For Immediate Release Contact: Director, Public Relations (909) 621-8219 nina_mason@pitzer.edu Sheryl Miller Named to Distinguished Teaching Chair at Pitzer College Claremont, Calif. -- Oct. 30, 2001 -- Sheryl Miller, professor of anthropology at Pitzer College in Claremont, has spent countless hours scraping the earth for clues to ancient life at sun-baked archaeological sites in Africa. She has listened in anticipation as Hopi Indian women slowly shared their intricate culture. Her latest fascination is with the Germans who settled in Pennsylvania during colonial times. But her divergent research interests always lead her back to one place: the classroom. "I consider myself first and foremost a teacher," says Miller. "I still love teaching at an introductory level where you can open the eyes and minds of young people to matters they haven't even thought about before." And now a very generous gift ensures that future generations of Pitzer College students will have access to Miller's brand of intensive, hands-on instruction. Miller has been honored as the first recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Chair in Archaeology and Biological Anthropology. This professorial chair was made possible by a $3.28 million gift by an anonymous alumna and her husband. "It's just the biggest honor you can imagine to have it come from someone who you taught," says Miller. "Who is in a better position to know if you're effective at what you do? It's the students." In addition to endowing the chair, the gift provides for two new scholarships, to be named after Miller and fellow anthropology professor R. Lee Munroe. The gift also endows annual summer field research stipends for two students to be nominated by Miller. That's important, Miller says, because students gain so much when they get their hands dirty out in the field. Over the years, Miller has taken students to her excavations in Africa to research hunter-gatherers who roamed the land more than 20,000 years ago. Students took part in the methodical work of scraping the earth, under the blazing sun, with the search perhaps yielding animal bones early hunters threw into a campfire after eating. "We had some exciting moments, some relative tedium, some moments of fun and some moments of terror,'' Miller says. "And I suspect no student who went would ever say they were sorry that they went." Most of the items discovered are, quite literally, garbage; however, Miller says this research has a way of bringing you closer to the ancients. You realize they had to think, plan and prepare like we do. Bring only one spear on the hunt, and you'll lose out when an animal runs off with the weapon stuck in its side. But as a researcher you also run into the limitations of studying inanimate objects with no voice to explain them. You may figure out their function, Miller says, but not necessarily their cultural meaning. Miller has also taken her curiosity to the Hopi Indian Reservation in Arizona, where she learned from the women who craft baskets as part of an ancient, intricate culture. This has been a break from the limits of unearthing those ancient objects in Africa. It's a huge help to have someone to talk to, to ask questions. Finding out what the objects mean to people is what really excites Miller. Example: quilts are another one of her research interests. Studying writings from colonial and frontier times, she learned that quilts provided much more than warmth for the women who made them. Making quilts was a form of community expression or a chance to do something for themselves after a rough day of chores. Miller's diverse interests date back to her days as a student. She studied philosophy at Oxford before earning her doctoral degree in anthropology at UC Berkeley. She was always interested in answering the question: what does it mean to be human? Anthropology was another way at it. And an exciting one at that. "Can you imagine holding in your hand something that a person made 100,000 years ago? A million years ago?" she asks. "There's something magical about that." Today, Miller tries to spark in her students that same fascination. Miller has taught Pitzer's introductory course in archaeology and biological anthropology for three decades. But it never gets old because those fields keep evolving and so does her course. "I still point out to them that all the answers are not in," says Miller, who started at Pitzer in 1969. She added a lab component to her introductory class, a place for hands-on learning. One artifact students can grasp is a more than 200,000-year-old hand ax, which she calls "the original Swiss Army Knife." Miller finds good teaching is closely linked to her research. She has never taught a class specifically on a research interest, but it always "seeps in." "It always comes back to the students, the students," she says. Miller's appointment as the inaugural holder of the Distinguished Teaching Chair in Archaeology and Biological Anthropology will be honored at a campus dinner on Monday, Nov. 12. ##### Pitzer College, a member of The Claremont Colleges, offers 40 major fields in the liberal arts and sciences with an emphasis on interdisciplinary studies, cultural immersion, social responsibility and community service. Photo available upon request.