Touching History: An Anthropology Alumna’s Academic Journey from Kentucky to the Cradle of Civilization

By Stephanie Godward, Communications and Marketing Director, College of Arts & Sciences  

Ashley Watkins’ first-ever experience camping occurred in Africa, where she lived in a tent in Tanzania for five weeks while conducting anthropology field work alongside peers and professors. 

“I love it so much that I don’t get homesick at all. I love immersing myself in other cultures,” she said. 

Watkins is from Oldham County, Kentucky and earned a degree in anthropology, graduating in December 2025. She transferred to UofL from Jefferson Community and Technical College as a junior.  

Her passion for anthropology began with an interest in ancestry and DNA, which stemmed from helping her grandmother, who was an adoptee, connect with her biological family and with her own biological roots for the first time ever before she passed away. 

“I realized that she deserved closure in knowing who her family was, so I started working on that when I was 16 and I worked on it for two years. I found her biological family, showed her pictures of her father, and I love the fact that I have this potential to help people, and understanding their backgrounds, showing them things they may not have known about themselves,” Watkins said. 

It was then that she knew anthropology was both her personal and professional calling.  

Watkins had the chance to spend the summer of 2025 in Tanzania through the National Science Foundation’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates program. Her first experience of doing international fieldwork happened in Portugal alongside Anthropology Professor Jonathan Haws, who then recommended her for the Tanzania trip with Associate Professor of Anthropology Amanuel Beyin.  

Compared to her first-ever international learning experience in Portugal, this one was completely different, Watkins shared. 

“I was drawn to this opportunity because that is where human civilization first started. I thought it would be awesome to go there, get that fieldwork experience, and be immersed in the culture. It gave me the chance to see what I had been hearing about in all of Dr. Beyin’s classes,” Watkins said. 

A major part of Watkins’ training involved operating the Total Station for precise site mapping, which is a tool she was first exposed to during class. This experience gave her hands-on learning in the field. She also had the chance to develop her own leadership skills. 

“It required a lot of patience and precision. It’s a lot of trying to understand how to take accurate measurements. Over time, I ended up getting it and not needing help anymore,” Watkins said. “I got really comfortable using it independently and then was able to take on certain field sites on my own. This tool is critical for archaeologists because it allows us to document sites with that high spatial accuracy and it integrates that data into GIS and digital mapping systems.” 

Some of her discoveries in the field included having the chance to expand her professional repertoire. While Watkins is more focused on forensics and bones, Beyin’s work focuses on stone tools, early civilization, and artifacts. 

“Something I have never seen before is that there were a lot of surface artifacts. A lot of the things I have been exposed to in the past are below the surface. But here, we would go on excursions at multiple sites. We'd walk and along the way, we’d see so many surface artifacts,” she said. 

These include items like stone tools that were fabricated into tools that could be used for weaponry and basic survival.  

“We then took those artifacts and catalogued them, and I learned a lot about that process as well,” she said. “Touching history is just so cool.” 

In the future, Watkins’ ultimate career goal is to attend graduate school, earn a forensic anthropology degree, and do military repatriation. She wants to go overseas to find, locate, and repatriate soldiers from past wars in order to give them proper burials. 

Her background in being from a military family paired with her passion for anthropology lends itself to this work.  

“There are over 83,000 soldiers still missing in action and the U.S. government works to bring these soldiers home.”