TCNJ

32 WINTER 2017 the Middle Ages. "You can look at many aspects of past life in bioarchaeology, but we focused specifically on disease and nutrition, and general indicators of health." When she finished her PhD, she was steered by her advisor to a place with a large backlog of unidentified bodies: the Pima County office, which investigates almost all of the deaths in Southern Arizona. "Before I moved to Tucson to do this work, I had no idea what was happening on our border," Soler says. "I don't think many people do." What was happening was death — migrants dying as they walked across the unforgiving Sonoran Desert, trying to evade the U.S. Border Patrol. "When I was a grad student training here in the 80s, there would be maybe 10 or 15 cases a year, because people weren't crossing in the desert," says Bruce Anderson, a forensic anthropologist in the Pima County office. But when he returned to work there in 2000 — just as the Border Patrol was tightening enforcement along the border, and migrants began steering away from established routes and into harsher territory to avoid apprehension — the body count soared. It's averaged about 180 a year over the past 18 years. "It hasn't been under 130 in any year since 2001," Anderson says. "The peak was 225 in 2010." Most are from Mexico — 85 percent of the 1,581 who have been identified so far. Guatemalans account for eight percent. "And virtually every other country is at one percent," Anderson says. They died trying to join the estimated 11 million other undocu- mented immigrants who live and work in the United States, and who were at the center of a contentious debate in the 2016 presidential election. "The deaths speak for themselves as far as how dangerous it is and continues to be," says Anderson. "Being in the desert, out of water, not knowing where you're at — it can happen very quickly when the temperatures are in triple digits." And as fast as the desert can kill you, it can also reduce you to a skeleton, making the medical examiner's job — to identify a body and a cause of death — especially difficult. To try to determine which bodies are foreign- born migrants and which are Americans, the medical examiner's office relies in part on a series of clues written on the bones. The bones of a migrant tell a different story than the bones of an American, and it's a story that Soler, like Beatrice, had read before, too — in the skeletons she had studied for her own dissertation, of Nubians who lived on an island in the Nile River from the 6th to the 15th centuries. "These were people who had lived in really difficult circumstances — tuberculosis, malaria, hookworm," she says, and their skeletons retained the marks of disease and malnutrition. "When I saw this in my normal day-to-day casework with border crossers, I was taken aback." When Beatrice arrived and started examining skeletons in Tucson, he was similarly struck by how much they resembled the ones he had examined at centuries-old archeological sites. "You're dealing with an environment where subadult mortality was extremely high," he says, pointing to a photo on his office wall of a medieval Albanian eye socket that was pitted in the same way as the one from the Arizona desert. "And yet we're seeing some of the very same things in border crossers who died yesterday. It doesn't make sense to see this stuff in modern people." Anthropologists in the Tucson office had long noticed these markers — they

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