James Bennett Griffin - Professional Career

Professional Career

Griffin accepted a research fellowship in 1933 at 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, 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.