Employee Spotlight: Damita Engel

Hi all! I am Damita Engel, and currently I serve as the General Manager for Metcalf, but I still sneak out into the field occasionally too! If someone told me I would be more business than fieldwork, I would have called them a dirty rotten liar. But, alas, here I am! No one wants to hear BUSINESS stories (snooze) so here is my archaeo-journey.

There are two varying theories on how and when I started along my archaeology path. MY version is that I got a National Scholarship Fund grant to attend a field school in Kampsville, Illinois when I was a junior in high school. My MOM’s story is that when I was as young as two years old, I was fascinated by rocks and often collected them from around the house and brought them in to wash and dry them (napping while they dried was awesome, I hear, and you should try it). Negotiations would stall out as to how many rocks I could bring in the house, and, never being satisfied with the limitations set, I smuggled many into the house in my diaper, allegedly. Thankfully it was the 70’s and no one photo-documented every inch of life.

 

Archaeology has taken me around the Plains states and east to Ohio (do not recommend) and New York’s Long Island (do not recommend the ticks, but the delis are awesome). I worked for the ARCHLAB at the University of South Dakota and graduated in 1997, then in 2001 went off to grad school at University of Nebraska at Lincoln. I was hired on at Metcalf in 2004 as a Project Director, then as Principal Investigator, Regional Director of Operations, Regional Manager, General Manager, and Vice President. It seems like I have served in nearly every capacity (except ESOP Admin – thank you!) for this company over the last 18.5 years and loved nearly every minute.