William L. Deaver

William L. Deaver, Bill to most, and Billy to a select few, has left his humanly body and returned to the collective energy all around us. Despite valiantly, bravely, and with unceasing positivity fighting cancer, on August 25, 2025, his 68 year old body could endure no more. He is missed dearly by his family: three children, one grandchild, wife, father, two sisters, a supportive extended family and countless friends.

William was a renowned archaeologist, a field where his greatest interests all seemed to intertwine. His love for discovery and teaching about those discoveries, his love for philosophizing, never accepting a singular answer as true, his love for connecting to the Earth, contented to be where the soil coated his hands, all existed in this field. It was as though archaeology was designed for him, and it comes as no surprise that he would treat it as more than a profession but rather a way of living and understanding our existence amongst one another. The son of professional ceramicists, he merged this love for the art form with the study of the techniques and designs of ancestral ceramicists, a window into the lives and cultures of the past peoples of the Southwest. Delving deeper into scientific study, William relished expanding the subfields of radiocarbon dating and archaeomagnetic dating (briefly, a way of comparing the direction of iron within historical material to a known record of Earth's magnetic field fluctuations to approximate the date of a site, for example, estimating when a hearth was utilized based on the iron in the clay). Over his career, William worked for several cultural resource management firms in the desert Southwest, playing a pivotal role on numerous projects to date and preserve records of Indigenous Peoples before the land was redeveloped. He was a true friend to the Nations, holding all cultures and beliefs in high regard, and treating people and artifacts with great respect. He authored or co-authored many publications and research papers over the years and was a wealth of information, sometimes overwhelmingly so, as those of us who had regular dinners with him can attest. He regularly regaled any who would listen with current theories, stories of recent discoveries, and always welcomed friendly intellectual debates with the hope of together reaching a greater understanding not just of human history but what it means to be human in any era. His passing is a loss for the archaeological world. But William took great delight in knowing future generations will build upon his thoughts, ideas, and research, as is the intrinsic nature of scientific study, which he loved so much.

William's many hobbies, pursued with the same level of artistry and academic rigor as archaeology, included competitive cycling, landscape architecture, and photography. Among his many cycling victories were a few terrifyingly near misses. In one race, his crash left his helmet split completely in half yet he walked away otherwise unharmed. We were grateful he never rode without one, for his helmet kept us from losing him far sooner in life. Inspired by his parents and siblings, William carried on the creative family spirit, designing and building the family backyard into a picturesque retreat and later becoming an admired photographer. His abstract photos captured the essence of moments, as he once said, of life in Tucson, his home for many years. It is life's many small, complex moments that intrigued William and lent to the beauty he knew of the world.

William loved with his entire soul. He loved his children in whom he instilled a similar zest for knowledge and [self]discovery. He loved his spouse whom he cherished like a precious gem, and who cherished him, as she likes to say, as her dazzling unicorn. And he was blessed to have several communities of friends whom he adored and for whom he and his family are eternally grateful for the support you all shared with him and us over the years. If you would like to make a donation in William's honor, please consider the Society for American Archaeology to support scholarships for future generations of archaeologists.