John Allen Walthall was born on January 23, 1946, in Birmingham, Alabama. He passed away on October 22, 2025, in Springfield, Illinois. He is survived by Nina Rowe, his wife and love of his life, his son David, and two grandsons, Rhys and Brooks.John graduated from the University of Alabama in 1968. His first field experience took place in the summer of 1966 when he worked on an archaeological dig in the Buttahatchee Valley of northwestern Alabama under the direction of Professor David L. DeJarnette. He received his master's degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1970 and his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1973. During his graduate-school days, John took part in archaeological fieldwork in the central Mississippi Valley, the southern Appalachian Mountains, the upper Great Lakes, along the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, in southwestern France, and in the Valley of Mexico.He was an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, for several years. (Yes, he did meet and shake hands with Bear Bryant.) While there, he wrote his book Prehistoric Indians of the Southeast (University of Alabama Press, 1980; paperback edition, 1990), which became a standard reference volume for regional archaeologists and students.In 1977, John accepted an offer to become the first chief archaeologist for the joint Illinois Department of Transportation/University of Illinois Cultural Resources Program. He served in this role for 34 years, retiring in January 2012. During this time, he administered some of the largest archaeological projects in North America, including the American Bottom FAI-270 Archaeological Mitigation Projects and the 2008–2016 excavations in East St. Louis that discovered over 1,500 Cahokia-related structures and demonstrated Greater Cahokia's urban nature—a project that was awarded the 2016 Shanghai Archaeology Forum International Field Discovery Award.During his 50-year career in archaeology, John Walthall authored and edited a dozen books on the archaeology of Native peoples, French colonial Illinois, and the American frontier, as well as some 50 journal articles and edited book chapters (https://il.academia.edu/JohnWalthall). John was renowned for his fascination with making lists, his lifelong love of Japanese watercolors, and his acquisition of historic ceramics, bottles, and tokens and his predilection to turn those collections into insightful foundational academic studies.He served as an adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign for over 20 years and was a research archaeologist at the Illinois State Museum for much of that time. John arrived in Illinois at the onset of the CRM era and was instrumental in professionalizing nationally recognized research-based IDOT cultural resource management studies, in supporting the reporting on IDOT legacy collections, in promoting extensive archaeological publishing programs, and in supporting the establishment of the University of Illinois's transportation archaeology program. John has been recognized by his peers with several awards, including lifetime/career achievement awards from the Society for American Archaeology in 2008, the Illinois Archaeological Survey in 2009, and SEAC in 2012.John Walthall's and IDOT's support through the years have been essential to the emergence and development of ISAS in its present form as a nationally recognized cultural research management and scientific program. The establishment of the Illinois State Archaeological Survey (ISAS) in 2010 and its formal incorporation in law as part of the Prairie Research Institute in 2013 were a result of a 28-year collaborative relationship between John and Thomas Emerson. From 1984 to through 1993, Emerson was chief archaeologist for the newly created Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. In that role, he was responsible for providing regulatory oversight of IDOT projects. In 1994, John offered Emerson the opportunity to assist him in establishing a centralized transportation archaeological program at the University of Illinois. The newly formed Illinois Transportation Archaeological Research Program ITARP), directed by Emerson, essentially took responsibility for ensuring that IDOT's projects fulfilled the agency's federal and state legal preservation responsibilities across the state, while growing from fewer than a dozen field surveyors in Urbana to its present form as ISAS. ITARP's transformation from a LAS program in anthropology to a state survey, while envisioned by Emerson and supported by William Schilts, the director of the Illinois State surveys, was only made feasible through the direct intervention and support of John in his role as IDOT's chief archaeologist.John's life was enriched as a member of several archaeological expeditions and by his own independent travels. Included in his travels were a 1970 ride on a Triumph motorcycle from Salisbury near Stonehenge in England to Paris, then farther south to Les Eyzies in southwestern France, where he worked with a Harvard University crew analyzing stone tools from a 40,000-year-old rockshelter and explored several local caverns containing Paleolithic cave art. In 1972, to obtain data for his dissertation, John entered several deep caverns in the south Appalachian highlands seeking 2,000-year-old human remains. One of these caves could only be reached by crawling through a muddy and slick down-slanted tube and then manually repelling down a rope to the base of a 96-foot-deep chasm. He scuba dove along the Gulf Coast near Tampa in search of submerged archaeological sites and artifacts.In highland Mexico, he climbed Popocatépetl, an 18,000 ft high snow-capped volcano, which reerupted in a spectacular display in early 2023. In the Valley of Mexico, he ascended the Pyramid of the Sun at the great prehistoric city of Teotihuacán. John and Nina explored the ruins of Mayan temples and cities in the jungles of Yucatán and Belize. In Italy, they walked the 2,000-year-old streets of Pompeii, an archaeologist's dream. They also visited wonderful Roman ruins and medieval fortresses and villages in southern France, particularly those in Provence and Languedoc. John's favorite archaeological sites were those associated with Roman Britain—hiking Hadrian's Wall and visiting nearby sites like spectacular Vindolanda were especially memorable, as was touring Roman Bath.John had a lifelong affection for animals, meeting his first dog on his grandparent's farm in northern Alabama when he was two years old, and loved, and was loved by, his many dog friends over the course of his life. He hoped to join his beloved dogs, especially Gremby and Frankie, for a long, long walk in the near future.
Emerson et al. (Thu,) studied this question.