Entangled Communities: Photo Essay of Immigration in the Ancient Andes

Cassandra Scaffidi
Anthropology & Heritage Studies
UC Merced

This grant facilitates a visit to ancient mobility hubs evinced by the biogeochemical data synthesized in my pre-tenure book, Elements of Community: Landscapes of Immigration in the Ancient Andes. It enables the collection of GPS points and photography, as well as visits to site museums and local communities at the southern and northern ends of the Inca Road defining the maximum geographic extent of the book’s geographic limit, working from north to south over ~5-6 weeks from Ecuador to Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile. The work involves photographing sites and roads for the book’s digital supplement, documenting local museum art related to immigration and foreigners, ground-truthing the project’s mobility corridor models against the landscape, and establishing relationships with community leaders and administrative officials to determine how best to disseminate the book and digital supplement to rightsholders and stakeholders. This grant empowers me to complete my book draft, bring local communities meaningfully into the book’s conversation, and define a new focus in my disciplines—landscape bioarchaeology—and bring its understandings to bear on today’s Andean immigration crises.