The Internment Archaeology Digital Archive
Stacey Camp & Ethan Watral
The Internment Archaeology Digital Archive (IADA) project is a digital platform and website dedicated to sharing the stories of Japanese Americans who were incarcerated and interned during World War II in Idaho. The project is an outgrowth of my (Dr. Stacey Camp) archaeological research at the site of Idaho’s Kooskia Internment Camp, a World War II incarceration site that imprisoned over 260 men from 1943 to 1945. This project began in 2009 when I was a faculty member at the University of Idaho. While excavations at the site are done for now, we continue to share and disseminate the data recovered through projects like IADA.
The Internment Archaeology Digital Archive (IADA), which has been funded by the National Park Service’s Japanese American Confinement Sites grant program and is a collaboration between myself and Dr. Ethan Watrall, will go live later this academic year (2023-2024). It will share artifacts and objects associated with Japanese Americans who were imprisoned at both Idaho’s Kooskia Internment Camp and Minidoka War Relocation Center. As part of this project, we (myself, Dr. Watrall, and two Anthropology Ph.D. students – Grace Gerloff and Emily Nisch) traveled to Minidoka earlier this summer (2023) and spent two weeks there digitizing and creating 3D models of objects, documents, and artifacts in their holdings.
IADA also features profiles of every individual who was incarcerated at Kooskia and Minidoka. These profiles share the history of the individual’s life, including where they lived prior to and after incarceration, any jobs they held, personal letters and photographs connected to the individual, artifacts directly linked to the individual, and the individual’s family members. Lastly, this project will provide free downloadable curriculum on these two sites of incarceration, which aligns with common core standards.
The following Project Highlight was originally created for the DH@MSU Undergraduate Newsletter and was featured in the September 20, 2023 issue. Subscribe to the Newsletter here.
