James Deetz

James Fanto Deetz, Ph.D (February 8, 1930 – November 25, 2000) spent a majority of his career focusing on culture change, and how artifacts reflect this change over time. Deetz focused on the record of colonial New England as well as sites in South Dakota, South Africa, and California. He is recognized as one of the founders of the discipline of historical archaeology in North America.

Introduction: The majority of Deetz’s work focused on historical sites in New England, including; the Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts and, the Virginian Tidewater region. In 1948, he graduated from Fort Hill High School in Cumberland, Maryland. Immediately after; he left for Cambridge, Massachusetts to attend Harvard University from 1948-1950. James enlisted into the Air Force in 1951 to take part in the Korean War Effort, married his wife Eleanore Joanne Kelley three years later, and was honorably discharged in 1955. Before leaving for the service James spent one field season working on the Missouri River near the Oahe Dam. After receiving his B.A. in 1957 Deetz returned to the River Basin Survey and used the experience as the foundation for his Ph.D Dissertation "An Archaeological Approach to Kinship Change in Eighteenth Century Arikara Culture" which was completed in 1960 From 1958-1959 Deetz continued his dissertation work in South Dakota, using an IBM mainframe to examine "stylistic coherence" on thousands of rim sherds from the Howland site. , Deetz was using a set of 1/64-in. drill bits to date the early historic pipe stems that would help him establish an occupation sequence. This was also where he was introduced to colonial archeaology by Harry Hornblower II. The two work together for several years on early pilgrim settlements in Massachusetts, as well as study the surrounding native inhabitants. While working on site at the Plymouth Plantation as the advisor; Deetz also became an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Santa Barbara. Over the next few years Deetz worked and taught, becoming very popular in both aspects of his career. Throughout the 1960’s Deetz continued to build upon his career, including lecturing at schools, teaching at UCSB as well as Brown, and continuing work on the Plymouth site, as well recording and studying gravestones from the Concord, Massachusetts cemetery. In 1965 Deetz’s study on the ceramics from South Dakota was presented at American Anthropological Association in Denver. Over the next few years with the help of Lewis and Sally Binford his work was published as a chapter in Perspectives in Archaeology. This book has become a cornerstone in the library of “New Archaeologists” everywhere. In the mid 1970’s Deetz as assistant director while worked on New England gravestones, and published works co-authored with colleague and friend Edwin Dethlefsen. Deetz and Dethlefsen offered a compelling demonstration of the efficacy of seriation studies in archaeology, and in his own later work Deetz related gravestone carving to broader changes in the lifestyles and world view of colonial New Englanders. From 1972-74 he was on the Executive Committee of the Society for American Archaeology and in 1974, became President of the Society for Historical Archaeology. At the end of his term in 1975 he moved to the Executive Committee of the Society for Historical Archaeology. During his last years teaching at Brown, Deetz as well as Henry Glassie made strides in offering classes dealing with current American archaeological finds and a shift towards structuralism. Deetz spent a year teaching at William & Mary while finishing work at Plymouth. As Deetz’s time in the northeast came to an end he switched his emphasis to African American Archaeology to better help promote heritage and social awareness. In 1979 Deetz began work at University of California, Berkley. He also became the director of the Lowie Museum of Anthropology and continued to be a member of the board for the museum for the rest of his life. While in California, Deetz began work on communities such as the Somersville, California site, as well as Paradise Valley, Nevada. In 1984 Deetz visited Cape Town, South Africa for the first time. He soon began his tenure as a professor and head of the local fieldwork. He brought graduate and undergraduate students from California to the Eastern Cape, where they worked on a number of research projects in cooperation with various South African colleagues. He went back to South Africa 1988-91 as an Honorary Visiting Professor to the University of Cape Town and also for the Eastern Cape Historical Archaeology Project as Director of their Human Sciences Research Council. In 1988 he was made an Overseas Research Fellow by the Human Sciences Research Council. As the 1990’s opened James Deetz took a position at the University of Virginia. After his arrival in Charlottesville, Deetz reworked his classic In Small Things Forgotten (1989), which included some of the most significant results of his research in the Chesapeake, such as his ideas about African-American cultural development in the region. In 1997 The Society for Historical Archaeology awarded Deetz the J. C. Harrington Medal, honoring the strides he made as an anthropologist, as well as a teacher. James F. Deetz died November 25, 2000 at the age of 70. He left behind ten children and was married twice, once to Eleanore Joanne Kelley (1953-1997), and then to Patricia Elena Scott (1997-2000).

Background: James Fanto Deetz was born in Cumberland, Maryland on February 8th, 1930. He was the only son of John Harold Deetz and Catherine Fanto Deetz. Deetz received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D from Harvard. Deetz has performed fieldwork in South Africa, the Chesapeake, Plymouth, South Dakota, California, and Nevada. His major contributions were to colonial archaeology in the New England Region.

Awards and Honors: Deetz was awarded with the 1997 J. C. Harrington Medal, the Harry Hornblower Award in 1999, and was the Harrison Professor of Historical Archaeology. He also became the director of the Lowie Museum of Anthropology and continued to be a member of the board for the rest of his life. Key Excavations: Plymouth, Massachusetts is perhaps Deetz’s best known site. . Other notable sites include:, Mission La Purísima in Lompoc ,California, Medicine Crow site, Missouri He also participated in fieldwork in South Dakota, Nevada, South Africa, work in the New England region, as well as the Chesapeake region. Research Emphasis: James Deetz helped the push to understanding historical archaeology as a way of understanding people not through written works but through the actual evidence they left behind. He felt that that was the best way to understand people of the past the way they really were. He stressed the idea that artifacts are the remains that cannot deceive, and act as a key into past cultures. Deetz stresses the point that material culture can show us evidence of culture that is omitted or twisted in literature and that writing is almost always biased, while “material culture may be the most objective source of information we have concerning America's past” (Small Things Forgotten, 1975:160) Deetz was quoted as saying "after 30 years in the business, I have first been a culture historian, then a New Archaeologist, then a structuralist, and now apparently, a passionate post-structuralist. The fact is, I am not doing things that differently from the way I did in the '60s. I don't think I have changed at all; the transformations have been in the way my work has been perceived by others. Fine! What goes around comes around, but I cannot help but wonder what kind of an archaeologist I will be in the year 2000." (Berkley Archaeology, vol. 8, number1) Selected Books: • 2000 - The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love, and Death in Plymouth Colony (with Patricia Scott Deetz). New York: W.H. Freeman. • 1996 - In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life. (expanded and revised edition). New York: Anchor, Doubleday. • 1993 - Flowerdew Hundred: The Archaeology of a Virginia Plantation, 1619- 1864. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. • 1977 - In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American Life. New York: Doubleday. • 1965 - The Dynamics of Stylistic Change in Arikara Ceramics. University of Illinois Press • 1971 - Man's imprint from the past. University of Michigan. Digitized 2007. Selected Papers • 1990 - . The Transformation of British Culture in the Eastern Cape, 1820-1860 (with Margot Winer). Social Dynamics vol. 16 no.1 pp. 55-75. • 1988 - American Historical Archaeology: Methods and Results. Science vol. 239, January 22: 362-7. • 1988 - History and Archaeological Theory: Walter Taylor Revisited. American Antiquity 53(1):13-22. • 1968 - New Perspectives in Archaeology. Edited by Lewis and Sally Binford.

External Links: http://www.sha.org/publications/default.htm http://www.histarch.uiuc.edu/plymouth/JDeetzcar.html http://www.virginia.edu/anthropology/faculty/deetz.html http://www.histarch.uiuc.edu/plymouth/JDeetzmem3.html