Forringer-Beal ’12 Presents at Society for American Archaeology

On Thursday, April 19, senior Anna Forringer-Beal presented a research project at the Society for American Archaeology’s (SAA) annual meeting in Memphis.

This past year Forringer-Beal has been working on the Undocumented Migration Project directed by Jason De León at the University of Michigan. It is an ethnographic and archaeological study of undocumented migration along the Arizona-U.S. border focused in the Sonoran Desert. For the past few months she has been studying BK-3, a small migrant station (an area where migrants rest, eat, etc.).

“My work has focused on micro-debitage found at the site,” explains Forringer-Beal.  “Micro-debitage is the array of fragmented and minute artifacts found in a site after it has been cleared. I worked to understand what can be found at BK-3 post-clearing (2010/2011) as compared to what was there pre-clearing (2009).”

Her presentation, co-authored with De León, focused on “backpack fragments and female-associated artifacts and how their presence could illustrate both the effectiveness of  micro-debitage as a proxy for individuals and its capabilities for capturing the experience of female migrants.”