His graduate work was done at the University of Chicago, where he pursued his interests in the Hopewell Tradition of the Middle Woodland period in the American midwest.

The profile of the foundation was raised enormously with its large-scale excavation at the Koster Site in Greene County, Illinois.

In the 1980s Struever retired from Northwestern and the CAA and moved to Colorado, becoming president of the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez.

Dr. Struever eventually moved to Santa Fe and helped his wife Marti with her Indian art business, before she died.[when?]

He made this case in an important 1971 article (Struever 1971), and at the same time he was actively working to build the Center for Illinois Archeology into the sort of large-scale multi-disciplinary research program that he had advocated.

Struever had in effect given up his career as a researcher within a few years, in order to devote his time to directing the CIA and later the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center.