Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

How do we “see” migrant and diaspora communities archaeologically over different time scales? We revisit an old debate over the tendency for archaeologists to approach this question as a binary: (1) by interpreting materials associated with migrant and diaspora communities as culturally distinguishable and distinct or (2) by interpreting materials associated with migrant and diaspora communities as unique cultural hybrids, shaped by both places of origin and present contexts. In relying on interpretive methodologies that are static and cyclical, resulting narratives often focus on a set of culturally determined material traits that overshadow the long-term, complex social processes that distinguish different communities. We ask participants in this session to critically examine and discuss the methodological assumptions that they rely on as they do archaeology of migrant and diaspora communities. In turn, we also ask them to discuss approaches that have aided them in breaking this pattern. What archaeological methodologies have allowed them to “see” migrant and diaspora communities and their associated material worlds in a more nuanced way—a way that leaves space for process, continual movement, individual autonomy, multidimensional social identities, and/or dynamic networks of exchange?

Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-14 of 14)

  • Documents (14)

Documents
  • Community Caretaking, Collective Parenting, and Othermothering: Diasporic Family Building in the Western American Military (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Katrina C Eichner.

    This is an abstract from the "Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Using materials and archives associated with Black US Army laundresses stationed at Fort Davis, Texas, in the 1860s–1890s, this paper will investigate how the practice of parenting intersected with a broader focus on public caretaking in the African American community. Adoption, communal...

  • Diaspora on the Block: Neighborhood Archaeology as Theory and Method (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Koji Lau-Ozawa. Ryan Kennedy.

    This is an abstract from the "Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeology of diaspora has grown in many directions during the first two decades of the twenty-first century. It has become a key way of understanding the short-term and long-term connections between people and communities defined by movement and migration. However, archaeologists...

  • Diasporic Tensions of Historical Framing and Material Process in Mauritian Archaeology (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Julia Haines.

    This is an abstract from the "Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines the tension between historical framing and material process in the context of colonial labor migrations, using archaeology of domestic and settlement landscapes in nineteenth-century Mauritius as a case study. Historical archaeology has the benefit of being able to...

  • Five Generations at the Stagecoach Inn: A Ruin at the Intersection of Historic Migration(s) in D’Hanis, TX (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Markert.

    This is an abstract from the "Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Stagecoach Inn in D’Hanis, Texas, sits at the intersection of multiple migrations and acts of place making in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Texas. The limestone and sandstone ruin, obscured by brush from the closest gravel road, was once the most prominent and visible marker of a...

  • Home, Hearth, and Hammer: Detecting Migrants in the Wari Empire, Peru (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Donna Nash.

    This is an abstract from the "Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The existence of a prehistoric Wari Empire in the Andes of Peru was debated for several decades. Despite major shifts in settlement patterns and large-scale landscape transformations corresponding to their early expansion in the seventh century CE, researchers questioned Wari hegemony...

  • Migrant and Diaspora Communities in Ancient Kutch and Saurashtra (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Supriya Varma.

    This is an abstract from the "Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Two categories of archaeological sites have been identified in the third and second millennia CE Saurashtra, viz. Indus and Local Chalcolithic, a distinction based on architecture, artifacts, nature, and the location of settlements. So far, the constructed narrative has been framed in...

  • Modeling a Collaborative Archaeological Synthesis of Human Migration for a Long-Term, Global Perspective (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Beekman. Migration Collective CfAS.

    This is an abstract from the "Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since September 2019, members of the Coalition for Archaeological Synthesis have sought to model a collaborative synthesis of human migration for a long-term, global perspective, from the earliest hominid movements to contemporary forced displacement in Europe. In March 2022, the group...

  • Moving in New Ways, Making New Places: Novelty and the Politics of Place Making (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Eduard Fanthome.

    This is an abstract from the "Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tracing the movement of people archaeologically is a challenge, especially since the deconstruction of the direct association between people groups and material culture. This paper approaches material culture and spatial practice as the constitution and negotiation of social relations. I...

  • Negotiating the Centrality of Regional Identity in Real Time: Punjabi, Bengali, and NWFP-Ness among Partition Refugees in Delhi (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Riggs.

    This is an abstract from the "Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists understand the limitations of viewing cultural categories as deterministic of material use and preference. Nonetheless, it is challenging to avoid such assumptions when trying to understand material patterns associated with moments of migration. This paper considers how...

  • Redrawing the Arrows of Mississippianization to and from the Central Illinois River Valley (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Dana Bardolph. Christina Friberg. Gregory Wilson.

    This is an abstract from the "Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The rise of Cahokia, the largest precolumbian Native American city north of Mexico, and the rapid spread of Mississippian culture across the midcontinental and southeastern United States after 1000 CE have long been a focus of archaeological inquiry. From early theories of cultural...

  • Rethinking Mississippian Migration and Frontier Settlement in Southwest Virginia, USA (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Brandon Ritchison. Maureen Meyers. Zoe Doubles.

    This is an abstract from the "Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fifteen years of excavations at the Carter Robinson mound site in southwestern Virginia, USA, have documented a case of immigration, settlement, and transformation at the extreme edge of the Mississippian world. Recovered cultural material suggests residents were nonlocal Mississippians...

  • Seeing Identity within a Carceral Environment: Race and Gender within sites of the Southern Convict Lease System (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only V. Camille Westmont.

    This is an abstract from the "Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Following the abolishment of chattel slavery in the United Stated, southern legislatures found a replacement for enslaved African American labor in their prison populations. Building on racist laws and racially prejudiced prosecutions, southern legislatures systematically charged,...

  • Settled in Strange Lands: Forced Relocation as a Technology of the Inka Empire (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Whittemore.

    This is an abstract from the "Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Why do empires force their subjects to leave home? From Neo-Assyria to the British West Indies, coercive migration policies have been adopted by expansive, multiethnic polities across time and space. One of the most ambitious projects of imperial forced relocation took place in the Inka...

  • “Wide-Awake Merchants” and Reform-Minded Women: Archaeology of Alexandria, Virginia’s German Jewish Community (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Tatiana Niculescu.

    This is an abstract from the "Seeing Migrant and Diaspora Communities Archaeologically: Beyond the Cultural Fixity/Fluidity Binary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Historical archaeological investigations of Jewish diaspora sites have often heavily relied on faunal remains, particularly the presence or absence of pig remains, as a proxy for Jewishness. Keeping kosher is not the only relevant component of Jewish diasporic identities or even the only...