George Cowgill: How I got here...

George Cowgill is a Mesomericanist archaeologist, probably best known for his work at Teotihuacan. In an essay titled "How I got to where I am now: One thing after another, a (mostly) linear narrative" and published in Ancient Mesoamerica late last year, Cowgill talked about how he got into archaeology, and it is an essay anybody contemplating an entry into the field ought to read.

Teotihuacan from the Pyramid of the Moon to the Pyramid of the Sun. Photo by Owen Prior

In "How I got to where I am", Cowgill first describes a childhood in Depression-era Idaho with his twin brother Warren. As a high school student, Cowgill toyed with being a journalist and an anthropologist, but started out his academic career in physics, graduating with a BS at Stanford and beginning a graduate degree at Iowa State. Somewhere along the line, he fell in with bad company, and in 1952 found himself at an archaeological site in Jamestown, North Dakota working with Richard Wheeler and Hester Davis, and while in Iowa visited the Effigy Mounds and met Will Logan and Reynold Ruppe. By 1954 he chucked physics and started graduate school in archaeology at the University of Chicago.

The rest of the essay discusses Cowgill's life as an archaeologist, how he got to Harvard and eventually Arizona State, how he ended up at Teotihuacan with Rene Millon, and what he thinks of the changes in the profession over his fifty plus years in the field. The essay is an interesting glimpse into how one man became an archaeologist, and what being an archaeologist meant in the 1960s and what it means today.

Cowgill, George L. 2008 How I got to where I am now: One thing after another, a (mostly) linear narrative. Ancient Mesoamerica 19:165–173. You can buy a copy of the article for £10 or US$15 through this link.

A Walking Tour of Teotihuacan