As the usual fog rolled across the Golden Gate Sound, seeming to erect a gray wall against the Presidio of San Francisco, archaeologist Edward De Haro sifted through a batch of rocks and dirt, looking for artifacts buried in the fog of time.
For more than a decade, De Haro and the Presidio’s team of archaeologists have dug into the grounds of the former military base, seeking to uncover the walls and footprint of the original Spanish fortress built around 1776. The work revealed the original adobe walls, the remains of a brick chimney that probably toppled in the 1906 earthquake, pieces of pottery and metal.
“It’s very exciting to excavate here because this is where San Francisco began,” De Haro said. “It’s San Francisco.”
De Haro grew up as a history lover, but it would take him a leap into two other careers before he finally discovered his true passion, archaeology. His initial plan to become an animator turned into a temporary job in the tech industry that lasted seven years.
“At that time, I realized that my lifelong love of history was still there,” said De Haro, sitting in a laboratory surrounded by animal bones, books and pieces of objects recovered from the floor of the Presidio. “During that process, I discovered archeology and realized that was more of what I wanted to do.”
De Haro’s specialty is identifying animal bones, many of which are buried in the Presidio’s past. During recent work to transform Battery Bluffs into a new public park, the team discovered cow bones dating back to when the Spanish or American army raised cattle there. The bones are just more clues to the same starting point for understanding what life was like in early times.
“So every time I find a cow bone, a horse bone or even a bird bone,” De Haro said, “I get excited because it shows me life – shows me how people interacted with the animals of the region.
De Haro considered ancient ways of life beyond just the lens of his work: When he was a child, his family moved to Mexico for several years and took up residence in a small town. De Haro lived in an adobe house with dirt roads winding through town where he rode horses and ran in the dust – much like what life would have been like in the Presidio before the U.S. Army took over. power in 1847. A child of immigrant parents. who worked in the Napa wine country, he was steeped in the rich brine of his parents’ new-world aspirations.
“Like any other immigrant family, they made a lot of sacrifices for their children,” De Haro said, “and allowed us to pursue our dreams.”
Back at the lab, De Haro and fellow archaeologist Georgie DeAntoni dumped a bucket of soil transported from a dig site onto a metal screen, which they sprayed with a hose. Dirt seeped through the screen, leaving behind mysterious chunks, which the pair sorted into groups of rocks, metal, ceramics, glass and animal bones. Over time, these small fragments created a theoretical mosaic of how San Francisco’s early non-native inhabitants lived.
For De Haro, the archaeological work carried out in the Presidio is as important as the discoveries made in Rome, Greece or Egypt. What emerges in its own backyard is purely a Californian story, rooted in the twists and turns of adventurers, occupiers and researchers.
“The story is always evolving, we are always discovering new things,” De Haro said. “I want to be the person who found the new thing that changed the way we see history – for me, that’s archaeology.”
De Haro admits that as a child he did not fully understand how much history had taken place in what would become California, long before gold fever transformed San Francisco into a bustling metropolis almost overnight. As the father of a young son, he now hopes to inspire others to delve into the history of the Presidio, grapple with its stories and lessons, and imagine lives lived inside of adobe walls and along slopes where fog regularly swallows up the view of the bay at will.
“I’m not writing history,” De Haro said. “I’m exposing the history that’s here – I’m exposing other people’s lives.”
