Project Directors:
Katrina C.L. Eichner
Katrina (or “Kat”) is a 5th year PhD candidate in UC Berkeley’s Anthropology Department affiliated with the Archaeological Research Facility and is a Center for Big Bend Studies Visiting Research Associate. She is a historical archaeologists who investigates 19th and 20th century American history through the use of documentary research, oral histories, and material culture. She started the Fort Davis Archaeology Project in 2011 as her dissertation research project. Kat’s research questions how aspects of racial/ethnic, gender, sexual, and class identity affected civilian and military interaction in the western United States during the Indian Wars and early 20th century. By looking into family and community histories coupled with archaeologically recovered artifacts, Kat aims to tell a more holistic and inclusive story about life in early American West. Previously she has worked in Ecuador, Peru, Montserrat, Antigua, California, Boston, and interned with the BLM in Washington D.C. Additionally, Kat is committed to a continued focus on undergraduate education, community outreach, and creating an inclusive archaeology practice and methodology.
Contact Katrina at eichner@berkeley.edu
Erin C. Rodriguez
Erin is starting her 6th year of graduate studies at UC Berkeley’s Anthropology Department and is affiliated with the Archaeological Research Facility and is a Center for Big Bend Studies Visiting Research Associate. She is a doctoral candidate focusing on microscale geoarchaeology, archaeology of daily life, and gender archaeology. Her interests in archaeology stem from a dissatisfaction with dominant narratives of the past and a desire to explore the experiences and lives of people whose perspectives were not preserved in written form. She joined the Fort Davis Archaeological Project in 2013 and has also worked in Ecuador, Peru, New Mexico, California, and New York. Erin’s work aims to broaden the diversity of perspectives and voices involved in archaeological practice through education, public outreach, and collaboration.
Contact Erin at rodriguez.ec@berkeley.edu and visit her page at https://berkeley.academia.edu/ECRodriguez
Laurie A. Wilkie
Laurie is an anthropological archaeologist whose research has focused on understanding 19th- and 20th-century life in the United States and Caribbean, combining documentary and material sources of evidence to understand the recent past. Through a focus on household archaeology, her work has focused upon two principal themes: how expressions of social difference – gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sex, socioeconomics and politics – can be understood through the materiality of everyday life; and how a sense of material heritage has shaped human life in the recent past, and continues to do so today.
Contact Laurie at lawilkie@berkeley.edu
FODAAP 2015
Project Staff:
David Hyde
Alyssa Scott
Mario Castillo
Junior Staff:
Carlisia McCord (Senior Thesis Student)
Elizabeth Flores (Senior Thesis Student)
Field School Students:
Shauna Mundt (Senior Thesis Student)
Jenifer Davis (Senior Thesis Student)
Victoria Sandsor
Chandler Fitzsimons
Nick Perez (Senior Thesis Student)
Jesse Pagels
Jackson Huang (Senior Thesis Student)
Thomas Banghart (AIA Jane C. Waldbaum Archaeological Field School Scholarship Awardee)
FODAAP 2014
Project Staff:
David Hyde
David is a second year Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley. David’s current research interest concerns the archaeology of the American West, focusing specifically on 19th century coastal port communities in California. Specifically, he is interested in exploring how the ways in which particularities of early American settlement in the West afforded unique social interactions and relations that had lasting implications on perceptions of gender, race, class, and labor in the US. To investigate these issue he looks at archaeological materials from frontier saloons, hotels, and other ad hoc community gathering points. David came to Fort Davis to gain a better understanding of the way the frontier experience in Texas differed for various social groups. The most interesting (and unexpected) artifact he recovered was a 1928 Buick “Goddess Head” radiator cap/hood emblem.
Contact: david.hyde@berkeley.edu
Annie Danis
Annie is a second year Ph.D. student at UC, Berkeley interested in sensory experiences of the past. Focusing on historical archaeology in the Southwest, she studies how the experience of sound and other senses were an important part of identities and social organization in the changing landscapes of the American West. She is interested in the way the various military and civilian communities of Fort Davis interacted with the natural and built environment through the senses. For example, investigating the way bugle calls from the Fort structured daily events both on and off the fort property help us understand how civilians nearby found themselves part of the frontier military project. The most interesting artifact she has encountered on the project is a plume decoration from an 1880s cavalry helmet, found just a few centimeters below the ground surface on a possible skirmish ground.
Field School Students:
Ambrose Davila
I’m a senior Anthropology student at the University of California, Berkeley. I’m interested in neurodiversity and gender systems of past and current peoples and hope to have a career in archaeology studying these topics. I decided to spend my summer working with this project to get experience doing real archaeology, hang out with archaeologists, and learn about American history while doing it. The coolest artifacts I have found so far are a piece of a cavalry insignia and a bullet.
Elizabeth Flores
Naphtalie Jeanty (Haas Scholar, Senior Thesis Student)
I am a 4th year University of California, Berkeley student majoring in anthropology and following the archaeology tract. I am interested in sex, gender and racial interaction. I became involved with the Fort Davis project because I felt like we don’t learn enough about black history in school and to learn about black soldiers , who gave their all for this country, first hand would be a great opportunity. The most interesting artifact that I have found so far is a 1920’s bubble pipe that is shaped like a dog.
Carlisia McCord
Hey Y’all! I am originally from Memphis, TN (where we make the best barbecue in America!) I am currently a junior at the University of Notre Dame. I’ve wanted to study Anthropology and language since seeing Disney’s Atlantis as a young child. So, I am double majoring in Anthropology and Arabic Language Studies. My current anthropological interests are race and culture in America. I recently began dabbling in some gender and archaeology stuff, too. I joined the Fort Davis Project in order to explore my curiosity of Archaeology and African American history. I also enjoy the close ties the project has with the community of Fort Davis. The most interesting artifact I have found so far was this beautiful, brown, glass bottle body shard. It was very unique.
Richard J. Terk
Terk is a recent graduate from UC Berkeley. He plans on attending grad school to study celtic viking archaeology with an interest in military archaeology. Terk came to Fort Davis because of the opportunity to work on a military based archaeological project and to visit the great state of Texas! The most interesting artifact he found was a complete (but in pieces) license plate dating to 1931. It was interesting because of his love of car culture and the potential to learn about the car and people to which it belonged.
FODAAP 2013
Team Members:
Gloria Keng
Gloria graduated from UC Berkeley in 2013. She originally became interested in archaeology after taking a class with Kent Lightfoot and has not stopped since. After graduation she joined the FODAAP project as a part of the survey and artifact analysis team and then continued on to work as a lab assistant in the Historical Archaeology lab at UC Berkeley. Currently she plans on continuing her studies in graduate school focusing on Zooarchaeology.
Edward De Haro
Edward is from Napa, California and received a BA in anthropology with a focus on Historical Archaeology and Zooarchaeology from UC Berkeley in 2013. He attended a field school in the Mono Basin, studying the town of Mono Mills, which provided the lumber for Bodie, California in the late 19th-early 20th century. Edward also attended a field school in Fort Davis, Texas, looking at the history of the Civil War fort. His passion is 19th century America with special interest on interactions of different cultures in the west, focusing on California. Some of the projects he has been involved in at the Presidio are the initiation of the comparative faunal collection and digitizing field reports for publication.
Leah Grant (HAAS Scholar, Senior Thesis Student)
Shannon Pheiffer
Nika Monokandilos
UC Berkeley Undergraduate Research Apprentices (URAP)
Alicia Agnew (Fall 2015)
Kelsey Brahms (Fall 2014)
Jenifer Davis (Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015)
Nick Eskow (Fall 2015)
Hannah Feeney (Spring 2016)
Chandler Fitzsimons (Spring 2015, Fall 2015)
Elizabeth Flores (Spring 2014, Fall 2014, Spring 2015)
Adam Garzoli (Spring 2014)
Matthew Gaston (Spring 2016)
Tammy Gu (Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016)
Jackson Huang (Fall 2015)
Napthalie Jeanty (Spring 2014, Fall 2014, Spring 2015)
Sarah Pak (Spring 2014)
Nick Perez (Spring 2015, Fall 2015)
Jennifer Reynolds (Fall 2014)
Victoria Sandsor (Spring 2014, Fall 2014, Spring 2015)
Hannah Schnell (Spring 2015, Fall 2015)
Kelsey Scott (Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016)
Shauna Smith (Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015)
Carys Stamp (Spring 2014)
Juliette St. Andrew (Spring 2014)
Julia Velasquez (Fall 2015)
Alexandra Walton (Spring 2016)
Holly Wertman (Spring 2014)
UC Berkeley, Fort Davis Archaeological Project 