Old Methods and Theories in the Ethnographic Present: Why We Need An Archaeological Sensibility in the 21st Century

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology Out-of-the-Box: Investigating the Edge of the Discipline" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists often look to sociocultural anthropology for either ethnographic data that support interpretations of the ancient past or for the latest "cutting edge" theory that can be directly grafted onto a data set. In essence, archaeologists excel at mining the ethnographic literature for analogies or new social theories. However, few ethnographers dare to venture into the archaeological literature or attempt to explore the potential of that sub-discipline’s methods or theories for understanding the contemporary moment. This is surprising given the growing sociocultural interests in actants, landscapes, materiality, and corpses. Using data from the Undocumented Migration Project, a long-term interdisciplinary research endeavor focused on understanding the violent social process of clandestine migration from Latin America to the United States, I argue that traditional archaeological methods and theories can provide new insight into modern sociocultural phenomenon. Moreover, I posit that an "archaeological sensibility" (i.e., an analytical viewpoint that takes a rigorous approach to both the physical and sociopolitical aspects of materiality) helps to erase the stifling borders that often exist between subdisciplines while pushing for new and organic forms of interdisciplinary research.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeology Out-of-the-Box: Investigating the Edge of the Discipline   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22994