At the time of his death he was Crossett Professor Emeritus of Humanistic Studies at Stanford University.
in Greek at the University of Chicago in 1942, aged seventeen, served in the U.S. Navy as a Japanese translator, 1943–46, then married Virginia Broyles.
A Fulbright Fellowship in 1949 supported him at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, where he hiked the Peloponnesos with his new wife and gained an intimate knowledge of inscriptions.
Though a spirit of perfectionism inhibited his production of an overarching book, in some sixty articles he explored the setting of Greek religion in its specific locality and time, thus focusing on unravelling the details of cult and ritual sacrifice; he did a great deal of work on epigraphy[2] and its relations with literature and history, and he explored Greek sites, especially at the partly drowned port city of Halieis (Porto Cheli), which he began excavating in 1962, and in the Argolid, where he galvanized a broad ecological study, 1979–83, that was the first examination of the paleoecology of ancient Greece, resulting in the publication of M. H. Jameson, Tjeerd van Andel and C. N. Runnels, A Greek Countryside: The Southern Argolid from Prehistory to the Present Day (Stanford University Press) 1994.
[3] The discovery, which adjusted the historian's view drawn from Herodotus, elicited extensive literature, including four articles by Jameson, setting the text in its historical context and debating its essential authenticity.