From Survey to Surveillance in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Extractive industries such as gold, copper, and lead mining anchored settler colonial expansion in Southern Arizona through the 19th and 20th centuries, initiating survey-based cartographic practices as colonial method. These now-abandoned mining landscapes have since been incorporated into the contemporary border security landscape as U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) expands its surveillance infrastructure in the region. The rugged terrain of the Arizona highlands has become an experimental zone for “virtual wall” techno-security measures, including networks of sensors, cameras, and drones that map CBP’s vision onto the landscape. It is these sites where the surveillance system touches down, however, that the legacy of the historic frontier structures border security logics in unexpected ways: the mining landscape affords sites of capture, refuge, and countersurveillance, distorting the surveillance fantasy of disembodied vision. At a methodological level, this paper interrogates the parallels between archaeological survey and the techniques of state surveillance, asking how we might square the view from above with the view from the ground. This paper also uses archaeology to ground surveillance infrastructure not just in its historical precedents, but in its material traces and dependencies, making visible an object that is often seen as a nebulous network of dispersed power.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40181.0