Cassandra (Beth) Koontz Scaffidi

BETH K. SCAFFIDI, University of California, Merced, California, was awarded a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship in September 2021 to aid research and writing on “Immigration and Mobility in the Age of Ancient Andean Empires: Insights from Isotope Biogeochemistry and Landscape Bioarchaeology.” Funding supported full-time work on the book, Elements of Community: Lived Landscapes of Immigration in the Ancient Andes, and related publications, during the 2022-2023 academic year. The book and underlying articles approach human immigration as a spatially explicit adaptation to social and environmental shifts from the Holocene until Spanish colonialism in the Central Andes. Since mismatches between human and burial site isotope values provide the only direct evidence of individual immigration, the book leverages the Andean Paleomobility Unification (APU) database (named after mountain deities guiding travelers)— > 2,300 archaeological and > 700 environmental 87Sr/86Sr datapoints contextualized by data from > 93 sites—to examine its central question: How did policies and practices structure immigration and its outcomes at site and individual levels? Biogeochemical measures of human mobility at individual and sites-wide scales are integrated with landscape-constrained models of potential movement to identify non-local individuals and quantify scales of mobility. Results suggest that weaving diverse geographies into sites buffered them from certain social and environmental stressors, while exacerbating others. Ultimately, the book defines a new synthetic framework—landscape bioarchaeology—speaking broadly to readers seeking to understand immigration processes as interactions between embodied landscape experiences, place-time (pacha in Quechua), and societies.