Transitional Paragraphs: From the Archaeology of Migrants to Homelessness

Transitional paragraphs are really hard in the best of circumstances, and I’m finding them pretty tricky when writing a survey of a new discipline they’re even more complicated. 

I spent the last few days thinking about how to combine some strange topics such as the archaeology of forced and undocumented migration and the archaeology of homelessness. This is part of the chapter that I’m currently writing in my book on the Archaeology of the Contemporary American Experience. Here’s the intro to the chapter, the first substantive section, and the section that I wrote last week.

Forced Migrants and the Archaeology of Homelessness

Recent work on the archaeology of forced migration has invariably considered refugee camps as an important locus for understanding the experience of migration. Archaeologists have joined architectural historians, anthropologists, and policy makes in an effort to understand the role of camps, squats, and other forms of migrant settlement contribute to formation of migrant identities both within their communities and in their host countries. While relatively little of this research has taken place in the US, the global nature of forced migrants and its relationship to foreign policy, military interventions, climate change and humanitarian activities has made the forced and undocumented movement of people a global constant. Migrant settlements, whether defined by the borders of refugee camps or the more fluid spaces of squats and shelters, have become spaces where individuals and groups preserve and define identities outside of the legal and territorial definitions of the nation-state. In this regard, the work of archaeologists in understanding and documenting the migrant experiences parallels recent work to document homelessness and ways in which homeless individuals create a sense of home, place, and identity.

It is hardly surprising, then, that the work of Rachel Kiddey in Europe, for example, focused on the archaeology of homelessness in England and has since shifted to study refugees as part of her “Migrant Materialities” project. Drawing on the larger “material turn” in migrant studies (Wang 2016; Basu and Coleman 2008), Kiddey published three portraits that contextualize some aspects of migrant in Athens, Greece: a collectively run squat in a former tourist hotel, a UNHCR funded refugee settlement in another hotel, and a community center operated as a co-operative (Kiddely 2018). Her use of ethnography and archaeology in these contexts follows from her groundbreaking work on the archaeology of homelessness in the UK. Kiddey embraced a “translational” approach to her research. The concept, as developed by Larry Zimmerman, Courtney Singleton, and Jessica Welsch (2010), proposed a view of archaeology that translated archaeological work and analysis into research of use to policy makers. He emphasized the need for archaeologists to share their authority as a way to complicate the distinction between our status as archaeologists and the status of migrants or the homeless as “the Other.” (Zimmerman et al. 2010, 444-446). While such activist archaeology is hardly seems like a radical proposition in the 21st century, the specifics regarding the methods, ethical consideration, and goals of these activist practices are deeply situated in local contexts. For Kiddey, translational practice manifest itself in her close collaboration with members of the homeless community not only through the excavation, documentation, and interpretation of their material culture but also in their collaborative efforts to present it to both a wider public and an academic audience through lectures and exhibitions (2017). De León and his project, while not as collaborative in design as Kiddey’s work, nevertheless shared its translational emphasis in its efforts to communicate their results through installations and exhibits and to produce a more politically aware society.