Archaeology of the Contemporary (Other Keyword)
1-9 (9 Records)
A boon to the archaeological study of American lifeways in the past and present, the massive assemblages of discarded objects at landfills poignantly speak to an era of unrivaled consumption and waste. Aggregated through municipally sanctioned collection services, these assemblages, however, are rarely representative of the full range of household-level discard behaviors. Illegal dump sites, in contrast, comprise assemblages that cannot be easily or quickly discarded through regular garbage...
"Clean Up Your Mess, Chino": Contested Space, Boredom, and Vulnerability among Central American Migrants Crossing Southern Mexico. (2016)
The growing subdiscipline of archaeology of the contemporary has stressed the importance of studying detritus to access silenced or abject aspects of the recent past. This paper takes a different approach, focusing on the ways that an archaeology of the present is not about uncovering “truths” that correct ethnographic research, but is rather a constant agitation and addition to ethnographic engagement. Following recent American pressure on the government of Mexico and changes in Mexican...
Crossing the Line (Part II): Taphonomies of toxicity in Contemporary Archaeology (2015)
This paper is the second part of a two-part dialogue on the use of taphonomy as an archaeological technique in both prehistoric archaeology and the archaeology of the contemporary. Part II explores how using the concept of taphonomy to study the accumulation of harmful toxins in the environment and in the human body opens up new avenues of study for an archaeology of human-environment interactions in the contemporary nuclear and industrial age. Intimately tied to the waste of human activity,...
The Edge of Humanity: Why Commonsensical Notions about Nature Impede our Understandings of Structural Violence in the Arizona Desert (2015)
Since the 1990’s Border Patrol has employed a strategy known as "Prevention Through Deterrence." This policy emphasizes heightened security around urban ports of entry so that undocumented migrants will attempt to cross the border in more remote areas that are difficult to traverse but easy for law enforcement to patrol. Rather than deterring migration, hundreds of thousands of people each year now spend days in the desert attempting to walk across one of the most extreme environments in North...
Landscapes of the Borderlands: Efficacy and Ethics of Applying Archaeological Spatial Analysis to Undocumented Migration in the Arizona Desert. (2015)
Utilizing an archaeological landscape approach to analyze undocumented migration has significantly improved our understanding of this highly politicized and poorly understood social process. Using spatial methods in conjunction with interviews with migrants, this paper examines the complex geopolitical landscape that is shaped, traversed, and experienced by federal law enforcement, humanitarian workers and undocumented border crossers. While the employment of archaeological spatial methods aids...
Old Methods and Theories in the Ethnographic Present: Why We Need An Archaeological Sensibility in the 21st Century (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology Out-of-the-Box: Investigating the Edge of the Discipline" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists often look to sociocultural anthropology for either ethnographic data that support interpretations of the ancient past or for the latest "cutting edge" theory that can be directly grafted onto a data set. In essence, archaeologists excel at mining the ethnographic literature for analogies or new social...
On Dangerous Ground: Documenting the Undocumented Migration Project 2009-2014 (2015)
Started in 2009, the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP) developed out of an attempt to couple archaeological data on what border crossers left in the Arizona desert with ethnographic data collected at migrant shelters in Northern Mexico. The initial goal was to understand the informal economy that structured human smuggling and the various technologies of survival and subterfuge that people employed while crossing the Sonoran Desert. Since 2009, the project’s scope has significantly expanded...
Pain and Perseverance: An Archaeological Study of the First-Aid and Ethnopharmacology of Undocumented Migration (2015)
Undocumented migrants crossing the Sonoran Desert must survive the dangers of extreme heat and rugged terrain, while simultaneously avoiding apprehension and physical abuse by the US Border Patrol. A successful migration attempt therefore depends, in part, on the ability to endure or alleviate pain experienced en route. In order to better understand how health concerns play into the strategies and experiences of migrants, this paper presents an analysis of pharmaceutical and aid-related...
Tossed Cigarettes, Illegal Dumps, and Soiled Cardboard: An Archaeology of Illicit, Invisible, and Seldom-Studied Discard Phenomena in the Twenty-First Century (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology Out-of-the-Box: Investigating the Edge of the Discipline" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology has long sought to distance itself from the present, and despite a small corpus of novel and seminal research emerging over the last four decades, an archaeology that addresses the contemporary has remained only on the fringes of the discipline. Highlighting recent investigations in which the...