Around the world today, hundreds of thousands of people fleeing violence, poverty, and abuse have left the Global South seeking to enter Europe and the United States. The nations of the Global North have erected barriers (physical and legal) to deter migrants and refugees. They have dispatched their border guards to turn them away. Migrants and refugees travel thousands of miles, expend thousands of dollars, cross deserts, and float in stormy seas. Tens of thousands die, many end up in squalid camps or detention centers, and some make it to the North where countless must live in hiding. Contributors to Yannis Hamilakis's The New Nomadic Age use archaeology to study forced and undocumented migration during the twentieth century.
Hamilakis points out that this modern migration entails material and sensual experiences in time, and that the craft of archaeology engages with the material, the sensual, and the temporal. Thus, we can use archaeological methods to study and understand modern migration. Following the lead of scholarship in refugee and forced migration studies, The New Nomadic Age engages with modern migrations as a humanitarian crisis and seeks social justice for migrants and refugees.
The 19 chapters of the book— many of which originally appeared in 2016 in the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology (3[2])—span the globe from North America to Europe to Australia and Asia, and they participate in a growing archaeological commentary on the contemporary world. Contributors focus on dynamic material relations and the lived experience of the modern world. Archeological techniques help identify detail in the seeming chaos of the modern material world, unearthing the complex relationships that material shares with social relations, meaning, and agency. The chapters in The New Nomadic Age seek to understand migrants’ journeys: what they left behind, how they built new lives, and what the heritage of migration is.
Modern migration entails movement through space and kinesthetic experiences of landscapes and seascapes. Such movement is fraught with danger—thousands have died in the deserts of the southwestern United States in recent years, and tens of thousands have died in the Mediterranean Sea. Archaeologists in The New Nomadic Age find the materiality of modern migration in remnants such as backpacks and personal effects that migrants and refugees leave on the landscape (Chapter 3, Stewart et al.). The chapters discuss various types of abandoned material culture, including life jackets on Greek islands (Chapter 9, Tryikos-Ergas), and dozens of cars abandoned on the Finnish-Russian border (Chapter 11, Seitsonen et al.). Migrants and refugees also mark their routes with graffiti and shrines (Chapter 4, Soto).
The experience of modern migration creates empty spaces, in both social and material senses, in the places that people leave. Certain chapters in The New Nomadic Age discuss buildings left behind in the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan (Chapter 1, Riggs and Jat) and the bedrooms people left behind in Albania (Chapter 7, Pistrick and Bachmeier). In both examples, the materiality of absences is powerful.
Migrants and refugees struggle to enter the Global North and build new lives, and they often fail to do so. Nations imprison migrants and refugees in detention centers or deport them back to the Global South. Materiality shapes the experience of detention centers and deportation, and migrants use material things to resist and protest both detention and deportation. Several chapters in The New Nomadic Age focus on the materiality of detention and deportation, especially in Greece (Chapter 5, Radziwinowiczówna; Chapter 8, Kourelis). They reveal how migrants use drawings (Chapter 10, Arbelaez and Mulholland), gardens (Chapter 12, Coelho), clothing (Chapter 2, Butler and Al-Nammari), and other material elements to resist these processes.
Do we valorize the material remnants of migration as heritage, or are these objects just trash to be disposed of? Should museums treat the experience of migration as national heritage in the Global North (Chapter 14, Byrne; Chapter 15, Schofield)? Many museums have simply ignored migration, while others have built exhibitions that distort and malign the migrant/refugee experience (Chapter 13, Breene). Should archaeologists engage with and encourage migrants’ self-representation of their own heritage (Chapter 16, Thomopoulos et al.)?
The last three chapters of the book provide a commentary on the archaeology of forced and undocumented migration (Chapter 17, Harrison et al.; Chapter 18, Kirtsoglou; Chapter 19, VanValkenburgh). These comments—and The New Nomadic Age as a whole—show that archaeologists can work with migrants and refugees, and they can use archaeology to better understand how migrants and refugees interpret and fashion their own history. We can also use our privilege in the Global North to wage a war for social justice for contemporary migrants and refugees.
