Reviews of Books

When Jim Deetz was a boy of six, growing up in rural Maryland, he and two cousins set out to investigate a rumor of bodies and treasure buried in the family backyard. Having identified a still-operative privy as the most likely site, Jim descended by rope into its murky depths. Alas, no bones or gold appeared--just the face of his mother sternly peering down from the seat-hole overhead. "Jimmy," she insisted in words he would never forget, "you come back up here this minute" (p. 270).	1
Thus began--or so one might hypothesize--an archaeologist's career of extraordinary range, duration, and creative achievement. Its subsequent parts included college at Harvard (as what Jim himself called "the first hillbilly affirmative action case"), graduate school (also at Harvard), and faculty appointments at Harvard, Brown, the University of California (both the Santa Barbara and the Berkeley campuses), the University of Capetown, and, most recently, the University of Virginia. There were recurrent stints of fieldwork: on Indian communities along the Missouri River, Spanish missions in southern California, an immigrant Chinese village in Nevada, an abandoned mining town near San Francisco, and, most importantly, early British settlements in Massachusetts (Plymouth Colony), Virginia, and the Cape frontier in South Africa. There were many books and articles, too, ranging from erudite monographs such as Flowerdew Hundred: The Archaeology of a Virginia Plantation, 1619–1864 (Charlottesville, 1993) to the generalist classic In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American Life (New York, 1977). On the personal side, there were two marriages, ten children, and friends, colleagues, and students too numerous to count.	2
Last December when Jim Deetz died--much too soon, still vibrant and youthful at age seventy--he and his second wife, Patricia Scott Deetz, had just published the book under review here. In a way, The Times of Their Lives completes the circle of his own life and leaves the rest of us with a fitting final act. For this work revisits the first of Jim's major accomplishments--during the decade-plus (1967–1978) when he served as director of research at Plimoth Plantation--even as it incorporates all that he learned afterward. Indeed, the book can be read as both last testament and quasi-autobiography. It is full of wisdom, full of stories, full of Jim's wonderfully engaging voice.	3
Upon setting out, the Deetzes aimed for something that would bring together a "diverse number of themes" and thus provide a more comprehensive treatment than anything previously available in the voluminous literature on early Plymouth. In truth, they have fallen somewhat short of this goal. Their "coverage" includes almost no economic history and very little of either religion or politics. Still, what they do offer seems abundant enough: much thoughtful discussion of social experience and its cultural "framing," plus "for the first time, a summary account of all the significant archaeology . . . carried out on Old Colony sites" (p. xii).	4
Actually, the book starts with a deft dissection of modern-day folklore about the "Pilgrims," especially around Thanksgiving, Plymouth Rock, and the Mayflower Compact. It is easy enough to discredit the more fanciful elements here, but the Deetzes' concerns go well beyond mere "debunking." Instead they treat the whole package as a "national origins myth"--and thus as a special sort of interpretive opportunity. The Pilgrims of popular legend came (mostly in the nineteenth century) to stand for such culturally exalted virtues as faith, fortitude, and hard work, while the Compact itself was taken as the seedbed for our constitutional democracy.	. . .