Tonight, a different lens on the tension at the U.S.-Mexico border, one that applies deep-dive anthropology and in-the-dirt archaeology to learn more about migration.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown talks to a national book award-winning author whose work explores the clandestine world of human smuggling.

The report is for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

We're pretty far north.

At this point, we're close enough that people are getting ready to get picked up.

And so that's why you're starting to see lots of clothes and other items being left behind.

It's a different approach to seeing and understanding migration at the U.S. border.

Through the stuff, the things they carried

that offer clues to the people and the paths they've taken. It's been an ongoing focus of

anthropologist Jason DeLeon, captured in the 2019 documentary Border South. Every one of these things

tells a story.

This past December, De Leon, a professor at UCLA and director of the Cotson Institute of

Archaeology, showed us some of his archaeological finds, now collected in his lab.

Clothing, shoes, water bottles, part of his undocumented migration project.

Why collect this stuff? I mean, and why, how is archive it?

Yeah.

Why?

This is archaeology.

I mean, people go, oh, well, this is garbage. This is trash.

And I said, well, you know, what do you think archaeologists study?

So I think these objects can tell a lot of different stories and really connect us, I think,

to this thing that happens far away, that happens in, you know, in the middle of nowhere.

...