Erasure, Disappearance, and Accountability: Rethinking Taphonomy and Site Formation Processes in the Sonoran Desert

Summary

This is an abstract from the "AD 1150 to the Present: Ancient Political Economy to Contemporary Materiality—Archaeological Anthropology in Honor of Jeanne E. Arnold" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In 1994, the US Border Patrol formalized a boundary enforcement strategy known as “Prevention Through Deterrence” (PTD) that employs the natural environment as a weapon to impede the movement of undocumented border crossers. PTD has subsequently been linked to the death and disappearance of thousands of migrants in Arizona, Texas, and California. Since 2009, the Undocumented Migration Project has employed a combination of archaeological, forensic, and ethnographic approaches to document and understand the violent social milieu created by PTD in regions such as the Sonoran Desert, as well as the material footprint of clandestine migration. In this paper, we highlight the important (and often hidden) role that PTD plays in both the formation of archaeological sites and the taphonomic erasure of human remains. Drawing inspiration from Jeanne Arnold’s work on the California Channel Islands, we discuss how micro-debitage analysis has been used to help explicate the experiences of people crossing the US-Mexico border while also improving our understanding of the complicated politics of site formation processes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• AD 1150 to the Present: Ancient Political Economy to Contemporary Materiality—Archaeological Anthropology in Honor of Jeanne E. Arnold   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38164.0