(Image by Louis Psihoyos)
Bill Rathje passed away on May 24th – just over a month shy of his 67th birthday.
Everyone who knew Bill well loved him. And there was a lot to love about him. A kind and gentle man, Bill had a laugh that shook the room. This laugh was matched by his sense of humor. Bill never missed an opportunity to make a joke or to enter one into his talks. Garbage was an easy target, and Bill did it with style.
Bill was generous. He provided graduate student with incredible opportunities, which were more than a boon to their professional formation. And at a time when I was without a steady income, he was there to help.
Bill would regularly take graduate students out to lunch and in Palo Alto there was a dozen places where Bill knew all the staff by name; and he knew the names of everyone in their families too. And of course they knew Bill and what he liked.
An innovator in the field of Modern Material Culture Studies, Bill never lost his sense of connection to being a Mayanist and he frequently reflected on this area of archaeological interest. And though retired, of late, he was keen on pushing back on what has come to be known as the archaeology of the present. He was in the midst of writing a piece for a volume edited by Alfredo Gonzalez Ruibal.
Since Stanford, Bill and I had regular phone conversations, which became more frequent over the last couple of years because of a project that we were working on with Michael Shanks. Our last conversation was just before I left for fieldwork at the beginning of May. He was on the good side of a bad week, or at least that was how he put it to me. Most of our talk was about how he was doing. Some was about the project. But he never failed to ask about Liz and our two sons, Eli and Liam.
Bill is missed both personally and professionally. To borrow one of his signature statements: “Ding Hoy Buckaroo!”