Digging Deep

When Hannah Hoover (M.A. ’21, Ph.D. ’25) was considering graduate programs in anthropological archaeology, the University of Michigan stood out—not just for its world-class faculty and resources, but also for the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology (UMMAA)’s James B. Griffin Endowment Fellowship. The “Big Griffin,” as it's referred to by UMMAA faculty and grad students, is a uniquely structured internal fellowship that gives grad students a significant head start on their careers by providing financial support for independent field research.

Established through a bequest from alumnus and professor emeritus of anthropology James B. “Jimmy” Griffin (Ph.D. 1936), who served as UMMAA’s director from 1946 until his retirement in 1975, the fellowship carries a lot of weight. Though he retired 50 years ago, Griffin is still considered one of the most influential archaeologists of the 20th century and is regarded as the dean of North American archaeology.

Until this year, the Griffin Endowment Fellowship, which was created in 1997, has been awarded solely to graduate students with research interests in the Eastern United States—Griffin was the internationally recognized expert on the prehistoric indigenous cultures of the Mississippi Valley and the Eastern U.S. during his career.

But over the past 28 years, the James B. Griffin Endowment Fund, which supports the fellowship, has grown large enough to support every archaeology Ph.D. student in the Department of Anthropology’s graduate program, all of whom are affiliated with UMMAA—no matter where in the world they conduct their research. That’s a game changer, says Professor Rob Beck, UMMAA’s associate director and curator of Eastern North American archaeology. “There’s no place else that has this kind of internal opportunity where, if you put in the work and write a solid proposal, you can start your dissertation research with a $20,000 grant in hand,” Beck says. “That’s a huge draw for students who plan to apply for a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to finish their dissertation.”

Hannah Hoover says the fellowship was a key factor in choosing Michigan. “The Griffin stood out to me in the application process,” she explains. “It showed that the museum had a long-standing commitment to student research and that I’d be supported at every stage. It’s a strong recruiting tool.”

For her dissertation, Hoover led fieldwork at a colonial-era Indigenous town in coastal South Carolina to understand how people mediated regional change through activities in everyday life. Thanks to the fellowship, she spent a full summer at the research site directing 20 undergraduate field research assistants from the College of Charleston and the University of Michigan who helped her conduct survey, excavation, and community-engaged archaeology for her project. Being able to do that kind of work so deeply and early on helped shape her research in lasting ways.

“The Griffin gave me the time and funding to get into the field and refine my research questions. Without it, I would have had to wait or scale back what I wanted to do,” she explains.

Beck underscores the importance of that timing. “NSF reviewers want to see that the groundwork is already in place—that the fieldwork is done and the student is now pursuing analysis. That’s what the Griffin allows: front-loading the fieldwork so the NSF can support the next phase. It sets our students up for success.”

Another strategic advantage of the "Big Griffin" is that its application process is structured to closely mirror that of the prestigious NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (DDRIG). 

“We require our Ph.D. students to write their dissertation proposals in the form of an NSF grant. It’s so beneficial to them because the students get amazing feedback from Michigan faculty with extensive NSF process experience when defending their proposals,” says Beck. “The Griffin application process teaches students how to frame a research question, lay out a methodology, and articulate broader impacts—skills that are crucial not just for the National Science Foundation grant application, but for their entire careers.”

For students like Hoover, who was awarded an NSF DDRIG in 2024, the process gives them early and realistic experience writing competitive proposals—something graduate students at many other top programs may not do until much later. “Being able to workshop a proposal with the Griffin committee helped me understand how to write for an academic grant audience in a specific, persuasive way, and grounded in a clear research plan,” she says. “It made my NSF application stronger.”

With their field research already completed through the Griffin fellowship, students can use the NSF grant to advance their research and fund expensive lab analysis, including things like radiocarbon dating, animal bone analysis, and ceramic analysis—work that is essential to completing a project. 

By opening the fellowship up to any UMMAA Ph.D. candidate, says Beck, “all of our grad students will have the opportunity to approach their dissertations that way—the Big Griffin to fund the fieldwork, the NSF to subsequently fund the analysis and, almost always, they come out with a high profile article before graduating that that NSF and Griffin grants are the foundation for.”

The Griffin fellowship model is rare if not unique among peer institutions, making it particularly strong in launching careers: “Our students can build a large-scale research project off the bat that is all their own—they are the co-principal investigator. It demonstrates to hiring committees that our grads can write grants, do field work, direct students in the field, and write articles,” he adds. 

Many Griffin fellows land tenure-track academic positions right out of graduate school, like Hoover, who joined the faculty at the University of Tennessee as an assistant professor of anthropological archaeology in August 2025, three months after completing her Ph.D. 

“And there are other very successful Griffin fellows who now have fantastic and impactful jobs in non-academic spaces, like at the National Park Service and in cultural resource management,” adds Hoover. In that context, the Griffin helps build the skill set needed to manage projects in other, equally important sectors of archaeology.”

Hoover appreciates that “part of writing the Griffin—that also prepares you for writing the NSF—is having to hone in on both the exciting research outcomes for our discipline and the broader outcomes, which are more about ‘how does this impact society?’ And for most folks working in North American Indigenous archeology, that’s a great space to think through and elaborate on the relationships between archaeologists, our work, and descendant communities.

“In my case, it involves community engagement and consultation with Indigenous stakeholders in the project itself. When I was looking for a job,” she says, “that experience helped me speak with authority professionally—even as a graduate student—about the project in South Carolina, the funding I acquired, and the opportunities that research has created.”

At Michigan and beyond, Jimmy Griffin was a visionary leader instrumental in reshaping how archaeology is practiced today. He served as director of UMMAA during a critical period of transformation when the field was shifting away from what Beck calls a culture history—specimen arrangement, artifact classification, and site dating—to a new, scientific approach focused on understanding human behavior, adaptation, and cultural evolution. Griffin’s willingness to embrace this change by bringing together experts across disciplines and fostering innovative scientific research methods, while other scholars resisted, established Michigan’s leadership in the field.

“In the 1960s, during this ‘new archaeology’ period in North America, Jimmy saw that the new way with new ideas about how archaeology works, and how archaeology is part of anthropology, was going to be the direction that carried archaeology into the future,” says Beck. In Griffin’s era, a wave of young, exceptionally talented archaeologists—many still in their 20s—joined the Michigan faculty. Together, they reshaped the discipline, and by the mid-1970s, Michigan had risen to become the top archaeology program in the world. The innovative approaches developed under Griffin’s leadership helped define a new era of American archaeology, which would go on to influence research around the globe.”

The “Big Griffin” fellowship embodies Jimmy Griffin’s legacy by challenging and supporting doctoral students to pursue ambitious, independent research early in their careers. “The expansion of the Griffin Endowment Fellowship will have a huge impact on UMMAA students and the research trajectory of the museum, and is an amazing tribute to Jimmy’s foresight and generosity,” says Michael Galaty, director of UMMAA. “Jimmy traveled the world, visiting archaeological sites and interacting with a global archaeology community. He would be thrilled to know that his gift now supports research across the globe. We used to name a couple of Fellows every few years. Now, we can award as many as four Fellowships a year. This is a sea change for us.”

UMMAA graduate students are currently conducting research on just about every continent—from Kazakhstan to Kosovo, Mesoamerica to the Andes, Africa, Asia and the United States—and, Galaty continues, “increasing the Griffin Fellowship’s funding and accessibility to match UMMAA’s scope will support the next generation of Michigan archaeologists as they push boundaries and address the big questions about human history and culture worldwide.”