Carl B. & Alice Larson Scholarship in Illinois Archeology

This scholarship was created by Dr. Patricia K. Anderson, WIU Professor of Anthropology and Archeology, in honor of her maternal grandparents, Carl B. and Alice Larson. Mr. Larson was an Illinois farmer who shared his love for nature and animals and fascination with past cultures with his Granddaughter. The dusty box of stone projectile points (“arrowheads”) which he had found while cultivating his fields, piqued her imagination and generated a lifelong love and interest in prehistory. Dr. Patricia Anderson received her undergraduate degree in Sociology & Anthropology from WIU in 1978. She expanded her interest in geography (MA ’83) and most notably in Archeology and Anthropology. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago based on her archaeological research at Yula, Yucatan, Mexico, for which she was awarded a Dissertation Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation. Between return research trips to Mexico, she worked as a field director for a private Cultural Resource Management firm based in Nashville, Tennessee. She was one of the few women in the south at that time to direct archeological projects in Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama and Puerto Rico.
Anderson was hired by WIU in 1999, soon after she completed her PhD. In 2000 she co-directed, with retired WIU professor Lawrence Conrad, the WIU/Spoon River College archaeological field school at the 10 Mile Creek Site, located east of Peoria on the Illinois River flood plain. During the summer of 2012, with investigations at the Orendorf site, she was thrilled to continue the tradition of an archaeological field school opportunity for interested WIU students and to offer this award to deserving archaeology students. Dr. Andrea Alveshere currently teaches the WIU archaeological field school.
This scholarship honors the memory of Dr. Anderson’s grandparents and encourages students to preserve and document the cultural contexts of the past using professional archaeological methods, thus generating understanding of diverse human adaptations and their relationships to past environments.
This scholarship was originally called the Dr. Patricia Anderson Scholarship in Archeology but was changed to the Carl B. Larson Scholarship at the request of Dr. Anderson in September 2012. The name and history was revised to the Carl B. & Alice Larson Scholarship in Illinois Archeology at the request of Dr. Anderson in August 2017.

CRITERIA: Junior or Senior Anthropology Major in good standing who demonstrates an interest in archaeology as a career and must have completed the WIU archaeological field school (Anth 424 & Anth 426). Minimum GPA of 3.0.