to research on a European scale. His career was relatively brief—roughly fifteen years between 1899 when he retired from his manufacturing business and 1914 when he died as a result of action during World War I. Déchelette was a self-taught scholar, never belonging to the academic elite or sharing in its exclusive focus on classical archaeology. He was, both socially and intellectually, above the level of local scholars and amateurs, who were limited to their arrondissement or canton. He was a correspondent of the Institut de France and the Société des Antiquaires, a member of the Comité des Travaux Historiques, a divisional inspector of the Société Française d’Archéologie, and a conservator of the Antiquites et Objets d’Art du Departement de la Loire.

Déchelette’s success in the field of protohistoric archaeology was no accident, and in the no-man’s-land between history and prehistory he pioneered what innovations were possible at the frontier where different disciplines meet.

Faced with a fragmented discipline in which archaeological remains were interpreted in isolation, Déchelette gathered together scattered records, connected disparate data and defined a relevant method that would work for all the periods covered by archaeology. He acquired an encyclopedic knowledge that enabled him to tackle problems from a synthetic perspective. When the publisher Picard proposed a manual of national archaeology, Déchelette was the obvious person to do it, writing the four volumes of the Manuel d’archeologie prehistorique, celtique et galloromaine between 1908 and 1914.

Déchelette was also one of the first archaeologists to examine the structure of empirical archaeological information. His 1904 publication Les vases ceramiques ornes de la Gaule romaine probably gives the best account of his method. The analysis of decorative techniques coupled with the identification of categories of vases clarified the apparent chaos of the sherds and indicated the existence of a series of workshops ranked in time and space. It was thus possible to discern the general development of the ceramic industry in the Gallo-Roman era, which coincided with a gradual shift in the centers of production from northern Italy to the banks of the Rhine. On a more detailed level the study of the decorative motifs and the stamped forms allowed archaeologists to identify each workshop by the individual output of its potters. In turn researchers could then trace how techniques and decorative themes were transmitted from workshop to workshop or even from potter to potter. The next step could be an analysis of the changes in the iconographic repertory, thereby moving from a technochronological study of the archaeological materials to questions of economic history or historical anthropology.

Déchelette, the father of French protohistory, was not a creative genius. He was a conscientious worker who applied himself enthusiastically to his archaeological pursuits in his retirement as he had done to his career in manufacturing.

He was awarded the Legion d’Honneur and given an honorary doctorate by the University of Freiburg. He was a foreign member of the Academies of Madrid and Stockholm and a contributing member of the Deutsches Institut and of the Archaeological Societies of London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Copenhagen, Brussels, Prague, and Hamburg.

Laurent Olivier;

translated by Judith Braid

References

For references, see Encyclopedia of Archaeology: The Great Archaeologists, Vol. 1, ed. Tim Murray (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1999), 287–288.

Deetz, James J.F.

(1930–2001)

After receiving his B.A. (1957), M.A. (1959), and Ph.D. (1960) from Harvard University, James J. F. Deetz taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara (1960–1978), Harvard University (1965–1966), Brown University (1967–1978), the College of William and Mary (1977–1978), and the University of California, Berkeley (1978–1993). He then became the David A. Harrison Professor of New World Studies at the University of Virginia. Deetz is acclaimed as a masterful teacher who entertains and inspires the students who flock to his ever-popular courses.

The author of over sixty articles and books that are influential in both historical and prehistoric