James Deetz; Expert on Colonial U.S.

James F. Deetz, one of the nation’s foremost experts on North American colonists and a developer of historical archeology who formerly directed the Museum of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, has died. He was 70.

Deetz died of pneumonia Nov. 25, two days after the Thanksgiving holiday that he was endlessly asked to explain, in Charlottesville, Va. He had lived there since 1994 as Harrison professor of historical archeology at the University of Virginia.

Although he established his reputation in digs in New England, Deetz spent 1978 to 1994 based at UC Berkeley, where he taught anthropology. From 1979 to 1988, he directed the Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum of Anthropology, then known as the Lowie Museum. He continued his work in New England and explored early American life by excavating the mining town of Somersville in Contra Costa County.

The Times was among many news outlets that sought his knowledge of the historical roots of Thanksgiving. Two decades of excavating and reconstructing the Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts qualified him as the preeminent expert on the first feast in 1621.

“Thanksgiving is better understood if we think of the Pilgrims as bawdy Elizabethans, which they were,” Deetz told The Times two decades ago. “They were hearty drinkers, they liked to dance, and they swore. Court records from Plymouth Colony show drunken behavior in public, fighting and swearing.”

He gladly shared many details gleaned from his research: The menu probably included pumpkin soup but no pie; duck, goose, eel and venison, but no turkey; corn; beer and maybe wine. Indians outnumbered Pilgrims 90 to 50. The participants danced, and the colonists showed off their skills at musketry while the Indians demonstrated the use of bows and arrows. They played games but probably did not pray. The Pilgrims wore brightly colored clothing, jackboots and plumed hats.

And “none of the settlers called themselves Pilgrims,” Deetz said. “One-third of the settlers were of the separatist religious group, and called themselves Saints. They referred to the other two-thirds, who were Anglicans, as Strangers.”

When Deetz took over the museum at Berkeley, it had about 4 million items--the largest of its kind in the Western United States--and the number of items grew under his stewardship. It was the minutiae collected in archeologists’ digs, he said, that helped define history.

“In the seemingly little and insignificant things that accumulate to create a lifetime, the essence of our existence is captured,” he said in 1981 when asked to explain the immense popularity of the show “American Quilts: A Handmade Legacy.”

Deetz earned UC Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 1982. His textbooks, “Invitation to Archeology” (1967), and “In Small Things Forgotten: The Archeology of Early American Life” (1977), are still in use. He published his final book, “The Times of Their Lives: Life, Love and Death in Plymouth Colony,” written with his second wife, Patricia Scott Deetz, a month before his death.

Born in Cumberland, Md., and educated in anthropology at Harvard, Deetz became attracted to the study of colonists during his doctoral research on their interaction with Native Americans of the Plains, and during his excavations at Plimoth Plantation. He taught simultaneously at UC Santa Barbara and Brown University from 1961 to 1967 when he became assistant director of Plimoth Plantation, the reconstruction of the early colonists’ village near Plymouth, Mass. He remained there until moving to Berkeley.

In addition to his wife, Deetz is survived by six sons, James of Berkeley; Joseph of Mendon, Mass.; Eric of Williamsburg, Va.; Geoffrey of Oakland; Joshua of Taipei, Taiwan; and Hartman of Mashpee, Mass.; four daughters, Antonia Rock and Kelley Mallios of Williamsburg, Va.; and Kristen and Cynthia Deetz of Albany, Calif.; a sister, Barbara Deetz, of Charlottesville, Va.; and 16 grandchildren.

Funeral services will be held today at St. Bede’s Catholic Church in Williamsburg, Va.

The family has asked that any memorial donations be sent to the James F. Deetz Fund at Plimoth Plantation, Box 1620, Plymouth, MA 02362.