Event: Friday Seminar: "Bunking with the 24th Infantry: The Material Lives of Black Soldiers at Fort Davis, Texas, 1867-1878"

Speaker: Dr. Laurie Wilkie, UC Berkeley

While the black regulars (otherwise known as Buffalo Soldiers) have been a compelling subject in popular culture, scholarly study into the lives of the African American men who chose to serve in the frontier military has been comparatively sporadic and unsustained. This is particularly true in the field of archaeology, where the complexities of preservation and resource management, and associations with US imperialistic policy, have made this soldier demographic an under-explored part of African Diaspora Archaeology.  In this talk, I will discuss the unique challenges of military site archaeology, introduce archaeological research undertaken at Fort Davis, Texas, a post where each of the black infantry and cavalry units cycled through during the period of 1867-1885.  Focusing on materials associated with the 1869-1875 period of occupation, I will talk about the ways that men of the post navigated a racially fraught landscape while creating a space for new constructions of black manhood in national discourses on citizenship rights, manliness and manifest destiny.