Kathleen Anne Deagan was born in the middle of the 20th century in Portsmouth, Virginia, while her father, a meteorologist with the U. S. Navy was stationed at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard.
[1] Deagan enrolled at the University of Florida in 1965 to study education,[3] then journalism, social work and counseling,[4] appropriate career choices for women at the time, but was drawn to anthropology courses.
[4] Enrolling in graduate school at the University of California, Davis to study museology, Deagan quickly left and spent some time in San Francisco.
[4][6] That same year Deagan was hired as an assistant professor at Florida State University[4] and expanded work begun during her dissertation in St. Augustine on the 18th-century history of the city.
[7] Based on a review of evidence at the site, known as both La Navidad and En Bas Saline, Deagan concluded that the shipwreck was not due to a weather related issue, but negligence on behalf of the crew.
[7] Simultaneously working sites in Florida and the Caribbean, in 1986, Deagan began fieldwork at Ft. Mosé, a legally sanctioned, buffer zone community of free blacks established as a strategic defensive barrier against outside incursions.
[15][16] Deagan's next Caribbean project, in the Dominican Republic began in 1989 with an investigation of La Isabela, Columbus's first permanent settlement in the Americas.
[20] Retiring from teaching in 2010,[21] she was appointed as the Lockwood Professor of Florida and Caribbean Archaeology and received an honorary doctor of laws from Flagler College in 2011.
[20] Continuing her work as curator of the Florida Museum of Natural History and leading excavations in the area around St. Augustine, Deagan began to search for the field notes and artifacts which had been unearthed by archaeologist John Mann Goggin in the early 1950s.
[22] The 12,000 artifacts and field notes helped determine the size of the original settlement and led to clues of a possible new defensive construction, which might indicate an additional fort.