Tales of the Texas Frontier: Research Conducted by the Fort Davis Archaeology Project (FODAAP) in Fort Davis, Texas

The Fort Davis Archaeology Project is a collaborative teaching project that uses a queer feminist pedagogy to encourage and foster diversity within the project’s personnel, research questions, and interpretations of the past. This symposium highlights research conducted by FODAAP personnel in Fort Davis, Texas between 2010 - 2016. Our research focuses on the lifeways and interactions between residents of a U.S. military post and civilian community during Reconstruction (1867-1891) and through the early 20th-century in order to investigate daily life among residents of different ethno-racial, gendered, and national identities. Of particular interest to the project are the experiences of African-American soldiers, women, and Hispanic civilians and the changing ways in which various communities related to one another in a diverse and shifting frontier landscape. FODAAP employs a variety of lines of evidence - such a geoarchaeological data, geophysical survey, artifact analysis, and historic documentation - to reconstruct interpretations of the contested past.