Alexandra McDougle
Year: 2016-2017
Nominating Institution: University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
Placement Organization: Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, Department of Archaeology and Prehistory
Placement Location: Phnom Penh, Cambodia
About Alexandra
(updated 6/2017) Alex McDougle is an anthropologist focusing on bio-archaeology and forensics. In 2015, she graduated from the University Hawaii at Mānoa with high honors in Anthropology and a minor in French, and began working as a forensic archaeologist with History Flight, an American NGO focused on the recovery and repatriation of missing combat veterans. Conducting extensive fieldwork in the Gilbert Islands in the Republic of Kiribati, she supports the current excavation effort for American Soldiers killed during the 1943 Battle of Tarawa in the Pacific Theater. Alex’s interest in conflict archaeology stems from her upbringing as the child of an archaeologist and a military officer. As a high school student, she volunteered with the excavation of a World War II internment camp hidden in the valleys of West Oahu. While in college, she worked with the Ifugao Archaeological Project investigating upland rice field systems of Cordilleran people of Luzon in the Philippines. Her research addressed the potential of skeletal samples of children, leading to an undergraduate thesis analyzing the ways in which children of rice farming populations defied accepted understandings of population health during the initial introduction of sedentary farming, and underscored the need to include more diverse population samples to challenge generally accepted grand narratives of archaeology. As an African-American female, Alex is passionate about giving voices to marginalized peoples and increasing minority representation in academia. Alex is working in the Department of Archaeology and Prehistory with the Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts in Phnom Penh . She has collaborated on projects with the Royal University of Fine Arts, The Tuol Sleng Genocide Center, and the National Museum of Cambodia. Her work ranges from preservation of Angkorian era artifacts, to developing methods of analysis of Khmer rouge vicitims. When not in the field, she is an amateur poet, noodle connoisseur and hip-hop fanatic trying to make the world a better place.Alexandra's Scholar Story
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