Carol B. Griggs (née Carol Susan Bliss) was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1954 and died quietly at home in Alpine, New York, in August 2023 after a long struggle with cancer.
Carol grew up in Warner, New Hampshire, where her father had an electrical contracting business. In her early life she was also his bookkeeper, which gave her a head-start on keeping track of large groups of small numbers. After high school, she enrolled at Middlebury College where she soon came to realize there were not enough archaeology courses to keep her busy. Her parents, Ted and Jane Bliss (both Cornell graduates) encouraged a transfer.
Carol was my first student at Cornell, working for me as a senior in 1976. One of her claims to fame as an undergraduate was that she excavated the pottery kiln of Ezra Cornell's father underneath an Ithaca building that was about to be...