John Mann Goggin

John Mann Goggin (May 27, 1916, Chicago – May 4, 1963, Gainesville) was a cultural anthropologist in the southwest, southeast, Mexico, and Caribbean, primarily focusing on the ethnology, cultural history, and typology of artifacts from archaeological sites.

Biography

Shortly after John M. Goggin's birth, his family moved to Miami, Florida, where Goggin's father, a dentist, had set up practice. Throughout high school, Goggin began collecting archaeological artifacts and exploring sites that he personally found, further establishing his love for the field of anthropological archaeology.

Goggin began his undergraduate work at the University of Florida in Gainesville, but did not complete his B.A at the university. After the war, Yale Peabody Museum offered Goggin an assistantship in favor of his excavations of F.H. Sommer III at upper Matecumbe Key. This made graduate work at Yale in anthropology possible for Goggin. Later, he received his M.A. from Yale in 1946 and then a Ph.D. in 1948 under the instruction of lifetime colleague, Irving Rouse.

Upon his receiving his Ph.D. from Yale in 1948, Goggin returned to the University of Florida as Associate Professor of Anthropology in the joint department of Sociology and Anthropology; this was the first appointment by a university to Anthropology in the entire state of Florida.

Goggin, with the help of peers in Florida, founded the Florida Anthropological Society, where he held the position of editor of the group's journal from 1949 to 1951. He presented his argument and evidence from a standpoint of ethnohistory, ethnology, and archaeology. The section of the dissertation specifically dealing with the Lower St. Johns area was later edited and published as the monograph Space and Time Perspective in Northern St. Johns Archaeology, Florida. Though he died well before he became a nationally renowned anthropologist, his ideology became fundamental in modern anthropology. Goggin refused to be called an archaeologist in favor of his all-encompassing view on the subject. More specifically, he mapped out the first cultural and natural history of Florida. Goggin incorporated archaeology, anthropology, ethnography, history, and natural history to assign a chronological history to a cultural group based on trends and "cultural patterns".

Major publications Space and Time Perspective in Northern St. Johns Archeology, Florida. Yale University Publications in Anthropology, No. 47. 147 pp. New Haven. University of Florida Press, 1998 Indian and Spanish: Selected Writings (edited by Charles H. Fairbanks, Irving Rouse, and William C. Sturtevant). University of Miami, Coral Gables, 1964.