Archaeology of the Contemporary (Temporal Keyword)
1-5 (5 Records)
While crossing the desert clandestinely, migrants routinely experience a broad range of physical injuries including dehydration, hyperthermia, exhaustion, cuts, bruises, and blisters, all of which are conceptualized by federal law enforcement to act as forms of deterrence. Drawing on a combination of interviews with migrants and experimental research on hiking injuries, we highlight the many ways that the desert hurts people and the various coping strategies that border crossers have developed....
Humanitarian Sites: A Contemporary Archaeological and Ethnographic Study of Clandestine Culture Contact among Undocumented Migrants, Humanitarian Aid Groups, and the U.S. Border Patrol (2015)
For over a decade, Arizona humanitarian groups such as Samaritans and No More Deaths have attempted to help undocumented migrants by leaving water bottles along the many trails in the Sonoran Desert leading from Mexico into the United States. These humanitarian sites have become a source of public controversy, viewed as acts of littering or attempts to aid illegal immigration. During the 2012 and 2013 field seasons of the Undocumented Migration Project, we conducted an archaeological analysis of...
An Investigation Of Surface Assemblages Related To Contemporary Immigration In Southern Arizona (2015)
For the last twenty years an archaeological record of immigration has taken shape in Arizona’s wilderness. This material record results from millions of undocumented men, women and children who have entered the U.S. without authorization by walking across the Sonoran Desert of southern Arizona. Along the way these people eat, rest, and deposit a variety of objects (e.g., water bottles, clothes, personal effects) at ad-hoc resting areas known as migrant sites. These surface assemblages are...
"Not By Angels": Religious Place-Making in the Sonoran Desert (2015)
When the archaeological traces of migrant religion are encountered in the Sonoran Desert by journalists, humanitarian workers, and social scientists, they are often interpreted as static containers of human belief. Previous discussions of this type of material culture have highlighted the perpetuation of colonial discourses that continue to demarcate and enforce the borders of both religious and migration studies, including the privileging of Western, Protestant, and male comprehensions of...
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...