James Deetz (February 8, 1930 – November 25, 2000) was an American anthropologist, often known as one of the fathers of historical archaeology. His work focused on culture change and the cultural aspects inherent in the historic and archaeological record, and was concerned primarily with the Massachusetts and Virginia colonies. James Deetz was interested in obtaining valuable information that could be used to better understand the lives of early North American colonists, natives, and African Americans. He investigated a variety of material culture related to these groups to better comprehend their social behavior.
Biography
Deetz was born in Cumberland, Maryland, coal country, and was the first in his family to finish high school, much less follow with three Harvard degrees on a full scholarship. He felt a particular affinity for author John Updike and regretted that their times at Harvard did not overlap.
Deetz received his BA, MA, and PhD degrees from Harvard. Following college, Deetz enlisted in the United States Air Force. He served for four years before he was honorably discharged in 1955.
In 1957, he began working on the River Basin Survey site in Missouri. This work inspired him to get his PhD dissertation in "An Archaeological Approach to Kinship Change in Eighteenth Century Arikara Culture." Deetz then became an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California. He also taught at University of California, Santa Barbara, Harvard, Brown, William and Mary, the University of Cape Town, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Virginia. While teaching at the University of California, Deetz teamed up with J. O. Brew and Harry Hornblower to excavate sites related to North American colonial archaeology. He would later meet Henry Glassie who was his inspiration to write In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American Life, which was published in 1977. He removed everything which would not have been in the settlement in 1637, such as interpretative signs, and introduced first-person interpretation by costumed staff: "part of a simulation of life in which all senses are involved, feeling, thinking, and acting in an environment as close to reality as research could make it".