Biographical Memoirs Volume 90 (2009) / Chapter Skim
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JAMES BENNETT GRIFFIN
JAMES BENNETT GRIFFIN
Pages 182-197
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From page 183... ...
He received his bachelor of arts from the University of Chicago in 1927. He gained excavation experience in the Illinois field school of the polymathic anthropologist Faye Cooper Cole in the summer of 1930 while working in Fulton County near Peoria, and this fieldwork led to one of his first publications (1934)
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From page 184... ...
With Lilly's funding Griffin drove from project site to project site studying ceramics in the field and making suggestions to excavators. Griffin brought order to the mountains of sherds with a binomial system in which larger groupings based on clay body and inclusions were subdivided into smaller groupings based on surface treatment and decoration; this improvement produced not only precise descriptive studies but also became the basis of Griffin's 1938 doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan.
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From page 185... ...
to undertake an archaeological survey of the lower valley of the Mississippi River. Hundreds of sites were systematically recorded and the recovered ceramic fragments, classified by Griffin and Phillips, were grouped into sequences of chronological units using statistical and graphical techniques developed by Ford (Phillips et al., 1951)
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From page 186... ...
The postwar years saw an expansion of archaeology within new anthropology departments. Griffin used Michigan's Department of Anthropology to provide advanced academic training to archaeologists already experienced in the Depression-era programs or in salvage archaeology occasioned by postwar pipeline, highway, and reservoir construction so they could fill newly established posts.
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From page 187... ...
In 1946 Griffin spent six months in Mexico working with Eduardo Noguera, then director of the Museo de Antropología in Mexico City, Miguel Covarrubias, Alfonso Caso, Ignacio Bernal, Antonieta Espejo, and other Mexican scholars. Griffin studied collections, visited sites, and applied his binomial method to Mesoamerican ceramics (1947)
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From page 188... ...
In the later 1950s, with the basic framework of North American prehistory well established, Griffin turned to the problem of understanding cultural change, particularly the impact of environmental change on human communities, which he viewed in rather direct cause-and-effect terms. He planned research on this problem with Albert Spaulding in the Great Lakes region, where the uplift of Holocene beaches had left magnificent archaeological landscapes available for study.
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From page 189... ...
Ever supportive with resources and requests for time away for field research, he was firm in his criticism of what he saw as overblown or patently wrong theory, inadequate evidence, or impolite behavior. Griffin's work with the material remains of Eastern Woodlands cultures, both the Mississippian peoples and the preceding Woodland peoples, particularly the Hopwellian florescence of the first few centuries of our era, revealed many possible cases of trade in unusual raw materials.
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From page 190... ...
The massive interstate highway program gave archaeologists trained in the Powers Phase project and many others the opportunity to apply the same approach of complete excavation and intensive debris sampling to the hamlets and centers of the greatest of the Mississippian societies, that at Cahokia near modern St. Louis, where Griffin sponsored excavations as long ago as 1950.
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From page 191... ...
James Bennett Griffin died quietly in his sleep in Bethesda, Maryland, in the loving company of his wife, Mary Marsh Dewitt Griffin, and his sons and their families on May 31, 1997. Today the destruction of our limited and irreplaceable archaeological record throughout the world by new agricultural technologies and suburban sprawl is vastly worse than the destruction wrought by reservoirs, pipelines, and roads in Griffin's time.
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From page 192... ...
the foregoing profited from Griffin's own writings, from unpublished assessments by Richard Ford and Jeffrey Parsons, from discussions with many of his friends and family members, and from the editorial skills of Joyce Marcus. An earlier version appeared in the British journal Antiquity (Wright, 1998)
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From page 193... ...
1998. James Bennett Griffin 1905-1997.
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From page 194... ...
1943 The Fort Ancient Aspect: Its Cultural and Chronological Position in Missis sippi Valley Archaeology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
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From page 195... ...
Ford. Archaeological Survey in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 1940-1947.
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From page 196... ...
1974 The ceramic affiliations of the Ohio Valley Adena culture. In Adena People, eds.
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From page 197... ...
J ames B ennett griffin 197
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