Kathleen A. Deagan

Last updated
Kathleen A. Deagan
Born
Kathleen Anne Deagan

Portsmouth, Virginia
NationalityAmerican
Other namesKathy Deagan
Occupationarchaeologist, academic
Years active1970-present

Kathleen A. Deagan is an American archaeologist who primarily focuses on excavations in Florida and the Caribbean. Known for her historic archaeology which uncovered the colonial past of La Florida , and work in St. Augustine, she has received multiple awards and honors, including the Award of Merit in 1992 and the J. C. Harrington Award in 2004, both bestowed by the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Contents

Early life

Kathleen Anne Deagan was born in the middle of the 20th century in Portsmouth, Virginia, while her father, a meteorologist with the U. S. Navy was stationed at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard. [1] [2] The oldest child in a Catholic family of four children, she attended more than twenty schools before graduating from high school, as her father, a specialist in tropical storms, was assigned to hurricane prone places like England, Guam, the Philippines, and Taiwan, as well as in the United States, Florida, New Jersey, and Rhode Island. Most of the schools were Catholic institutions like the Academy of Our Lady of Guam, one of four high schools Deagan attended. [1]

Deagan enrolled at the University of Florida in 1965 to study education, [3] then journalism, social work and counseling, [4] appropriate career choices for women at the time, but was drawn to anthropology courses. [3] Studying under Charles H. Fairbanks, she switched her major and graduated in 1970. [4] Enrolling in graduate school at the University of California, Davis to study museology, Deagan quickly left and spent some time in San Francisco. [5] In 1971, she returned to the University of Florida and completed a PhD in archaeology under Fairbanks in 1974. [4] [6]

Career

That same year Deagan was hired as an assistant professor at Florida State University [4] and expanded work begun during her dissertation in St. Augustine on the 18th-century history of the city. In 1979, her research shifted to the 16th-century population, making comparisons between the two eras and analyzing the town's development. Her study confirmed the rapid decline of the indigenous native population, the Timucua, after contact and the replacement of them with other indigenous peoples. [7] Deagan also undertook research concerning the influence of Indigenous customs and cooking among the Spanish colonies in the Americas. Her research found that many households in Spanish America utilized indigenous customs and cooking, a pattern which she later confirmed while conducting research in South America and the Caribbean. [8]

In 1981, when Fairbanks retired from the University of Florida, Deagan was recruited to fill his post [9] at the Florida State Museum and take over the direction of the ongoing project at the Puerto Real settlement near present-day Cap-Haïtien, Haiti. The colony, established on Hispaniola by Nicolás de Ovando y Cáceres, thrived from 1503 to 1578. Running the annual field schools at the site, in 1983, Deagan expanded their search to include the nearby site where the Santa María , one of Columbus's ships which ran aground in 1492. [7] Based on a review of evidence at the site, known as both La Navidad and En Bas Saline, Deagan concluded that the shipwreck was not due to a weather related issue, but negligence on behalf of the crew. [7] [10] While working on the site in Haiti, she met Lawrence Dean Harris (1942-2010), a wildlife conservationist who was in Haiti to consult on a project to create a national park in the country. [11] [12] Soon after, Harris, a father of four, and Deagan married. [7]

Simultaneously working sites in Florida and the Caribbean, in 1986, Deagan began fieldwork at Ft. Mosé, a legally sanctioned, buffer zone community of free blacks established as a strategic defensive barrier against outside incursions. [7] [13] Working in conjunction with Jane Landers, who specializes in African American history, worked for six months to evaluate documents from Spanish archives on the site prior to excavations. [14] While many histories up to that point had included interaction with Spaniards and Native American peoples, few had included interaction with Africans and their findings sparked additional scholarship, as well as a movement to preserve the site as a National Historic Landmark. [15] [16] Deagan's next Caribbean project, in the Dominican Republic began in 1989 with an investigation of La Isabela, Columbus's first permanent settlement in the Americas. Because the community existed from 1493 to 1498, it was a "wholly 15th-century" location, yielding information on period flora and fauna, as well as social construction and technology. [7] In 1992, Deagan was honored with the Award of Merit from the Society for Historical Archaeology. [17]

In 1993, Deagan discovered the original settlement site of the fort at St. Augustine. For sixty years, archaeologists had searched for the original location of the fort, built by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés in 1565. The later Castillo de San Marcos was built in the 17th century and lies to the south of the original fort, which was located near the monument to Nuestra Senora de la Leche adjacent to the Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park. Though artifacts and house footings had indicated 16th-century use of the site, the find of the moat confirmed the location and established conclusively that the Spaniards had colonized Florida long before the British had established the colony of Jamestown or the Plymouth Colony. [18] In 1995, Deagan initiated an excavation at Concepción de la Vega in the interior of the Dominican Republic. The settlement was founded in 1496 and occupied until 1562. [7]

That same year, 1995, Deagan was honored as a Distinguished Research Curator of the Florida Museum of Natural History. In 1997, she was honored with an award as an Outstanding Alumna of the University of Florida and in 1999 was designated by the research foundation of the university as a Distinguished Research Professor. She was the 2004 recipient of the J. C. Harrington Award of the Society for Historical Archaeology. [19] In 2007 Deagan was awarded the Order of La Florida by the City of St. Augustine for her work in developing the history of the city. [20] Retiring from teaching in 2010, [21] she was appointed as the Lockwood Professor of Florida and Caribbean Archaeology and received an honorary doctor of laws from Flagler College in 2011. [20]

Continuing her work as curator of the Florida Museum of Natural History and leading excavations in the area around St. Augustine, Deagan began to search for the field notes and artifacts which had been unearthed by archaeologist John Mann Goggin in the early 1950s. In 2013, she received a telephone call from a woman in Martinez, California who had gathered all the materials to complete his graduate work in Connecticut. Though he never finished his degree, the student kept the materials and moved them with his family to Chicago, later to New Mexico and finally to California. When he died, his daughter discovered the items in the family garage and Deagan arranged shipment of them to Florida. [22] The 12,000 artifacts and field notes helped determine the size of the original settlement and led to clues of a possible new defensive construction, which might indicate an additional fort. [23] The following year, the owners of the Fountain of Youth Park donated 97,000 artifacts which had been excavated from the property over a 65-year period to the museum [24] and Deagan returned to the Park to evaluate the site anew from her discoveries in the field notes from 1950. [23] In 2017 the research curator emerita retired as the Lockwood Professor, but continued to pursue excavations in St. Augustine. [20]

Deagan currently serves on the board of University of Florida Historic St. Augustine, Inc, a direct-support organization of the University of Florida which ensures the long-term preservation of historic properties in St. Augustine. [25]

Selected works

Over her career, Deagan authored and edited over a dozen books and monographs, over two-dozen chapters of books and over four-dozen articles. She presented over one hundred papers and was recognized with book awards from the Florida Historical Society for her work on Fort Mose and the Society for American Archaeology for her work on La Isabela. Among her most noted contributions are: [20]

Related Research Articles

St. Augustine, Florida City in Florida, United States

St. Augustine is a city in the Southeastern United States, on the Atlantic coast of northeastern Florida. Founded in 1565 by Spanish explorers, it is the oldest continuously-inhabited European-established settlement in the contiguous United States.

Florida Museum of Natural History Natural history museum in Florida, United States

The Florida Museum of Natural History (FLMNH) is Florida's official state-sponsored and chartered natural-history museum. Its main facilities are located at 3215 Hull Road on the campus of the University of Florida in Gainesville.

Joseph Marion Hernández

José Mariano Hernández or Joseph Marion Hernández was an American politician, plantation owner, and soldier. He was the first Delegate from the Florida Territory and the first Hispanic American to serve in the United States Congress. A member of the Whig Party, he served from September 1822 to March 1823.

St. Augustine Light

The St. Augustine Light Station is a private-aid to navigation and an active, working lighthouse in St. Augustine, Florida. The current lighthouse stands at the north end of Anastasia Island and was built between 1871 and 1874. The tower is the second lighthouse tower in St. Augustine, the first being lit officially by the American territorial government in May 1824 as Florida's first lighthouse. However, both the Spanish and the British governments operated a major aid to navigation here including a series of wooden watch towers and beacons dating from 1565.

Key Marco Archaeological site in Florida, US

Key Marco was an archaeological site (8CR48) consisting of a large shell works island next to Marco Island, Florida. A small pond on Key Marco, now known as the "Court of the Pile Dwellers" (8CR49), was excavated in 1896 by the Smithsonian Institution's Pepper-Hearst Expedition, led by Frank Hamilton Cushing. Cushing recovered more than 1,000 wooden artifacts from the pond, the largest number of wooden artifacts from any prehistoric archaeological site in the eastern United States. These artifacts are described as some of the finest prehistoric Native American art in North America. The Key Marco materials are principally divided between the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania; the Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution; and the Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida. The original pond was completely excavated and refilled. It is now covered by a housing subdivision. Excavations of small parts of the site were also conducted in 1965 and 1995.

Fort Mose Historic State Park United States historic place

Fort Mose Historic State Park is a U.S. National Historic Landmark, located two miles north of St. Augustine, Florida, on the edge of a salt marsh on the western side of the waterway separating the mainland from the coastal barrier islands. The original site of the 18th-century fort was uncovered in a 1986 archeological dig. The 24-acre (9.7 ha) site is now protected as a Florida State Park, administered through the Anastasia State Recreation Area. Fort Mose is the "premier site on the Florida Black Heritage Trail". In 1738, the Spanish governor of Florida, Manuel de Montiano, had Fort Mose constructed and established it as a free black settlement, the first to be legally sanctioned in what would become the territory of the United States. The fort has also been called Fort Moosa or Fort Mossa, variants of the Spanish pronunciation.

The Mocama were a Native American people who lived in the coastal areas of what are now northern Florida and southeastern Georgia. A Timucua group, they spoke the dialect known as Mocama, the best-attested dialect of the Timucua language. Their territory extended from about the Altamaha River in Georgia to south of St. Augustine, Florida, covering the Sea Islands and the inland waterways, including the mouth of the St. Johns River in present-day Jacksonville and the Intracoastal. At the time of contact with Europeans, there were two major chiefdoms among the Mocama, the Saturiwa and the Tacatacuru, each of which evidently had authority over multiple villages.

Fort Walton Mound United States historic place

The Fort Walton Mound (8OK6) is an archaeological site located in present-day Fort Walton Beach, Florida, United States. The large platform mound was built about 850 CE by the Pensacola culture, a local form of the Mississippian culture. Because of its significance, the mound was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964.

Ximenez-Fatio House United States historic place

Ximenez-Fatio House Museum is one of the best-preserved and most authentic Second Spanish Period (1783-1821) residential buildings in St. Augustine, Florida. In 1973, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places. It was designated a Florida Heritage Landmark in 2012. The museum complex sits just south of the city's central Plaza de la Constitución at 20 Aviles Street, the oldest archaeologically documented street in the United States. It is located at the center of Old Town, the city's oldest continuously occupied community. Since 1939, the property has been privately owned and managed by The National Society of The Colonial Dames of America in The State of Florida (NSCDA-FL). Through their efforts, it was restored and interpreted to reflect its function as a fashionable boarding house during Florida's first tourist boom, which began after 1821. The property is a historic house museum, furnished and presented to tell stories of the visitors who lodged there, the women who owned and managed it, and how people lived during Florida's territorial period.

George R. Fischer American underwater archaeologist

George Robert Fischer was an American underwater archaeologist, considered the founding father of the field in the National Park Service. A native Californian, he did undergraduate and graduate work at Stanford University, and began his career with the National Park Service in 1959, which included assignments in six parks, the Washington, D.C. Office, and the Southeast Archaeological Center from which he retired in 1988. He began teaching courses in underwater archaeology at Florida State University in 1974 and co-instructed inter-disciplinary courses in scientific diving techniques. After retirement from the NPS his FSU activities were expanded and his assistance helped shape the university's program in underwater archaeology.

Francisco Menéndez was a free Black militiaman who served the Spanish Empire in Florida during the 18th-century. Born in the Gambia in West Africa, Menéndez was captured and sold into slavery, being purchased by European slave traders and shipped across the Atlantic to Carolina. He escaped into the Spanish colony of Florida soon after, taking advantage of legislation promising freedom to all fugitive slaves from the Southern colonies dating back to the 17th-century. Menéndez converted to Catholicism and enlisted in the colonial militia, settling down in a settlement created for free people of color by the Spanish authorities. Participating in numerous conflicts on the side of the Spanish Crown, Menéndez was recognized by the Spanish Crown for his loyalty and courage through the numerous conflicts he participated in. Francisco was also recognized as the founder of San Agustín de la Nueva Florida, a village in Cuba. Fort Mose has been designated as a National Historic Landmark, as it was the first legal free Black community in what is now the United States.

Michael Alexander Arbuthnot is an archaeologist, instructor and archaeological filmmaker.

Siege of Fort Mose 26 June 1740 action of the War of Jenkins Ear

The Battle of Fort Mose was a significant action of the War of Jenkins' Ear, which took place on June 26, 1740. Captain Antonio Salgado commanded a Spanish column of 300 regular troops, backed by the free black militia and allied Seminole warriors consisting of Indian auxiliaries. They stormed Fort Mose, a strategically crucial position newly held by 170 British soldiers under Colonel John Palmer. This garrison had taken the fort as part of James Oglethorpe's offensive to capture St. Augustine. Taken by surprise, the British garrison was virtually annihilated. Colonel Palmer, three captains and three lieutenants were among the British troops killed in action. The battle destroyed the fort. The Spanish did not rebuild it until 1752.

Saturiwa Timucua chiefdom in Spanish Florida

The Saturiwa were a Timucua chiefdom centered on the mouth of the St. Johns River in what is now Jacksonville, Florida. They were the largest and best attested chiefdom of the Timucua subgroup known as the Mocama, who spoke the Mocama dialect of Timucuan and lived in the coastal areas of present-day northern Florida and southeastern Georgia. They were a prominent political force in the early days of European settlement in Florida, forging friendly relations with the French Huguenot settlers at Fort Caroline in 1564 and later becoming heavily involved in the Spanish mission system.

Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park Private archaeological park

The Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park is a privately owned 15-acre (61,000 m2) park in St. Augustine, Florida, located along Hospital Creek, part of the Intracoastal Waterway. It has been touted as the likely 1513 Florida landing site of Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon, although no evidence has been found to substantiate this claim. Recent research by amateur historian Douglas Peck has placed another possible landing site in the vicinity of Melbourne Beach in Brevard County. The park contains a well claimed to be the freshwater source referred to by Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas in his Historia general de los hechos de los castellanos en las Islas y Tierra Firme del mar Océano and supposedly sought by Ponce de Leon, but there is no supporting evidence. Archaeological excavations made by Dr. Kathleen Deagan on the park's grounds in the 1990s uncovered remains of the first Spanish settlement and its fortifications in St. Augustine.

David Moore is an American archaeologist and historian. He is best known for his work on the Blackbeard's Queen Anne's Revenge Shipwreck Project. The Queen Anne's Revenge was the flagship of the infamous pirate Blackbeard. He used her for less than a year, but she was an effective tool in his prize-taking.

The history of St. Augustine, Florida, the oldest continuously occupied settlement of European origin in the continental United States, began in 1565 when it was founded by the Spanish admiral, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés. The Spanish Crown issued an asiento to Menéndez, signed by King Philip II on March 20, 1565, granting him various titles, including that of adelantado of Florida, and expansive privileges to exploit the lands in the vast territory of Spanish Florida, called La Florida by the Spaniards. This contract directed Menéndez to explore the region's Atlantic coast and report on its features, with the object of finding a suitable location to establish a permanent colony from which the Spanish treasure fleet could be defended and Spain's claimed territories in North America protected against incursions by other European powers.

Kathleen K. Gilmore American archaeologist

Kathleen K. Gilmore was an American archaeologist and specialist on Spanish colonial archaeology. She was the first archaeologist to prove the location of Fort St. Louis, established by the French explorer, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle. She received the J. C. Harrington Award of Society for Historical Archaeology in 1995, the first woman ever honored by the society.

Peggy Brunache is a Haitian American food historian and archaeologist. She currently lives in Perth and lectures at the University of Glasgow on the History of Atlantic slavery. Brunache has contributed to various BBC programs and is involved with an annual food festival in Perth called the Southern Fried Food Festival.

Gonzáles and De Hita Houses United States historic place

The Gonzáles House and the De Hita Houses are located at 33 and 35 St. George Street, St. Augustine, Florida. Both houses are reconstructions of First Spanish Period (1565-1763) homes built on their original foundations.

References

Citations

  1. 1 2 Ewen 2017, p. 463.
  2. ↑ McEwan 2004, p. 5.
  3. 1 2 Ortiz 2012, p. 2.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Ewen 2017, p. 464.
  5. ↑ Ortiz 2012, pp. 2-3.
  6. ↑ Ortiz 2012, p. 3.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 McEwan 2004, p. 6.
  8. ↑ Ortiz 2012, pp. 11-12.
  9. ↑ Ewen 2017, pp. 464-465.
  10. ↑ El País 1985.
  11. ↑ McCrea 2004.
  12. ↑ Hatcher Cremations 2010.
  13. ↑ Ortiz 2012, p. 19.
  14. ↑ Orser Jr. 2016, p. 150.
  15. ↑ Ortiz 2012, pp. 18-19.
  16. ↑ McIver 1993, p. 3.
  17. ↑ Orser Jr. 2002, p. 577.
  18. ↑ Wilford 1993.
  19. ↑ McEwan 2004, p. 7.
  20. 1 2 3 4 Ewen 2017, p. 465.
  21. ↑ Ortiz 2012, p. 41.
  22. ↑ Tonnessen 2014, p. 53.
  23. 1 2 Tonnessen 2014, p. 124.
  24. ↑ Tonnessen 2014, p. 51.
  25. ↑ University of Florida Historic St. Augustine (December 13, 2018). "Governance". UF Historic St. Augustine.

Bibliography

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.