A conversation with Elizabeth Chilton
Before Elizabeth S. Chilton settled into her new job as dean of Harpur College of Arts and Sciences in mid-July, she sat down for a conversation with Binghamton University Magazine. While she is busy meeting 26 department chairs and more than 500 faculty members, here is a chance to meet her.
QUESTION: What led you to archaeology?
ELIZABETH CHILTON: I got into it completely by accident. I was a math major as a sophomore, and I was home one winter break and my father said, “How’s college going?” I said, “Oh, I’m kind of bored with math.” His advice was, “I think you should stick with it, but I think you should round out your education and take more liberal arts, something like anthropology as an elective.” I literally said, “What is anthropology?” And he sat up in his chair — having not received a college degree himself — and he said, “Anthropos — the study of man — how can you get a college education without taking an anthropology course?”
That spring, the only course that was open was Introduction to Primates, one of the least popular courses at the time. But I was captivated. The next semester I took three anthropology courses, and then I changed my major, but kept a minor in math.
It wasn’t until a summer field school in the Mohawk Valley at an Iroquoian archaeological site that I realized this was what I wanted to do for a career.
After graduation, I volunteered on a dig in Belize and it was a life-changing experience. I lived in a grass hut for five months with no electricity, no plumbing — complete with tarantulas and snakes. While of course it was exciting, I really missed the archaeology of the Northeast, where there are 13,000 years of human history that we walk over every day. I was fascinated by the disjuncture of a rich and diverse history and its invisibility in the present, both physical — meaning it’s a challenge to excavate because the New England Algonquians didn’t have permanent villages prior to European colonization — and in the curriculum and everyday conversation.