The Conferring of Honorary Degrees
Dr. William M. Kelso

Dr. William M. Kelso, we honor you here today for your pioneering scholarship in the field of Archaeology.

After receiving his Ph.D. in 1971, Dr. Kelso has built a reputation as one of the foremost archaeologists of colonial North America. For the first thirty years of his career his work included excavations and discoveries in Georgia and throughout Virginia, doing important work as Director of Archaeology at Carter’s Grove in Colonial Williamsburg as well as at and around the area of Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson. From his field work at Monticello he produced numerous volumes, including Archaeology at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello: Artifacts of Everyday Life in the Plantation Community, Monticello Black History, as well as a volume, edited with Rachel Most, entitled Earth Patterns: Essays in Landscape Archaeology, which, in the words of the renowned archaeologist James Deetz, would be instrumental to “the birth of landscape archaeology as we know it today.”

But even this path-breaking scholarship, and the accolades it garnered, would only indicate successes that were yet to come. For his work as Director of Archaeology for the Jamestown Rediscovery Project has produced simply the most important archaeological find in North America in over fifty years. Inherited wisdom had claimed that James Fort at Jamestown, Virginia, established by English colonists in 1607 as the first successful permanent English settlement in North America, had been washed away by almost four hundred years of the slow movement of the James River. Kelso believed otherwise, and was, at times, ridiculed for it. Many thought the project to find James Fort was folly. Even he wavered at times. “Maybe I am crazy,” he occasionally thought, as was recently quoted in the Washington Post. Luckily, for both his sanity and our illumination, he successfully repressed this urge and continued to believe that the fort could be found. And find it, he did. But he and his growing number of assistants unearthed not only the layout of the fort. By the time he wrote his multiple prize-winning book, Jamestown: The Buried Truth, in 2006—just in time for the much-celebrated 400-year anniversary of Jamestown’s founding in 2007 (so he’s a good marketer, too)—they had uncovered over 700,000 individual objects from the early seventeenth century. These artifacts have already contributed to a major recasting of historical interpretations on the birth of English colonization in North America, tempering a previous vision of colonial incompetence and arrogance and replacing it with interpretations that indicate that Jamestown, and not the peaceable kingdoms of New England villages, might be the template from which other English colonies in America could successfully borrow.

Yet even with his discovery and his subsequent fame—he has hosted luminaries both foreign and domestic throughout the Jamestown Rediscovery site, most notably Queen Elizabeth II—he has retained a grace and sense of wonder that bespeaks the best of the combination of academic achievement with public engagement: ideals that we here at Dickinson hold dear.

It is for these qualities of academic rigor, public service, perseverance, and unabated enthusiasm to simply know more, that we honor him here today.

Mr. President, it is my honor and pleasure to present to you William M. Kelso for the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Archaeology.

William M. Kelso, upon the recommendation of the Faculty to the Board of Trustees, and by its mandamus, I confer upon you the Degree of Doctor of Archaeology, honoris causa, with all the rights, privileges, and distinction thereunto appertaining, in token of which I present you with this diploma and cause you to be invested with the hood of Dickinson College appropriate to the degree.

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