Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement

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.