Anthony Vasquez Humanities
Finding the Lost Generation: Material Culture, Women, and UC Berkeley in the 1920s
During the summer Anthony will be excavating an archaeological site near the UC Berkeley campus that was designated as female student housing from the 1920s to mid 1940s. Using both material culture collected during excavation and archival documents, Anthony will do a comparative study between the lives of male and female UC Berkeley students of the time period. Sites associated with Zeta Psi, the first fraternity in California, have already been excavated, providing Anthony a wealth of information on all-male living situations. Finding archaeological data on all-female situations is not as easy. Anthony hopes the excavation will unearth clues as to how female Cal students were maneuvering through a patriarchal society at a time when gender roles were in flux.