Professor passes away at home

IU's anthropology department suffered a tragic loss Monday. James H. Kellar, director emeritus of the Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology, died at home. \nKellar was a long-standing member of the anthropology department since beginning his career in 1960 until his retirement in 1986.\nKellar was the first full-time IU archaeology professor. He is credited with building the program and was responsible for the conception and fulfillment of the Glenn A. Black Laboratory of Archaeology, located on Indiana Avenue near 10th Street. \n"Professor Kellar and Glenn Black, along with Eli Lilly, are the makers of modern understanding of prehistory and historical archaeology in Indiana. He was a lovely, kind man and a fine scholar," said Christopher Peebles, the current director of the Glenn A. Black Laboratory and close friend of Kellar. He is also responsible for the conservation by his own efforts of the Great Lakes Ohio Valley Ethnohistory Archive, according to Peebles. \nKellar's wife, Patricia, remembers her husband living an active recreational life, enjoying canoe trips, opera, theater, travel and, among other sporting loves, the Chicago Cubs. He and his wife, upon the retirement of both, embarked on a canoeing trip in Canada that lasted 37 days and traversed 250 miles of paddling with just two small packs. After this trip, the pair fell in love with the outdoors. IUTV still occasionally runs the resulting video the two created, "Canoeing the Quetico." \nAnother of Kellar's loves was cooking. \n"Jim was a gourmet cook," Patricia Kellar said. "He liked nothing better than to have family or invite friends and cook a wonderful meal. He never wanted anyone to leave the table; he always wanted to stay and socialize." \nHe also followed a robust travel schedule that took him all over Europe, particularly Spain, Greece and Italy. "In Italy, we used to rent a villa and take a car and explore the countryside. Jim fell in love with Italy during the war," Patricia Kellar said. \nKellar occasionally performed in operas, an interest drawn from a love of opera and theater, something he and his wife shared. \nHe graduated from Indiana's Plymouth High School and went to Ball State University. His studies were interrupted by a three-and-a-half year stint in the Mediterranean Theater during World War II, where he served on Landing Ship Tank, often in combat zones. He later researched the history of an Evansville shipyard that built 167 LSTs; this work resulted in a publication about the shipyard. \nAfter the war, Kellar moved to Bloomington, where he enrolled in IU, earning his undergraduate degree in anthropology. He split his graduate studies between Berkeley and IU, from where he received an M.A. degree and also a Ph.D. \nKeller held several positions around the country at archaeological projects and museums before joining the sociology and anthropology department at the University of Georgia in 1957. In 1960, he returned to Bloomington and joined the anthropology department. \nKellar also participated in excavating a network of caves in Greece, and acted as a consultant to the architect of the Angel Mounds State Memorial Interpretive Center in southern Indiana. One of Kellar's proudest accomplishments, according to a statement released by his son, James J. Kellar, was "saving the lovely Circle Theater in Indianapolis" while serving for nine years on the Indiana Professional Consulting Committee to the National Register of Historic Places. \nKellar was often the recipient of awards from various state and national organizations, including Sagamore of the Wabash, Lilly Endowment, Foreign Study, and Distinguished Service Award from the Indiana State Museum. He had innumerable professional affiliations, including fellowships with multiple archeological, anthropological and science societies. He also consulted for many state and federal organizations. \nAt the time of his death, Kellar was engaged in a project to catalog a photo collection of Indian pots from the Bone Bank site on the Wabash River. He had indexed the pots and written background information on the region, work that still may be finished by his younger son, James, and Cheryl Munson, an archaeologist with the department of anthropology at IU.