctic studies are not a primary focus. The result is an interdisciplinary project that values dialogue across fields. Although we often publish within disciplinary silos, many of us ask similar questions about cultural engagements with Antarctica. Reading beyond our own fields broadens these perspectives, enriches understanding, and opens new directions for collaboration. We also hope that the diversity represented in this volume will encourage others to consider how thinking with both Antarctica and materiality might expand their own work.
The book is structured not around a single argument or definition but around a set of shared questions. Asking questions allows us to connect diverse disciplinary perspectives while keeping open the multiple ways materialities can be understood and studied. It reflects an inquiry-driven approach that values comparison, dialogue, and interpretation. The three questions that follow do not seek definitive answers; rather, they provide a common framework for exploring how materialities imagine, shape, and transform Antarctica across different temporal and spatial scales. In doing so, they offer a way to integrate the volume’s diverse contributions while maintaining a coherent conversation about what materialities do in and through Antarctica.
Throughout the volume, three interrelated questions guide our inquiry: How have material practices and representations created the values, narratives, and meanings through which Antarctica has been imagined? How do materialities transform landscapes and understandings, shaping human–environment relations and the production of knowledge in the Antarctic? How do Antarctic materialities connect times, people, and places, linking the continent to global histories and revealing its multiple temporalities? These questions organize the book’s three parts: Creating Values, Narratives, and Meanings; Transforming Objects, Landscapes, and Understandings; and Connecting Times, People, and Places. Each part brings together case studies that respond, from different disciplinary angles, to the central question of what materialities do in Antarctica.
The first part, Creating Values, Narratives, and Meanings, examines how material practices and representations shape the ways in which Antarctica has been imagined. Claire Warrior analyzes the curatorial process of the Polar Worlds gallery at the National Maritime Museum, showing how heroic narratives persist even when efforts are made to complicate them. Henrietta Hammant traces the trajectory of Captain Scott’s snow goggles at Discovery Point, revealing how museological practices continually reframe both object and memory. Jean de Pomereu studies photographic negatives as material agents that record and remake “Antarcticas” through their circulation and preservation. Seen together, these chapters reveal how materialities generate and sustain the values and imaginaries through which Antarctica continues to be culturally produced.
The second part, Transforming Objects, Landscapes, and Understandings, explores how materialities shape knowledge and transform the environment. Diego Aguirrezábal and Bruno Gentile analyze, from an archaeological perspective, nineteenth-century sealing camps, showing how hybrid material and technical practices, sometimes derived from Indigenous knowledge, produced the first human-altered Antarctic landscapes. Ellen Arnold follows the changing biographies of penguin eggs, from food to scientific specimen to museum object, demonstrating the evolving and situational relationship between humans and penguins. Floris Winckel examines scientific attempts to “fossilize” snowflakes, revealing the tension between ephemerality and permanence at the core of polar science. Daniella McCahey analyzes NASA’s experiments with underwater robotics and hydroponic greenhouses, which transformed Antarctica into a laboratory for extraplanetary exploration, underlining the rhetorical dimension of these experiments and their role in reinforcing the idea of Antarctica as “alien.” Seen together, these chapters show how Antarctic materialities transform both environments and epistemologies, redefining what can be known, collected, or imagined within the continent.
The third part, Connecting Times, People, and Places, focuses on the circulation and persistence of materialities through time. Alice Oates traces icebreakers as infrastructures that bolster British sovereignty, thus materializing the relations between science, geopolitics, and environment. Cornelia Lüdecke examines meteorological instruments from early twentieth-century German expeditions, showing how they transformed natural phenomena into quantifiable imperial data. Sarah Pickman deconstructs the trajectories of chocolate and medical kits, revealing how everyday commodities infused Antarctic exploration into global capitalism. Finally, María Victoria Nuviala, María Violeta Nuviala, and María Ximena Senatore Connolly analyze Antarctic architecture as a negotiation between impermanence and endurance, reflecting the material tensions of human presence under environmental regulation. Seen together, these studies show how Antarctic materialities generate layered temporalities—continuing, transforming, and inverting past orders—so that the continent appears not as a frozen archive but as a dynamic field within global history.
Asking what materialities do in Antarctica is another way of asking how the continent itself becomes thinkable. Each of the questions that structure this book—on imagination, transformation, and connection—approaches this problem from a different angle. Together they show that the Antarctic has never been a blank or timeless space but a historically produced landscape made through things. Attending to these material relations allows us to see how the continent—and the idea of the continent—have been continually remade, revealing Antarctica as an active part of the world’s ongoing material and historical making.
Mar ía Ximena Senatore Connolly has been working on archaeology in Antarctica for the last three decades. She is a Senior Researcher at Instituto de Ciencias del Patrimonio, Consejo Superior de Investigación Científica Spain. With a degree in archaeology and a doctorate in history, she is interested in understanding the human exploration and incorporation of remote lands into the modern and contemporary world. Her work has focused on questioning the master narratives of the Antarctic past and the theoretical conceptualizations of heritage conservation. Her research examines human–things relations in Antarctica past and present, with recent focus on habitability in contemporary Antarctica. In addition to her Antarctic work, her research areas include modern colonialism in Patagonia, theory in historical archaeology, and heritage studies.
Daniella McCahey is an Assistant Professor at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, where she mainly teaches classes on British history, public history, and the history of science. She has published widely on the history of polar and marine science and exploration in both academic and popular venues. She is the co-author of Antarctica: A History in 100 Objects (Conway, 2022).