Antczak, Konrad Andrzej

Konrad A. Antczak is a Venezuelan anthropological archaeologist of Polish ancestry. He received his BA in Anthropology from Rollins College (2012) and his MA (2014) and PhD (2017) in Anthropology with a specialization in Historical Archaeology from The College of William and Mary. He is currently a Tenure-Track Professor at the Departament d’Humanitats of Universitat Pompeu Fabra. At UPF he teaches “Socio-Cultural Anthropology” in the bachelor’s degree in Humanities and “Archaeologies of Colonialism” in the World History master’s programme and coordinates the Colonialism, Gender, and Materialities research group (CGM) together with Sandra Montón Subías. He is also a Researcher at the Unidad de Estudios Arqueológicos at Simón Bolívar University in Caracas, Venezuela.

Konrad specializes in the historical archaeology of the 16th–19th-century Southern Caribbean. In his research he explores everyday life, informal trade, alternative modernities, and maritime mobilities through the conceptual framework of assemblages of practice that reveals changes and continuities in human-thing entanglements through space and time.

He is currently PI of the ERC Starting Grant project “IslandLives: Alternative Modernities and Everyday Life in the Pre-emancipation Southern Caribbean (1634–1863)”. He was previously a Juan de la Cierva-Incorporación fellow (2021–2025) and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fellow (2019–2021) at UPF, carrying out the ArCarib project “Archaeology of Informal Maritime Trade in the Caribbean”, as well as a visiting scholar (2018–2019) at the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture of the University of Amsterdam.

Konrad is the author of Islands of Salt: Historical Archaeology of Seafarers and Things in the Venezuelan Caribbean, 1624–1880 (Sidestone Press, 2019), which received the 2022 Fernando Coronil Prize awarded by the Venezuelan Studies Section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) for the best book on Venezuela, and editor of Venezuelan Historical Archaeology: Current Perspectives on Contact, Colonialism, and Independence (Sidestone Press, 2024). He has published various articles in peer-reviewed journals on Venezuelan historical archaeology and history and archaeological theory and method, among these: “Life at the Salty Edge of Empire: The Maritime Cultural Landscape at the Orange Saltpan on Bonaire, 1821–1960” (International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 2023) and “Assemblages of practice. A conceptual framework for exploring human–thing relations in archaeology” (Archaeological Dialogues, 2019).