Star of the Field Awarded NCAA Postgraduate Scholarship
Bright future ahead for student-athlete who received prestigious scholarship to attend archaeology doctoral program.
Four seasons playing field hockey, three summers spent on an archaeological site, and seven semesters as a high-achieving Washington College student have paid off for Kat Esposito ’25. She was awarded a $10,000 NCAA Postgraduate Scholarship and accepted into a doctoral program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Photo by Pamela Cowart-Rickman
Photo by Pamela Cowart-Rickman
At UNC, Esposito will study the archaeology of the Southeastern U.S., focusing on identity and gender roles as revealed through artifacts. Her interest in what ceramics and other artifacts reveal about societies began when she participated in Professor Julie Markin’s archaeology field school. Since the summer of her first year, Esposito has been studying and analyzing Woodland Period ceramics from a Native American site at Chapel Branch on the Choptank River in Denton, Maryland. The formal excavation of the site continued through this past summer.
“It was really cool to be able to be involved in this excavation from its beginning stages, after the landowner reached out to the Archeological Society of Maryland and said, ‘Could you come check out my land?” Esposito said. “Being there from the initial surveys all the way through wrapping up our processing of the artifacts and being involved for a long time with this one site has given me a strong idea of what archeology really is and what it entails.”
Photo by Pamela Cowart-Rickman
Photo by Pamela Cowart-Rickman
Based on dating the ceramics, her research group has determined that people lived on the Chapel Branch site from the Early Woodland Period through the Late Woodland Period. Different design styles suggest that some of the ceramics may have originated in New York, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and both shores of Maryland.
“It looks like there were a lot of different ideas and people moving in and out of this land across several centuries,” Esposito said.
As a double major in art and art history and anthropology, Esposito conducted research on how our understandings of and assumptions about gender roles relate to the production of craft materials. She is interested in how colonial and modern Western biases assume that women were primarily involved in arts like ceramic-making, whereas, from research, she found that gender roles were likely varied across different native groups and time periods.
Photo provided by Kat Esposito '25.
Photo provided by Kat Esposito '25.
Esposito also played on the women’s field hockey team as a standout forward throughout her time at Washington and was the team captain during her junior year. A group of Esposito’s professors and coaches encouraged her this past winter to apply for the NCAA Post-Graduate Scholarship for her outstanding academic and athletic accomplishments.
Esposito said that being an athlete at an NCAA Division III school allowed her the unique opportunity to continue playing the sport she loves while also having plenty of time to devote to classes, conferences, research projects, and other academic activities. Alongside athletic involvement as a student, Esposito was the president of the Lambda Alpha Anthropological Honor Society and the Anthropology club at Washington. Although Esposito graduated early this past December, she continued working in Markin’s archaeology lab this spring.
As Esposito looks forward to the academic journey and archaeological discoveries that lie ahead, she is grateful for the support and lessons she has learned from her professors at Washington College.
“From all of my professors, I have learned so much,” Esposito said. “Especially through my experiences in the field, I’ve gained knowledge from Dr. Markin that has set me up really well to pursue my education.”
—Logan I. Monteleone ’27
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