Sidebar 4: Sidebar 4: Kathleen A. Deagan, 1948- Lu Ann De Cunzo

Kathleen A. Deagan specializes in historical archaeology of the Spanish colonies. She is Distinguished Research Curator of historical archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, Adjunct Professor of Anthropology and History at the University of Florida, and a past president of the SHA. She earned a Ph.D. in anthropology, beginning her studies in pre-contact Native American archaeology, but was drawn, as she’s said, “unavoidably” into historical archaeology. She has studied the interactions among people of different backgrounds in colonial St. Augustine, Florida, and on the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean. She began research on Hispaniola in 1979, seeking the places that witnessed the first century of contact and conquest. Her search led to an Indian town occupied in the late 1400s; La Navidad, established by Christopher Columbus’s shipwrecked crew in 1492; La Isabella, established the following year by colonists who joined Columbus’s second voyage from Spain; and Puerto Real, a Spanish city occupied from 1503 to 1578.