Horizons beyond the Perimeter Wall: Relational materiality, institutional confinement, and the archaeology of being global

As historical archaeologists, how might we begin to unpick the complex material webs of trades, migrations, and technologies that constitute globalization? How should we simultaneously understand the local and transnational meanings of our study sites? Through examples based around the 19th-century transportation of British felons to the Australian penal colonies, this article considers how recent work in relational theory offers fresh directions for exploring how the process of "being global" enmeshes humans, artifacts, and landscapes into ever-wider meshvorks of connection and significance. It suggests that by traveling along the dynamic awful lines of globalization from the inside out, we archaeologists can consider not only what alternatives could have been, but what might be in our future.