James Bennett Griffin or Jimmy Griffin (January 12, 1905 – May 31, 1997) was an American
archaeologist
Archaeology or archeology is the scientific study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscap ...
. He is regarded as one of the most influential archaeologists in
North America
North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere and almost entirely within the Western Hemisphere. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South America and the Car ...
in the 20th century.
Personal life
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
Frederick Russell Eggan (September 12, 1906 in Seattle, Washington – May 7, 1991) was an American anthropologist best known for his innovative application of the principles of British social anthropology to the study of Native American tribes. ...
and
Wendell Bennett
Wendell James Bennett (born March 24, 1950) is a Canadian former professional ice hockey player who played in the World Hockey Association (WHA). Bennett played with the Phoenix Roadrunners during the 1974–75 WHA season.. Retrieved March 22, ...
. 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
Anne, alternatively spelled Ann, is a form of the Latin female given name Anna (name), Anna. This in turn is a representation of the Hebrew Hannah (given name), Hannah, which means 'favour' or 'grace'. Related names include Annie (given name), ...
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.
Education
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.
[Griffin, James Bennett
1936 The Cultural Significance of the Ceramic Remains from the Norris Basin. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.]
Professional career
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 th
Parker Heights Moundnear
Quincy, Illinois
Quincy ( ), known as Illinois's "Gem City", is a city in and the county seat of Adams County, Illinois, United States, located on the Mississippi River. The 2020 census counted a population of 39,463 in the city itself, down from 40,633 in 2010. ...
, a project led by
William Krogman
William is a male given name of Germanic origin.Hanks, Hardcastle and Hodges, ''Oxford Dictionary of First Names'', Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, , p. 276. It became very popular in the English language after the Norman conquest of Engl ...
. By 1931, Griffin had gained enough experience in the field to conduct his own excavations. He led an excavation of
Upper Susquehanna Valley
Upper may refer to:
* Shoe upper or ''vamp'', the part of a shoe on the top of the foot
* Stimulant, drugs which induce temporary improvements in either mental or physical function or both
* ''Upper'', the original film title for the 2013 found fo ...
,
Pennsylvania, for th
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 Parker may refer to:
Persons
* Parker (given name)
* Parker (surname)
Places Place names in the United States
*Parker, Arizona
*Parker, Colorado
*Parker, Florida
*Parker, Idaho
*Parker, Kansas
*Parker, Missouri
*Parker, North Carolina
*Parker, Pe ...
a few years earlier. However, this manuscript was not published until 1991 by the
Center for American Archeology
The Center for American Archeology, or CAA, is an independent non-profit 501(c)(3) research and education institution located in Kampsville, Illinois, USA, near the Illinois River. It is dedicated to the exploration of the culture of prehistori ...
in
Kampsville, Illinois.
In the fall of 1939, Griffin accompanied
James A. Ford
James Alfred Ford (February 12, 1911–February 25, 1968) 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 ...
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 SurveyIn the
Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, 1940-1947 (Phillips, Ford and Griffin 1951) After this project, Griffin began work wit
A. C. Spaulding 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 th
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 th
Powers Phaseproject 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 th
Southeastern Archaeological Conference(which he founded with
James A. Ford
James Alfred Ford (February 12, 1911–February 25, 1968) 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 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.
Accomplishments and awards
Griffin received the
Viking Fund Award and Medal in Archaeology in 1957 from the
Wenner Grenn Foundation Wenner is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:
* Axel Wenner-Gren (1881–1961), Swedish entrepreneur, one of the richest men in the world during the 1930s
* Christopher Wenner (born 1954), British journalist and former British telev ...
. He was elected to the
National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...
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 th
Museum of Anthropology of Michiganfrom 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.
Selected publications
(1937) The Archaeological Remains of the Chiwere Sioux(1937) The Chronological Position and Ethnological Relationships of the Fort Ancient Aspect (American Antiquity, Vol. 2, No. 4)(1942) Adena Pottery(1942) On the Historic Location of the Tutelo and the Mohetan in the Ohio Valley(1945) An Interpretation of Siouan Archaeology in the Piedmont of North Carolina and Virginia(1945) The Box Elder Mound in la Salle County, Illinois(1953) Archeological Survey In the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley, 1940-1947(1955) Chronology and Dating Process(1967) Eastern North American Archaeology: A Summary. Science...(1969) Identification of the Sources of Hopewellian Obsidian in the Middle West(1985) An Individual's Participation in American Archaeology, 1928-1985(1985) The Formation of the Society for American Archaeology
References
Bentley Historic Library (University of Michigan) James B. GriffinAnthrosource: American Anthropologist: James B. Griffin 1905-97*
ttps://web.archive.org/web/20080509061757/http://www.saa.org/publications/saabulletin/16-1/SAA18.html Society for American Archaeology: James Bennett Griffinbr>
"Anthropology and Archaeology." Bentley Historical Library University of Michigan. 2008. Bentley Historical Library. 8 Mar 2008Ford, Richard. "James Bennett Griffin." American Anthropologist Vol. 104, No. 202 DEC 2004 635-637. 08 MAR 2008.*Williams, Stephen. "James B. Griffin (1905-1997)." Society for American Archaeology. SAA. 8 Mar 2008
External links
National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir
{{DEFAULTSORT:Griffin, James Bennett
Pre-Columbian scholars
1905 births
1997 deaths
University of Chicago alumni
University of Michigan faculty
People from Atchison, Kansas
Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
University of Michigan alumni
20th-century American archaeologists