Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Many archaeologists have considered how national belonging is materialized through historic sites and built heritage. We propose a session that instead asks archaeologists to analyze how sites of immigration and refugee resettlement contribute to understandings of national belonging. In recent years, the number

of Historical Archaeology projects focused on immigrant communities has increased. Simultaneously, scholars working in the emergent subfield of Contemporary Archaeology have produced a growing body of literature focused on undocumented migration and refugee crises. Our goal is to bring archaeologists working in these different contexts and temporal periods together to consider how material landscapes of immigration and refugee resettlement shape understandings of national belonging. Sites of interest might include borderlands, refugee camps, resettlement colonies, detention centers, and places of immigrant and refugee labor. By using archaeological methods to analyze such sites, we can better understand the material ramifications of government policies within the lives and homes of individuals. This is especially important at a time when global debates surrounding immigration are overly focused on political ideology and legality instead of the tangible, material consequences at a human scale.

Other Keywords
Historic • Migration • Historical Archaeology • Contemporary Archaeology • Ethnohistory/History • Ethnography/Ethnoarchaeology • Survey • Subsistence and Foodways • Zooarchaeology • Urbanism

Geographic Keywords
United States of America (Country) • North America (Continent) • Department of Martinique (Country) • Republic of El Salvador (Country) • Department of Guadeloupe (Country) • Cayman Islands (Country) • Antigua and Barbuda (Country) • Turks and Caicos Islands (Country) • Belize (Country) • Anguilla (Country)

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-13 of 13)

  • Documents (13)
Documents
  • Backpack Biographies: Re-scaling Undocumented Migration in the US-Mexico Borderlands (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Cameron Gokee. Jason De León.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Federal agencies and news media often report undocumented migration across the US-Mexico border in gross terms of hundreds of thousands to millions of crossings and apprehensions—a scalar project that then plays into broader political discourse about national belonging. In this paper we draw on research by the Undocumented Migration...

  • "But We Are Not Broken": Practices of Home in San Francisco Bay Area Homeless Encampments (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Ann Danis.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In January 2018 United Nations Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing Leilani Farha visited Oakland, CA homeless encampments. Farha reportedly remarked, "every person I spoke to today has told me, 'we are human beings.’ But if you need to assert to a UN representative that you are a human, well, something is seriously wrong." The...

  • Communal Spaces and Ideas of Belonging in a WWII Japanese Incarceration Center (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only April Kamp-Whittaker.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans was based on a questioning of national allegiance and the role of minority groups within this nation. This paper looks at the development of communal spaces at the Amache Incarceration Center in southeastern Colorado and explores the ways these areas express ideas of national and...

  • Food and Eating Practices as Affirmative Bio-politics on the Border (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Yannis Hamilakis.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, I will explore the role of provision, preparation, and consumption of food among undocumented border-crossers on the island of Lesvos in Greece. In the various migrant centres run by solidarity groups, cooking and eating become the embodied experiences that bind migrants and solidarians together. Relying on primary...

  • Immigrant Diets and the Making of Australia (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Kimberley Connor.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Australia, Casella and Fredericksen have argued, places of confinement have a disproportionate importance in the national mythology because they are material representations of classic Australian heroes: the convict, the outlaw, and the larrikin. Criminal or mischievous acts are recast as rejecting an unjust social system or an...

  • Lande: The Calais "Jungle" and Beyond (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Dan Hicks.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This talk introduces recent research for the current exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford looking at the 2015 refugee crisis in Europe through the lens of a contemporary archaeology of the Calais landscape, with special attention to the site of the Calais "Jungle." The talk explores: (1) the material, visual and digital...

  • The Materiality of Migration (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Lori Lee.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper considers what archaeologists can contribute to contemporary issues through doing what we do best—analyzing material culture to create narratives. I use this approach to personify a particular group of liminal, stereotyped people whose anonymity is critical for their survival—undocumented migrants. This paper is part of a...

  • Materializing the Incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Koji Lau-Ozawa.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The mass removal and imprisonment of over 110,000 people of Japanese descent during WWII relied upon an interconnected infrastructure of materials and technologies. These camps were not spontaneous creations, but the result of numerous strategies of immigration control and confinement with their own histories of use within the United...

  • Memories of the Past and Its Impact in the Present: Conceptions and Misconception of the Irish Immigrant Experience in the United States (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Brighton.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Alienating immigrant groups is not something unique to this generation. Immigrants to the United States, long before labeling human beings legal or illegal was commonplace, have been deemed either desirable or undesirable, moral or immoral, valued or value-less. Such categorizations have had a debilitating impact on the daily lives...

  • Migrants, Materials, and the South Texas Past (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Ruth Van Dyke.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I direct a historical archaeological project in the Alsatian community of Castroville, Texas. Members of the local heritage society, who sponsor the project, are descendants of economic migrants brought from Alsace to Texas in the 1840s during the aftermath of Texas’ break from Mexico. Today, Castroville residents seek to...

  • Refugees as a Productive Force, National Belonging as Mutable: The Case of 1947 Partition Refugee Resettlement in Delhi, India (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Riggs.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many archaeologists have focused on the material ramifications of nationalist exclusion. Such works have documented how discriminatory policies impact the ability of immigrants and refugees to build new lives post-migration, and in some cases, even endanger their lives. In this paper, I explore the opposite question: what happens...

  • Tutelo Resettlement in the Cayuga Heartland: Haudenosaunee Approach to Refugees (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Sherene Baugher.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Tutelos were driven out of their homelands in North Carolina and Virginia by land-grabbing Europeans. The Tutelos fled to refugee settlements in Pennsylvania along with other displaced Native Americans from diverse Indian nations. In 1753, the Tutelos were offered sanctuary with the Cayugas, one of the Six Nations of the...

  • What Can Archaeology Tell Us about Refugees and Forced Immigration? (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Randall McGuire.

    This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The authors in this session use archaeological methods to analyze refugees and forced migrations. We seek to better understand the material ramifications of migration in the lives of individuals. We wish to understand the tangible, material consequences of migration at a human scale. The papers in the session spring from historical...