Internment Archaeology Digital Archive

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 which allowed the federal government to incarcerate over 120,000 individuals of Japanese heritage - two thirds of whom were American citizens. Nearly overnight, Japanese Americans were rounded up by the United States government and shipped off to unfinished incarceration facilities under inhumane conditions where armed guard towers loomed large over prison facilities, ready to fire on innocent citizens. The Internment Archaeology Digital Archive uses archaeological materials and archival sources to document the experiences of the incarcerated. Unlike photographs that were censored or governmental documents that present an incomplete or biased record of the conditions in the camps and the lives of those imprisoned, archaeology provides a window into the actual material realities of prisoners' lived experiences under incarceration.