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James Bennett Griffin | |
---|---|
Born | |
Died | May 31, 1997 92) | (aged
Citizenship | American |
Alma mater | University of Chicago, (BA, 1927; MA 1930) University of Michigan (PhD 1936) |
Known for | Eastern North American prehistory |
Awards | Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1968 |
Scientific career | |
Fields | anthropology, archaeology |
Institutions | University of Michigan, Ann Arbor USA |
James Bennett Griffin or Jimmy Griffin (January 12, 1905 – May 31, 1997) was an American archaeologist. He is regarded as one of the most influential archaeologists in North America in the 20th century. [1]
Born in Atchison, Kansas, the son of Charles and Maude Griffin, Jimmy and his family subsequently moved to Denver, Colorado. His father was a supplier for railroad equipment. Griffin's interest in archaeology was born through reading as a child and his love for visiting museums. When Jimmy was eleven his family moved to Oak Park, Illinois, where he lived until he enrolled in college. He attended Oak Park schools and was a cheerleader at Oak Park and River Forest High School. At school in Oak Park he met Fred Eggan and Wendell Bennett. His friendship with these two schoolmates would last into graduate school and his professional career in anthropology. In 1933, he married Ruby Fletcher. They had three children: John, David, and James. Griffin retired in 1976 and remained in Ann Arbor for several years. His wife died in 1979, and in 1984, he moved to Washington D.C. He met Mary Dewitt there and soon married her. They spent twelve years together living in Washington before Griffin’s death in Bethesda, Maryland aged 92.
Griffin attended and graduated from Oak Park and River Forest High School where he became a champion swimmer, as well as cheer leader. He then enrolled into the University of Chicago in 1923 where he initially planned on studying Business Administration. After two years in the BA program, he transferred to the program of General Science. He graduated with his bachelor's degree in 1927. After graduating, Griffin took a brief break from school to work for Amoco, but later returned to the University of Chicago. In 1930, he graduated with a Master of Arts Degree in Sociology and Anthropology. In 1936 he was awarded a special Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Michigan, as the department there did not yet have a formal Ph.D. program. [2]
Griffin accepted a research fellowship in 1933 at the University of Michigan. That same year, he moved to Ann Arbor, where he would live for the next five decades. His first fieldwork was conducted in the summer of 1929, where he excavated at the Parker Heights Mound near Quincy, Illinois, a project led by William Krogman. By 1931, Griffin had gained enough experience in the field to conduct his own excavations. He led an excavation of Upper Susquehanna Valley, Pennsylvania, for the Tioga Point Museum. The following season, the project had to be postponed due to budget cuts caused by the depression. Griffin spent the season writing a manuscript about the summer spent excavating the Parker Heights Mound a few years earlier. However, this manuscript was not published until 1991 by the Center for American Archeology in Kampsville, Illinois. In the fall of 1939, Griffin accompanied James A. Ford and Philip Phillips on the start of a Lower Mississippi survey project. In 1945, he was appointed Associate Professor of Archaeology at Michigan. Four years later, he became a full professor. Between 1940 and 1946, Griffin spent nearly three field seasons working on surface surveys, while his partner Phillips worked on stratigraphic excavations at sites in the southeast, work published in 1951 in a monograph that has come to be regarded as a classic in American Archaeology, Archeological Survey In the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, 1940-1947 (Phillips, Ford and Griffin 1951) After this project, Griffin began work with A. C. Spaulding Archived 2013-05-21 at the Wayback Machine on the Central Mississippi Survey in 1950. Fieldwork was done in southeast Missouri and at the Roots site near the Kaskaskia River, but the main project was at Cahokia. These projects continued for a few more years, but Griffin stepped down as the leader of them in the mid-1950s. Griffin also conducted work in Europe, Mexico, and the former Soviet Union.
Griffin’s primary involvement in field activities shifted to a broader synthetic study and overview of archaeology itself. However, he still was involved with fieldwork. Between the years of 1963 and 1964, Griffin supervised an excavation at the Norton Mound group, a Hopewell Tradition-related site in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Soon after this, one of Griffins students, James E. Price, encouraged him to return to the northern end of the Lower Mississippi Valley with the Powers Phase project in southeast Missouri (1968–1972). The involvement with this site helped graduate students gain experience in new collecting and field techniques.
Though Griffin is known as a superb field and technical research archaeologist, he was also a distinguished professor whose teaching abilities inspired many of his students throughout the years to become archaeologists as well. He helped train dozens of North American archaeologists, many of whom went on to prominence themselves. His legacy as a professor was that in the 1970s and 1980s, many of the major archaeological graduate programs in North America were staffed by Griffin’s students. Even now, most archaeologists who focus on Eastern Woodlands prehistory are linked to Griffin or one or more of his students in some way. Those who knew him personally said he had an extraordinary ability to teach, and that his students worked hard to gain his respect. In addition to his teaching at Michigan, he served as a visiting professor at many schools, including the University of California, Berkeley in 1960, the University of Colorado in 1962, and Louisiana State University in 1971.
Throughout his career, Griffin was a regular participant at conferences and meetings of numerous professional organizations. His record of attendance was extraordinary at both the Society for American Archaeology meetings (which he helped found in 1934) and the Southeastern Archaeological Conference (which he founded with James A. Ford in 1937). He highly sought after by symposium organizers as a presenter or discussant. Griffin was well known for his extraordinary memory of the tens of thousands of artifacts he had seen in collections from all over Eastern North America—making connections between an artifact in one collection to another artifact he may have examined many years earlier at another institution. His ability to make these connections across space and time often yielded dramatic insights from a single photographic slide or presented paper. He was also known for his a sharp wit and his devastatingly sarcastic and thoroughly non-PC sense of humor, which he used to great effect. He could be a merciless critic of what he considered poorly done archaeology or sloppy scholarship, both verbally and in print. Most notably, he was embroiled in a long and antagonistic intellectual relationship with the next reigning lion in American archaeology, Lewis R. Binford.
Griffin retired from Michigan in 1976, but eight years later, he moved to Washington D.C. to become associated with the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution until he died in 1997.
Griffin received the Viking Fund Award and Medal in Archaeology in 1957 from the Wenner Grenn Foundation. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1968. He received the University of Michigan's Faculty Achievement Award in 1971; the same year he received an Honorary Doctorate from Indiana University. The University of Michigan honored him with the Henry Russell Lectureship for Outstanding Research in 1972. The Society for American Archaeology awarded Griffin the Fryxell Award for excellence in interdisciplinary research in 1980 and the Distinguished Service Award in 1984.
He served as the director of the Museum of Anthropology of Michigan from 1946-1975. He organized and managed the Ceramic Repository for the Eastern United States, a central source of information and collections about prehistoric pottery based out of the University of Michigan. He and H.R. Crane founded the University’s Radiocarbon Laboratory that was in operation from 1949-1970. He served many years in the Council of the International Union of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences. He was considered the premier Eastern North American ceramics expert by many of his colleagues. He wrote more than 260 articles and eight books about ceramics and applying other sciences to archaeology. Altogether, Griffin was among the most honored archaeologists of his generation.
Philip Phillips was an influential archaeologist in the United States during the 20th century. Although his first graduate work was in architecture, he later received a doctorate from Harvard University under advisor Alfred Marston Tozzer. His first archaeological experiences were on Iroquois sites, but he specialized in the Mississippian culture, especially its Lower Mississippi Valley incarnation.
Glenn Albert Black was an American archaeologist, author, and part-time university lecturer who was among the first professional archaeologists to study prehistoric sites in Indiana continuously. Black, a pioneer and innovator in developing archaeology field research techniques, is best known for his excavation of Angel Mounds, a Mississippian community near present-day Evansville, Indiana, that he brought to national attention. Angel Mounds was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964. Black was largely self-taught and began serious work on archaeological sites in Indiana in the 1930s, before there were many training opportunities in archaeology in the United States. He is considered to have been the first full-time professional archaeologist focusing on Indiana's ancient history, and the only professional archaeologist in the state until the 1960s. During his thirty-five-year career as an archaeologist in Indiana, Black also worked as a part-time lecturer at Indiana University Bloomington from 1944 to 1960 and conducted a field school at the Angel site during the summer months.
Robert S. Carr is an American archaeologist and the current executive director of The Archaeological and Historical Conservancy, Inc. He specializes in Southeastern archaeology, with particular emphasis on archaeology in Florida. He has also conducted fieldwork in the Bahamas.
Arthur Randolph Kelly was an American professional archaeologist. He made numerous contributions to archeology in Georgia, which began with directing excavations at the Macon Plateau Site in 1933, part of the federal archeology program that provided jobs while undertaking studies of important sites. During his career, he also worked at the Etowah Mound and Village site, Lamar Mounds, the Lake Douglas Mound, the Oliver and Walter F. George River Basin surveys, the Estatoe Mound, the Chauga Mound, and the Bell Field Mound, among others in Georgia.
James Alfred Ford was an American archaeologist. He was born in Water Valley, Mississippi, in February 1911. While growing up in the region, where ancient earthwork mounds are visible, he became interested in work on the ancient Native American cultures who built these works.
Timothy R. Pauketat is an American archaeologist, director of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey, the Illinois State Archaeologist, and professor of anthropology and medieval studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is known for his historical theories and his investigations at Cahokia, the major center of precolonial Mississippian culture in the American Bottom region of Illinois near St. Louis, Missouri.
Thomas Pluckhahn is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of South Florida. Pluckhahn specializes in the field of anthropology include Eastern United States Prehistory, Mesoamerican Prehistory, Cultural Resource Management, Settlement Pattern Studies, Archaeology of Households, Environmental Anthropology, Ceramic Analysis, and GIS Applications for Anthropology.
John Wallace Griffin was the State Archaeologist of Florida, the Director of the St. Augustine Historical Society, and a Regional Archaeologist for the National Park Service.
The Upper Mississippian cultures were located in the Upper Mississippi basin and Great Lakes region of the American Midwest. They were in existence from approximately A.D. 1000 until the Protohistoric and early Historic periods.
Dan Franklin Morse is an archaeologist specializing in the prehistory of the midwestern United States and the central Mississippi Valley, research summarized in a number of books, monographs, and technical articles. He is best known for his 1983 synthesis of the "Archaeology of the Central Mississippi Valley" with Phyllis A. Morse, and for his 1997 volume issued by the Smithsonian Institution Press on "Sloan: A Paleoindian Dalton Cemetery in Arkansas." The Sloan site is the location of the oldest marked cemetery found to date in the Americas. He conducted excavations on a great many other significant archaeological sites during his career, including at Brand, Cahokia, Nodena, Parkin, and Zebree. Morse retired from his posts as Survey Archeologist for the Arkansas Archaeological Survey and as Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arkansas in 1997, after 30 years of service, but continues to work on publications and interact with students and colleagues on sites.
Clarence H. Webb was an American medical doctor and archaeologist who conducted extensive research on prehistoric sites in the southeastern United States. A pediatrician by profession, he became interested in archaeology on a camping trip with his sons where he found some small, triangular points. A distinguished physician, his archaeological research included the study of Caddoan culture, and at a number of major sites such as Poverty Point, John Pearce. , Gahagan, and Belcher Mound.
Charles Harrison McNutt III was an American archaeologist and a scholar of the prehistoric Southeastern United States. He conducted fieldwork and published works on the archaeology of the American Southwest and the Great Plains in South Dakota. His work emphasized on a strong understanding of cultural history and statistical analysis.
Robert Stuart Neitzel was an archaeologist born on May 6, 1911, in Falls City, Nebraska, and died in 1980. He was married to Gwen Thomas in 1941 and they had two children, Sarah Cain and Stuart Allen. His parents were Robert Allen Neitzel and Hannah Sayre Meker Cain.
Albert Clanton Spaulding was an American anthropologist and processual archaeologist who encouraged the application of quantitative statistics in archaeological research and the legitimacy of anthropology as a science. His push for thorough statistical analysis in the field triggered a series of academic debates with archaeologist James Ford in which the nature of archaeological typologies was meticulously investigated—a dynamic discourse now known as the Ford-Spaulding Debate. He was also instrumental in increasing funding for archaeology through the National Science Foundation.
The Carson Mounds, also known as the Carson Site and Carson-Montgomery- is a large Mississippian culture archaeological site located near Clarksdale in Coahoma County, Mississippi, United States, in the Yazoo Basin. Only a few large earthen mounds are still present at Carson to this day. Archaeologists have suggested that Carson is one of the more important archaeological sites in the state of Mississippi.
The Cobb Institute of Archaeology is a research and service unit of the College of Arts and Sciences at Mississippi State University (MSU). It was established in 1971 with a goal of promoting archaeological research and education at Mississippi State University. The Lois Dowdle Cobb Museum of Archaeology and its artifact collections are included in the Institute's facilities, and many of the Institute's staff serve as teaching faculty while having formal cross-affiliations with the Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures. The Institute's archaeological research projects cover a wide geographic and temporal range, but focus on the cultures of the Near East and the Southeastern United States. Through collaboration with academic departments on campus, the Institute offers a wide range of opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students at Mississippi State University to engage in archaeological-related research and learning activities.
The Oak Forest Site (11Ck-53) is located in Oak Forest, Cook County, Illinois, near the city of Chicago. It is classified as a late prehistoric to Protohistoric/Early Historic site with Upper Mississippian Huber affiliation.
The Anker Site (11Ck-21) is located on the Little Calumet River near Chicago, Illinois. It is classified as a late prehistoric site with Upper Mississippian Huber affiliation.
The Fisher Mound Group is a group of burial mounds with an associated village site located on the DesPlaines River near its convergence with the Kankakee River where they combine to form the Illinois River, in Will County, Illinois, about 60 miles southwest of Chicago. It is a multi-component stratified site representing several Prehistoric Upper Mississippian occupations as well as minor Late Woodland and Early Historic components.
The Walker-Hooper Site (47-GL-65) is a multicomponent prehistoric site complex located on the Grand River in the Upper Fox River drainage area in Green Lake County, Wisconsin. It consisted of at least 2 village sites and several mound groups. It was excavated by S.A. Barrett under the auspices of the Milwaukee Public Museum in 1921 and again in 1967 by Guy Gibbon of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The major component of the site is an Upper Mississippian Oneota palisaded village. Other components were also present, mainly Late Woodland but also including Archaic, Early Woodland and Middle Woodland.