Cameron Gokee

Appalachian State University | ASU · Department of Anthropology

Junaluska is a historically Black community in the southern Appalachian town of Boone, North Carolina. In 2020, we began a collaborative archaeology project with the community-based Junaluska Heritage Association to address two community concerns: (1) identifying unmarked graves at the Clarissa Hill Cemetery and (2) learning more about the nineteen...

Massive infrastructures of transportation and border security, designed to control flows of people and things, dominate the contemporary US–Mexico border. Together, these material projects work to inscribe the hegemonic processes of neoliberal capitalism and national sovereignty onto the physical landscape and into everyday life, giving them an aur...

The archaeological record of the American Eastern Woodlands has been the subject of research on the origins and organization of complex societies for decades. Much of this research, ultimately grounded in political-economic theories of accumulation, underscores how foraging, horticultural, and agricultural societies manifested complexity in differe...

Since the 1990s, US border policies have worked to funnel undocumented migration into remote stretches of the Sonoran Desert, where deadly terrain and temperatures make border crossing most dangerous. This weaponization of the desert finds some cover, we argue, behind the scalar projects of state-centered maps emphasizing vast geography and gross s...

Historical narratives in Upper Senegal largely center on precolonial statecraft, long-distance trade, and ethno-religious mobilization. Drawing on the perspective of political ecology, we examine how these regional processes intersected with village life through local relations to land. Specifically, we chart the long-term dynamics of settlements a...

Historical narratives in Upper Senegal largely center on precolonial statecraft, long-distance trade, and ethno-religious mobilization. Drawing on the perspective of political ecology, we examine how these regional processes intersected with village life through local relations to land. Specifically, we chart the long-term dynamics of settlements a...

The study of social space has become a central concern of African archaeology over the past three decades. Responding to critiques of the search for grand narratives (Stahl 1999), many scholars have turned their attention to more synchronic interpretations of social complexity and subjective experience in specific times and places—a move that encou...

This chapter explores the historical interplay between archaeologies of identity and human remains in Senegal against the backdrop of broader colonial and postcolonial projects. Although the methods of anthropometry and bioarchaeology seem to add a scientific objectivity to interpretations of past racial, ethnic, political, and religious identity,...

The Bandafassi Regional Archaeological Project (BRAP) explores a multiethnic landscape in the upper Gambia River region heavily impacted by slavery. The project assesses discourses of different stakeholders to see what is silenced, acknowledged, centered, and decentered in historical narratives. This article compares if and how slavery is invoked b...

Community Archaeology and Heritage in Africa: Decolonizing Practice. PETER R. SCHMIDT and INNOCENT PIKIRAYI , editors. 2016. Routledge, New York. 324 pp. $44.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-11-3865685-7. - Cameron Gokee

This paper examines how mapping technology is central to the operation of the United States Border Patrol security apparatus on the US/Mexico Border, and explores how the very same mapping technology can be used in critique this security project. Drawing on the concept of counter-mapping, we use spatial data collected by the Undocumented Migration...

The land of Bambuk was an important source of gold for trans-Saharan trade and the imperial polities of Ghana and Mali, yet the non-centralized societies of this region remain largely peripheral in the historiography of West Africa. Drawing on recent archaeological research at the site of Diouboye in eastern Senegal, this book explores social life...

Since the 1990s, unauthorized migrants attempting to cross the Sonoran Desert of Arizona have relied on a unique set of material culture to evade Border Patrol, as well as prevent and treat injuries incurred en route. Drawing on data from the Undocumented Migration Project, a long-term ethnographic and archaeological study of border crossings betwe...

Each year hundreds of thousands of people attempt to enter the United States from Mexico without authorization by crossing the Sonoran Desert on foot or using false identification at ports of entry. During this crossing process, people actively construct, contest, and obfuscate a multiplicity of identities through various forms of material culture...

In this essay I argue that theoretical developments in semiotic anthropology, when empirically supported by technological approaches to material culture, can help to illuminate the ways in which people constructed, maintained, and manipulated ethnic identities within specific social historical trajectories. In order to evaluate the merits of this p...

Leather, animal skins and ivory were important components of the economies of medieval West African societies. Despite the prominent role of hunters in diverse oral histories throughout the region, little is known about the actual production of animal products, in particular those derived from wild animals. This paper presents a preliminary examina...

Recognizing that archaeologies of the contemporary past are inherently political, this paper examines the ways in which site classification plays into archaeological praxis in the US–Mexico borderlands of southern Arizona. Fundamentally, our definition and description of contemporary archaeological sites seeks to organize spatial and material data...

The collection of papers presented in this special issue of the African Archaeological Review emerged out of a session entitled "Making Meals, Producing Pots: Comparing Craft and Culinary Practice in Africa" held at the 2012 Society for Africanist Archaeology (SAfA) biennial meetings in Toronto. While archaeologists work-ing in Africa and elsewhere...

Recent archaeological research in Africa has moved to illuminate the dynamic ways in which cultural identities such as ethnicity and caste have intersected with regional histories. Along these same lines, this paper focuses on the roles of women within the processes of frontier and periphery that shaped, and were shaped by, daily life within the pr...

This dissertation examines the political economy of Diouboye, a village occupied circa AD 1000-1400 on the eastern banks of the Fal??m?? River (Upper Senegal region). Historical sources place this area within the gold-producing realm of Bambuk whose decentralized societies maintained connections to trans-Saharan trade networks vis-??-vis medieval s...

The distributions of Middle Woodland craft goods and raw materials across the Southeast attest to participation in interregional networks of material and ideological exchange, including the Hopewell Interaction Sphere. Existing models of these networks vary: some emphasize the role of Southeastern gateway centers in Hopewell production and exchange...

Beyond the growing entanglement of African and European worlds, the Atlantic era also witnessed transformations in the economic institutions, political regimes, and social identities that inhered between African societies, such as those of the interior of Senegambia. This paper traces how such historical processes both emerged from and shaped the q...