[2] Deetz was born in Cumberland, Maryland, coal country, and was the first in his family to finish high school, much less follow with three Harvard degrees on a full scholarship.
This work inspired him to get his PhD dissertation in "An Archaeological Approach to Kinship Change in Eighteenth Century Arikara Culture."
He would later meet Henry Glassie who was his inspiration to write In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American Life, which was published in 1977.
[1] By the time he was an established scholar, he was active in evaluating grant applications for the National Endowment for the Sciences and was particularly fond of having approved the construction of a 19th-century settlement village proposed to be burned to the ground so that the patterns of nail distribution could be studied to allow more accurate reconstruction of archaeological sites.
Deetz was appointed assistant director at Plimoth Plantation in 1959, and implemented changes to the way the heritage site was run.
He wrote a program that was used in an IBM mainframe computer, which was able to sort rim sherds based on specific characteristics of each individual piece.