Fall/Winter 1997

IN MEMORIAM James N. Hill This important archaeologist's passing is a loss for the UCLA community by James R. Sackett Jim Hill, a prominent and very popular UCLA archaeologist, lost a gallant fight with cancer on 2 August 1997. He was 62. A southern Californian, Jim graduated from Pomona College in 1957. He then served as an officer in the US Navy for three years, which included several months' hair-raising duty monitoring nuclear blasts at close range off Enewetak Atoll. In 1965, after obtaining his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, he joined UCLA's Department of Anthropology, where he remained the rest of his life. He was a dedicated teacher who gave his time generously to undergraduates and who treated his graduate students like research colleagues. Also an able administrator, he was instrumental in the founding of both the Institute of Archaeology and the Archaeology Program. He served as Acting Director of the former and chaired the latter for a total of six years. He as well spent six years as chair of the Anthropology Department. Jim belonged to the exciting generation of processual archaeologists that emerged in the 1960s. He specialized in the American Southwest, where his work at the Broken K pueblo in Arizona remains a classic example of how social organization may be reflected in the architectural segregation of pottery styles. He often returned to the question of style, with particular insight into its expression among individual artisans. But his abiding interest lay in the fundamental question of how archaeologists should go about explaining variability and change in prehistoric cultural systems, particularly in the realm of social organization. As a processualist, his approach was strongly colored by cultural ecology. Thus his field projects, as at Chevelon in central Arizona in the early 1970s and on the Pajarito Plateau of New Mexico some years later, searched for the interplay of subsistence pursuits and demography in the archaeological record. Methodological questions also occupied his mind, and evoked much original work on issues of research design and strategy. Jim believed that archaeology is anthropology; but he also believed that it should be pursued as an empirical science that plays by the same rules as other empirical sciences. Apart from his classic monograph, Broken K Pueblo (1970), Jim published widely in journals and in volumes of collected papers edited by colleagues. He produced two of the latter himself in 1977, The Explanation of Prehistoric Change and The Individual in Prehistory (co-edited with Joel Gunn). His work should enjoy a long shelf-life. Few have written with so much light and so little heat on the ideas that inform processual archaeology. And few can match the straightforward clarity of his exposition. Jim was good-natured, open, and entirely free of affectation. He treasured his family and enjoyed the fabric of everyday life, playing tennis with gusto and making a splendid luncheon companion. And he retained his warmth, intellectual enthusiasm, and sense of humor to the end. He was married to the anthropologist Julie Calvert, with whom he had a daughter, Sarah. He is also survived by three children, Kraig, Laura, and Karlyn, from an earlier marriage. James R. Sackett is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology. A fellowship for undergraduate research in anthropology has been established in Hill's honor. Checks should be made out to the UCLA Foundation, noting they are destined for the J.N. Hill Fellowship, and mailed to the Department of Anthropology, UCLA, Los Angeles CA 90095-1553.

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