archaeology, Deetz was admired for his clear and accessible writing. His Ph.D. dissertation, The Dynamics of Stylistic Change in Arikara Ceramics (1965), was heralded for its innovative statistical analyses of artifact variation as a means of delineating shifts in social organization and patterns of kinship among the Arikara Indians of the Missouri River Valley before and after European contact. His next book, Invitation to Archaeology (1967), was used extensively as a textbook for introductory classes in archaeology, and his popular introduction to historical archaeology, In Small Things Forgotten (1977), remains in wide distribution and has had multiple printings. Deetz’s Flowerdew Hundred (1993) received the 1994 James Mooney Award from the Southern Anthropological Society and the 1995 Distinguished Book Award of the Society of Colonial Wars, New York.

From 1967 to 1978, Deetz served as assistant director of Plimoth Plantation, conducting excavations at a number of historical sites in and around plymouth, massachusetts, including seventeenth-century Pilgrim settlements. From 1982 until the time of his death he was director of research and a member of the board of directors of the Flowerdew Hundred Foundation, Hopewell, Virginia, where he directed field schools and summer institutes in American historical archaeology, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, at seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century sites at flowerdew hundred plantation. From 1984 Deetz held the post of honorary visiting professor of historical archaeology at the University of Cape Town, south africa, and from 1983 he conducted research on the British colonial frontier of the eastern Cape as part of his broader investigation of the comparative archaeology of English colonialism.

Grounded in structuralism, Deetz’s approach was synthetic, working from data outward, emphasizing qualitative as well as quantitative evaluations, incorporating multiple and complementary lines of evidence, and allying historical documents closely with excavated evidence. His interest lay in the details of the everyday lives of, for example, early settlers, indigenous peoples, colonists, and African Americans, and his method comprised probing diverse categories of material culture such as houses, gravestones, ceramics, musical instruments, and clay pipes. By examining the products of individuals, Deetz brought to light the underlying cultural rules that generate the patterns of thought which are manifest in social behavior and material culture.

Mary C. Beaudry

References

Deetz, J. 1963. “Archaeological Investigations at La Purisma Mission.” In UCLA Archaeological Survey Annual Report 1962–1963, 165–241. Los Angeles: Department of Anthropology-Sociology, University of California at Los Angeles.

———. 1965. “The Dynamics of Stylistic Change in Arikara Ceramics.” Illinois Studies in Anthropology 4. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

———. 1967. Invitation to Archaeology. Garden City, NY: Natural History Press. Translated into Japanese, Tokyo: Tuttle-Mori Agency, 1988.

———. 1971. Man’s Imprint from the Past: Readings in the Methods of Archaeology. Boston: Little Brown and Company.

———. 1977. In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.

———. 1988a. “American Historical Archaeology: Methods and Results.” Science 239 (22 January): 362–367.

———. 1988b. “History and Archaeological Theory: Walter Taylor Revisited.” American Antiquity 53, no. 1: 13–22.

———. 1988c. “Material Culture and Worldview in Colonial Anglo-America.” In The Recovery of Meaning: Historical Archaeology in the Eastern United States, 219–235. Ed. M.P. Leone and P.B. Potter, Jr. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

———. 1989. “Archaeography, Archaeology, or Archeology?” American Journal of Archaeology 93: 429–435.

———. 1993. Flowerdew Hundred: The Archaeology of a Virginia Plantation, 1619–1864. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia.

Deetz, J. F., and E. S. Dethlefsen. 1964. “Death’s Heads, Cherubs, and Willow Trees: Experimental Archaeology in Colonial Cemeteries.” American Antiquity 31, no. 4: 502–510.