Landscapes of the Borderlands: Efficacy and Ethics of Applying Archaeological Spatial Analysis to Undocumented Migration in the Arizona Desert.

Summary

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 in our understanding of the complexities of border crossing, the act of studying and publishing high-accuracy spatial information about undocumented migration requires a great deal of sensitivity. We highlight what we have learned from five years of survey in the Arizona desert, outline some of the ethical dilemmas that have impacted how we analyze and publish spatial data, and posit that the current border enforcement system is largely a political smokescreen that has taken the lives of thousands of border crossers since the late 1990s.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Crossing Borders and Erasing Boundaries: An Overview of the First Five Years of the Undocumented Migration Project   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2015

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 97