Obituary, James O. Marshall III (1934–2021)

Abstract

With the death on March 4, 2021, of James O. Marshall III, Kansas and Central Plains archaeology lost a dedicated student. He was 86 years old. Jim’s death followed that of his wife of 64 years, Sally Ann Marshall, by a few months. The eldest of two children, Jim was born October 17, 1934, in Wheeling, West Virginia, and educated in Gouverneur, New York, where he graduated high school in 1953. He was immediately drafted into the US Army, in which he served for two years. Following his discharge, Jim attended St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, where he earned a BA in Anthropology. In 1959, under the direction of one of his professors, Paul R. Ducey, he participated in the final year of a three-year program of excavation at Johnson Hall, the baronial home of English entrepreneur, soldier, and diplomat Sir William Johnson in Johnstown, New York (Ducey 1960). When the dig concluded, Jim, who had married Sally Ann Burns in 1956, moved his family to Grants, New Mexico. The post-World War II years were the great era of salvage archaeology, which initially was focused on survey, testing, and excavation of archaeological and paleontological sites to be affected by the proposed impoundment of hundreds of reservoir projects in nearly every part of the United States. By the mid-1950s, reservoir salvage begat highway and pipeline salvage archaeology. Salvage archaeology would, in fact, define Jim’s career. In NewMexico, Jim was employed during the 1960 field season as one of several assistant archaeologists for the sprawling Navajo Reservoir project in San Juan and Rio Arriba counties, New Mexico. The project was under the direction of Alfred E. Dittert, Jr., Museum of New Mexico, and involved survey of the impoundment basin of the San Juan River and its tributaries in northwestern NewMexico and adjacent areas of Colorado, followed by testing and excavation of the more than 450 sites discovered (Eddy 1966). Although sites of every period were investigated, among the many sites Jim and his crew explored were a number of ancestral Navajo sites (Hester and Shiner 1963). With his experience in New Mexico behind him, Jim was hired in 1961 by the Nebraska State Historical Society in Lincoln as its first Highway Salvage Archeologist. President Eisenhower’s proposed National System of Interstate and Defense Highways had passed in Congress in 1956 as the Federal Aid Highway Act. As with reservoir projects, construction on the interstate highway network posed its own threats to the nation’s archaeological heritage. Hired to mitigate some of this damage, Jim devoted much of his time to survey and investigation of sites in the Grand Island-to-Lexington segment of Interstate 80, excavating at 25KX9 and other sites (Jelks 1962; Wood 1965:92). Approached by University of Nebraska professor John L. Champe, Jim was persuaded to enroll in the graduate program in anthropology the next year. Jim’s major professor was the brilliant, if irascible, iconoclast Preston Holder. Under Holder’s direction, Jim spent three summers (1963-1965) testing and excavating sites in the Glen Elder Reservoir basin in plains anthropologist, Vol. 66 No. 259, August 2021, 269–275