An Interview with Helle Girey

Michelle Jacobson1

A family trip to a dude ranch in Colorado in the mid-1970s changed Helle Girey’s life—and no doubt changed the course of history for the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. Helle was the first and for a number of years the only employee of the institute. She worked for every director before her retirement in 2017. In November 2022, Helle moved to Maryland to be near her daughters and grandchildren. Before she left, we discussed her impact on the Cotsen Institute and its impact on her.

Michelle Jacobson: You have been associated with UCLA archaeologists for more than 40 years. How did you find them, or how did they find you? Helle Girey: Well, if I go all the way back, it started with a family vacation to a dude ranch at Lake Mancos in Colorado when my children were young. After being on horseback for days, we had a day off and went to Mesa Verde. There I realized that I knew nothing about Indigenous Americans because all my education had been in Europe. I thought, how can it be that I don’t know anything about Indigenous Americans? So I went to Pierce College, near our home in the San Fernando Valley, and took classes there. I got involved in archaeology, did some fieldwork, and then ran out of classes to take. Therefore I moved to UCLA to take classes there. Wow! Suddenly, the whole world opened, and it wasn’t just California local archaeology. It was anything and everything that I was interested in. I worked with all the directors of the institute, starting with Giorgio Buccellati, when it was still named the Institute of Archaeology. I finally retired after Willeke Wendrich became director in 2016.2

MJ: You said that you are a proud Estonian. When did you come to the United States? HG: My younger years are quite a story. We left Estonia in 1944, hours before the Russians arrived. My family ended up as refugees in Germany, in an American-run refugee camp. I was there for four years. We really wanted to leave Europe, but the Americans didn’t want us, so we went to Sweden for a year and from there to Canada. I grew up in Canada and graduated with a BSc degree in biochemistry. I worked in Montreal for eight years. Then we came to California in 1972.

I know it sounds dismal, but kids are resilient. Of course I have bad memories of the war, but living in a displaced persons camp was not bad for a child. I had my family, and I had friends in every other room. We went to school, we had Girl Scouts and sports events, and, well, life went on. We didn’t have any fancy toys, but we didn’t know that we didn’t have fancy toys. An American soldier gave me a bag of marbles, and those marbles became my kings and queens and ladies-inwaiting. We made castles from cardboard boxes. By the way, I still have those marbles.

MJ: Did you share this with your grandchildren? HG: Oh yes. They know all about it.

Figure 1. Helle Girey (right) with Elga Stephans in the Gobi Desert

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Figure 2. The 1990 Pyramid of Donors of the Institute of Archaeology. In the top tier are Lloyd Cotsen/Neutrogena Corporation, Sandy and Ernestine S. Elster, and Bob and Bobbie Stern. Helle is in the third. Figure 3. On December 15, 1992, Lloyd Cotsen (1929–2017) and Franklin D. Murphy (1916–1994) were the first recipients of The Trowel: The Institute of Archaeology Highest Honor.

HG: Once I came to California, I thought I would go back to biochemistry, but there really wasn’t anything suitable. And I had two small children, so I stayed at home. When I made my way to the Institute of Archaeology, I think that the people at UCLA saw this very enthusiastic middle-aged woman who was quite willing to do things. So I volunteered for quite a while. When Merrick Posnansky became director in 1984, he asked me to organize a public lecture program.

MJ: So you were the first employee of the institute? HG: I guess at some point they started paying me something. I don’t know where they got the money. In the beginning, the institute didn’t have any money. People brought scissors from home because they didn’t have money to buy equipment. My job was to get other departments to cosponsor the lectures, and we had a lot of lectures. I would call the Department of Anthropology or Art History, for example, and say, “We have this wonderful speaker coming. Will you sponsor it with $100?” They would ask, “Who are you again?” When I said I’m a volunteer with the Institute of Archaeology, it didn’t go over very well. So that’s when Merrick gave me the title director of public programs.

Then Eileen Schwartz, who was the graduate student adviser for archaeology, retired. Merrick and others recommended that I apply for the job. I did and they accepted me, and off I went. Around the same time, I was working part-time for a contract archaeologist, Roberta Greenwood of Greenwood and Associates, running her laboratory. She did the big Chinatown excavation, and I had thousands of artifacts. Ultimately the Cotsen Institute Press published her book.

MJ: Did you go out to other excavations with faculty over the years? HG: Yes, so many that I had to write it down for you. I worked with Brian Dillon on several projects, the largest of which was at Vandenberg Air Force Base. I was in Guatemala with David Whitley and later with Marilyn Beaudry. I was in Peru with Tom Wake and Glenn Russell. Before that, I was at Lake Federsee in southern Germany with a professor from UC Santa Barbara. I was in Wales, excavating a castle; in Chiapas near San Cristobal with Richard Lesure; and again, two years later, with Barbara Voorhees from UC Santa Barbara.

Figure 4. In 2005 Helle received The Trowel: The Institute of Archaeology Highest Honor.

MJ: The institute moved into the Fowler Building in 1991. How did that change things? HG [laughing]: I don’t want to talk about moving at all right now.

MJ: It must have been such a transformation. HG: It was actually. Tim Earle was director at the time, and literally everything changed. There was so much room. Before moving to the Fowler Building, we had all these little cubbyholes with two people in each. Then we moved into these luxurious spaces and every faculty member had a laboratory, and they were big. Over time, there were more people and more laboratories, so eventually they all got divided up. Before the move, I shared an office in Kinsey Hall with Merrick and another volunteer, Lady Harrington. For us to have our own office was absolutely magical.

I would say the biggest impact of moving, however, was the fact that we now had the Lenart Auditorium for lectures. Previously, we had public lectures in different places. It really was a hunt and peck type of a thing to find an available room for the evening, and who knew what condition the project and screen were in and so on. The Lenart Auditorium was promised to us for Thursday evenings, and it worked quite well. In the beginning, however, we had a problem because they also had first-year undergraduate classes in there. Although there were big signs everywhere prohibiting food and drink, when Lady and I would go in before the lecture just to check things out, most of the time there would be half-eaten hamburgers and ants crawling over cups of ice cream. One time it was so bad and we had a very important speaker coming (not that they weren’t all important), so I called Chris [Donnan, then director of the Fowler Museum] and said, “This is just not suitable.” He came down with everyone who was upstairs with buckets and mops, and they cleaned it all up. Oh my gosh. It was great.

MJ: Do you have a favorite memory of your time at the institute? HG: I’m a people person. I really enjoy interacting with people, with the speakers, with the students. The students were absolutely wonderful, especially during the ten years we had the Maya weekend, which was such a big and successful event. The students were very much part of it because they all volunteered their time to help. I won’t say we ran it on a shoestring, but there were so many things that we wanted to do, and when you bring the top-10 Mayan scholars in the world to speak, that will cost you quite a bit of money.

MJ: Let’s talk about the students, because they were a big part of what you did. HG: Absolutely. You asked if I still keep in touch with them. I was their administrative adviser, but some of them really became my friends, especially the students who were a little bit older. We would all get together in the student lounge and talk, or have lunch together— staff, faculty, and students. I started to write down the names of the students I kept in touch with, and the list got longer and longer and longer! Most of them I now keep in touch with through Facebook.

MJ: In addition to the public lecture program and the Maya weekend, what other traditions at the Cotsen Institute did you start? HG: In 1990 I instituted the Pyramid of Donors, honoring our donors and at the same time creating enthusiasm to become one. This was followed in 1992 by The Trowel: The Institute of Archaeology Highest Honor, for those who contributed to the institute in other than financial ways. The first was later complemented by the Lloyd Cotsen Prize for Lifetime Achievement in World Archaeology. The receiver of the first trowel was Lloyd Cotsen, who not only made the institute financially independent but was also a lifelong classical archaeologist, albeit only in his precious time off.

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Figure 5. Helle on safari in 2009. Highlights included sleeping in tents with lions mating behind the trees (at least that’s what they were told) and gin and tonics over ice at the end of each day of driving and looking at animals.

Figure 6. Helle prepares for the Cotsen party at the Seventy-Eighth Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology (Honolulu, Hawai‘i, 2013).

Figure 7. The retirement party of Helle in the Davis Courtyard of the Fowler Museum, May 9, 2016. Left to right: Jill Silton, Shannon McGarry, Willeke Wendrich, Charles Stanish, and Helle. (Photograph by Tanja Hrast.)

The open house was another thing that I started, meant to inform the interested general public about our fieldwork, our laboratory research, and our publications. We had lectures at 7:30 in the evening. And believe it or not, people actually drove all the way to UCLA at that time. We later decided to show people the laboratories, so we opened them at 5:00, before the lecture. After a few years of doing that, we switched to a weekend.

MJ: Who did you invite for the open house? HG: Absolutely everybody! The UCLA Lab School, for instance. All the parents got invitations. We advertised it in the Daily Bruin. Then, once the Friends of Archaeology [now the Friends of the Cotsen Institute] got bigger, we would send mailers out. In my last couple of years, I started to see a drop-off in the number of people coming. I think that freeway traffic and parking were really starting to hinder attendance. Now you have a really wonderful opportunity with Zoom, and I hope that you’re going to continue to use it. It means that I can stay engaged, as can all the alumni and faculty who move away from Los Angeles. MJ: Well, Helle, what’s next? HG: I hope I will continue doing a little bit of archaeology. I am taking my car to Maryland, so I am going to remain mobile. There is a place called the Londontown Historic Park, and they are quite willing to take volunteers. It’s a beautiful place and only 20 minutes from my new home. The Dumbarton Oaks Pre-Colombian Society of Washington, DC, has a lot of Zoom presentations, so I think I’ll stay entertained.

MJ: You’ll be missed for sure. HG: I will always miss UCLA. It has a spot not just in my heart but also in my daughter’s heart, because she went to UCLA. When family visited, going to UCLA was always the one thing we really had to do. So her children have grown up at least once a year going to the UCLA campus.

MJ: I feel like we could go on reminiscing for hours. HG: Thank you for this hour. It was great. Take care of the institute. Bye-bye.