[1] Born in Atchison, Kansas, the son of Charles and Maude Griffin, Jimmy and his family subsequently moved to Denver, Colorado.

When Jimmy was eleven his family moved to Oak Park, Illinois, where he lived until he enrolled in college.

They spent twelve years together living in Washington before Griffin’s death in Bethesda, Maryland aged 92.

Griffin attended and graduated from Oak Park and River Forest High School where he became a champion swimmer, as well as cheer leader.

His first fieldwork was conducted in the summer of 1929, where he excavated at the Parker Heights Mound near Quincy, Illinois, a project led by William Krogman.

In the fall of 1939, Griffin accompanied James A. Ford and Philip Phillips on the start of a Lower Mississippi survey project.

Griffin’s primary involvement in field activities shifted to a broader synthetic study and overview of archaeology itself.

Between the years of 1963 and 1964, Griffin supervised an excavation at the Norton Mound group, a Hopewell Tradition-related site in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Soon after this, one of Griffins students, James E. Price, encouraged him to return to the northern end of the Lower Mississippi Valley with the Powers Phase project in southeast Missouri (1968–1972).

His legacy as a professor was that in the 1970s and 1980s, many of the major archaeological graduate programs in North America were staffed by Griffin’s students.

His ability to make these connections across space and time often yielded dramatic insights from a single photographic slide or presented paper.

Most notably, he was embroiled in a long and antagonistic intellectual relationship with the next reigning lion in American archaeology, Lewis R. Binford.

Griffin retired from Michigan in 1976, but eight years later, he moved to Washington D.C. to become associated with the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution until he died in 1997.

He organized and managed the Ceramic Repository for the Eastern United States, a central source of information and collections about prehistoric pottery based out of the University of Michigan.