For Charlotte Cardarella, a visit to the Scholastic book fair in first grade turned out to be a career-defining moment.

Among the picture books and novelty erasers, she found a book on mummification in ancient Egypt — one with clear overlays on each page depicting the stages of the ritual and touching on everything from canopic jars to hieroglyphs. She was instantly fascinated.

“Something about it was so interesting to me, and I was hooked,” Cardarella said. “After taking that book home, I remember looking for another book on how to read hieroglyphs. I worked on teaching myself hieroglyphs for years. The more I read, the more I wanted to know.”

By the time she was in high school, Cardarella thought she would leave her interest in Egyptology behind. She had also developed passions for math and science and decided to pursue what she thought would be a more practical major in college: mechanical engineering. But after being accepted to numerous engineering programs, she had an epiphany.

“I realized, ‘I don’t want to do this. I’m doing it for the wrong reasons,’” she said. “My grandfather was an engineer, and I was planning to do it for my family’s sake. But my family assured me they would be happier if I was doing something that made me happy.”

Cardarella, who is from Temecula, California, spent her first year at Holy Cross College reevaluating her career path. While she was there, she joined the Notre Dame Marching Band and soon fell in love with the campus and the community. She transferred to Notre Dame as a sophomore and decided to major in Arabic and anthropology, with the ultimate goal of studying ancient Egypt.

“I had never been to the Midwest before visiting campus with my dad during my senior year of high school, but this place has become a second home to me,” she said. “Coming to Notre Dame was the best decision I could have made.”

Cardarella focuses on archaeology in her anthropology major and has had the chance to participate in two digs at Collier Lodge on the banks of the Kankakee River in Indiana.

That hands-on experience will be invaluable next year as she begins a graduate program in Egyptology at the University of Chicago.

“It’s incredible to be able to do this level of research as an undergrad,” she said. “It’s pretty common for archaeology students to go to graduate school never having done a dig, and I feel so lucky that I’ve gotten to do it twice here.”

On campus, Cardarella works in an archaeology lab, studying Jordanian pottery from Bâb edh-Dhrâ, the site of an Early Bronze Age cemetery near the Dead Sea. She also works as a research assistant in the Center for Environmental Science and Technology, where she just finished a senior thesis under the guidance of Professor Mark Schurr. For that project, she used stable isotope analysis to reconstruct the climate of the Kankakee Valley based on Native American artifacts and shells she found while working at the dig.

“I think when people think of archaeology, they either think of Indiana Jones, or they think you’re just digging and doing paperwork,” she said. “And, to be fair, that’s part of it. But there’s so much more to it than that. We get to use these really cool, STEM-based methodologies all the time in the lab. I still love math and science, and I love that I can do that as part of my anthropology major.”

Read her full story at nd.edu/commencement-2025

Originally published by Carrie Gates at al.nd.edu on May 14, 2025.