Deetz, James John Fanto (1930– )

US anthropologist, archaeologist, and museum administrator. He gained a PhD and his early work focused on American Indians. He participated in the research that led to Plimouth Plantation, Massachusetts, becoming a major tourist attraction. He entered academia, becoming an authority on early colonial life.

He was born in Cumberland, Maryland and was educated at Harvard. He studied American Indian residence patterns and ceramic decoration as a reflection of social organization. He was one of the first US contributors to the scientific methodology that created the so-called ‘new archaeology’ and his most notable publication in this area was The Dynamics of Stylistic Change in Arikara Ceramics (1965). While teaching at Brown University, he became one of the USA's leading historical archaeologists. He went on to teach at the University of California at Berkeley, before moving to the University of Virginia. He interest in early colonial life led him to research US colonial gravestones, as well as the artefacts and customs of colonists. He wrote widely on this subject in such works as In Small Things Forgotten (1977) and Flowerdew Hundred: The Archaeology of a Virginia Plantation, 1619–1864 (1993).