James Bennett Griffin
Encyclopedia
James Bennett Griffin (January 12, 1905 – May 17, 1997) was an American archaeologist. He is regarded as one of the most influential archaeologists in North America
in the 20th century.
, 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.
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 Bachelors 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.
. 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 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, Berkley 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.
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.
North America
North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...
in the 20th century.
Personal life
Born in Atchison, KansasAtchison, Kansas
Atchison is a city situated along the Missouri River in the eastern part of Atchison County, located in northeast Kansas, in the Central United States. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 11,021. It is the county seat and most populous city of Atchison County...
, the son of Charles and Maude Griffin, Jimmy and his family subsequently moved to Denver, Colorado
Colorado
Colorado is a U.S. state that encompasses much of the Rocky Mountains as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the western edge of the Great Plains...
. His father was a supplier for railroad equipment. Griffin's interest in archaeology
Archaeology
Archaeology, or archeology , is the study of human society, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts and cultural landscapes...
was born through reading as a child and his love for visiting museums. When Jimmy was eleven his family moved to Oak Park, Illinois
Oak Park, Illinois
Oak Park, Illinois is a suburb bordering the west side of the city of Chicago in Cook County, Illinois, United States. It is the twenty-fifth largest municipality in Illinois. Oak Park has easy access to downtown Chicago due to public transportation such as the Chicago 'L' Blue and Green lines,...
, 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
Oak Park and River Forest High School
Oak Park and River Forest High School, or OPRF, is a public four-year high school located in Oak Park, Illinois, a western suburb of Chicago, Illinois, in the United States. It is the only school of Oak Park and River Forest District 200....
. At school in Oak Park he met Fred Eggan
Fred Eggan
Frederick Russell Eggan was an American anthropologist best known for his innovative application of the principles of British social anthropology to the study of Native American tribes. He was the favorite student of the British social anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown during Radcliffe-Brown's...
and Wendell Bennett. His friendship with these two schoolmates would last into graduate school and his professional career in anthropology
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
. 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
Bethesda, Maryland
Bethesda is a census designated place in southern Montgomery County, Maryland, United States, just northwest of Washington, D.C. It takes its name from a local church, the Bethesda Meeting House , which in turn took its name from Jerusalem's Pool of Bethesda...
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 ChicagoUniversity of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
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 Bachelors Degree in 1927. After graduating, Griffin took a brief break from school to work for Amoco
Amoco
Amoco Corporation, originally Standard Oil Company , was a global chemical and oil company, founded in 1889 around a refinery located in Whiting, Indiana, United States....
, but later returned to the University of Chicago. In 1930, he graduated with a Master of Arts
Master of Arts (postgraduate)
A Master of Arts from the Latin Magister Artium, is a type of Master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The M.A. is usually contrasted with the M.S. or M.Sc. degrees...
Degree in Sociology
Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
and Anthropology.
Professional career
Griffin accepted a research fellowship in 1933 at the University of MichiganUniversity of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of 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
Quincy, Illinois
Quincy, known as Illinois' "Gem City," is a river city along the Mississippi River and the county seat of Adams County. As of the 2010 census the city held a population of 40,633. The city anchors its own micropolitan area and is the economic and regional hub of West-central Illinois, catering a...
, 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
Pennsylvania
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a U.S. state that is located in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The state borders Delaware and Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, New York and Ontario, Canada, to the north, and New Jersey to...
, 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
Center for American Archeology
The Center for American Archeology, or CAA, is an independent non-profit 501 research and education institution located near the Illinois River, in Kampsville, Illinois, USA...
in Kampsville, Illinois
Kampsville, Illinois
Kampsville is a village in Calhoun County, Illinois, United States, located on the west bank of the Illinois River. The population was 350 at the 2000 census.-General information:...
.
In the fall of 1939, Griffin accompanied James A. Ford
James A. Ford
James Alfred Ford was an American archaeologist. He was born in Water Valley, Mississippi, on February 12, 1911. He became interested in work on Native American mound research while growing up in Mississippi.-Archaeological work:...
and Philip Phillips
Philip Phillips (archaeologist)
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...
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 on the Central Mississippi Survey in 1950. Fieldwork was done in southeast Missouri
Missouri
Missouri is a US state located in the Midwestern United States, bordered by Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska. With a 2010 population of 5,988,927, Missouri is the 18th most populous state in the nation and the fifth most populous in the Midwest. It...
and at the Roots site near the Kaskaskia River
Kaskaskia River
The Kaskaskia River is a tributary of the Mississippi River, approximately long, in central and southern Illinois in the United States. The second largest river system within Illinois, it drains a rural area of farms, as well as rolling hills along river bottoms of hardwood forests in its lower...
, but the main project was at Cahokia
Cahokia
Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site is the area of an ancient indigenous city located in the American Bottom floodplain, between East Saint Louis and Collinsville in south-western Illinois, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri. The site included 120 human-built earthwork mounds...
. 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
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
.
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
Grand Rapids, Michigan
Grand Rapids is a city in the U.S. state of Michigan. The city is located on the Grand River about 40 miles east of Lake Michigan. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 188,040. In 2010, the Grand Rapids metropolitan area had a population of 774,160 and a combined statistical area, Grand...
. 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, Berkley in 1960, the University of Colorado
University of Colorado at Boulder
The University of Colorado Boulder is a public research university located in Boulder, Colorado...
in 1962, and Louisiana State University
Louisiana State University
Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, most often referred to as Louisiana State University, or LSU, is a public coeducational university located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The University was founded in 1853 in what is now known as Pineville, Louisiana, under the name...
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
Society for American Archaeology
The Society for American Archaeology is the largest organization of professional archaeologists of the Americas in the world. The Society was founded in 1934 and today has over 7000 members. The Society holds an annual conference and publishes the flagship journal of American archaeology,...
meetings (which he helped found in 1934) and the Southeastern Archaeological Conference (which he founded with James A. Ford
James A. Ford
James Alfred Ford was an American archaeologist. He was born in Water Valley, Mississippi, on February 12, 1911. He became interested in work on Native American mound research while growing up in Mississippi.-Archaeological work:...
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
Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian Institution is an educational and research institute and associated museum complex, administered and funded by the government of the United States and by funds from its endowment, contributions, and profits from its retail operations, concessions, licensing activities, and magazines...
until he died in 1997.
Accomplishments and Awards
Griffin received the Viking FundAxel Wenner-Gren
Axel Lennart Wenner-Gren was a Swedish entrepreneur and one of the wealthiest men in the world during the 1930s....
Award and Medal in Archaeology in 1957 from the Wenner Grenn Foundation. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences
United States National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine." As a national academy, new members of the organization are elected annually by current members, based on their distinguished and...
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
Indiana University
Indiana University is a multi-campus public university system in the state of Indiana, United States. Indiana University has a combined student body of more than 100,000 students, including approximately 42,000 students enrolled at the Indiana University Bloomington campus and approximately 37,000...
. The University of Michigan honored him with the Henry Russell Lectureship for Outstanding Research in 1972. The Society for American Archaeology
Society for American Archaeology
The Society for American Archaeology is the largest organization of professional archaeologists of the Americas in the world. The Society was founded in 1934 and today has over 7000 members. The Society holds an annual conference and publishes the flagship journal of 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.
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