Phil Hobler

From his appointment at Simon Fraser University in 1967 to his death on July 19, 2006, Phil Hobler was an outstanding teacher, colleague and friend. To 27 cohorts of fieldschool students, and the many, many others he befriended in class or in the hallway, he was the man who taught them field techniques, gave them instruction in the finer points of photographic work, or told them stories and made them laugh. Phil was truly a student’s Professor, and the Archaeology Department was the richer for it. We are saddened by his passing but will never forget his love for life, archaeology, friends and family.

We need not write a detailed historical biography of Phil, his motivations or his accomplishments. Having learned of his cancer (heavy duty medical problems were his words) in 2004, he immediately set about doing that himself – there were just too many stories left to tell and he wanted to get them right. His volume Incidents Along the Way published in 2005 describes the man that truly is Phil - informative, engaging, adventurous, light hearted and always amusing. Phil spent 48 years as an archaeologist working in the Southwest, Egypt, Fiji and the Northwest Coast; 36 years of those he also spent as a university professor. The events and stories from those years are countless and most have entered the annals of department legend. As related on the promotional flyer for his book, “I lived in fear” said a student course evaluation, “of ending up in one of Hobler’s stories”. There are few who have wandered the halls of the Archaeology Department at Simon Fraser University who have not.

Phil Hobler was not always Phil Hobler. He was born on March 20th 1936 under the name Patrick Michael Ryan. Adopted by the Hoblers (Philip and Cecilia) at the age of eight months, Phil claimed to remember snippets of the drive home from Syracuse. And the snippet he most remembers about his adoptive parents was that he was “going to have to keep them amused”. No doubt he did. Phil attended high school in Johnsonville New York, went on to the University of New Mexico for a BA in 1958 and completed graduate training at the University of Arizona in 1964. Along the way he met a pack of lifelong friends including Roy and Maureen Carlson, James and Adrienne Hester, Curt and Polly Schaafsma and his first wife Audrey who he married in 1958. In 1967 and 1968 Alan and Jenny respectively came along and as Phil Hobler protégé, whether they liked it or not, they were in the field almost every year thereafter.

In 1965 Phil began his teaching career in the Anthropology Department at the University of Montana and it was from there in 1967 that Roy Carlson convinced him to come to Simon Fraser to help build an Archaeology program; in 1971 that goal was accomplished with the founding of an independent department. Over the years Phil served in many departmental capacities from Captain of the research vessel Sisiutl, to Chair from 1996 to 1999, to Professor Emeritus after his retirement in 2001. As life would have it, Phil became single again in 1990, a circumstance that quickly led him to “That Dahm Woman” as he writes. Building their ultimate retirement home at Salloomt in the Bella Coola Valley, Phil and Inge not only became neighbors to the Nuxalk and European communities but were integral members of both. And in this Phil once again was not Phil Hobler but P’quanna and Holis, traditional names bestowed upon him by the Nuxalk. Phil’s passing leaves a hole not only within the Archaeology community but an equal-sized one in the Bella Coola Valley.

Obituaries are never easy to write and they are even more difficult to end. In this it seems fitting, no necessary, to let Phil have the final word.

“What can I say, standing at one end of a long road and looking back? Every era in history is unique and each human life within those eras is also unique. I suppose if it is true for snowflakes why not for people? Still I look back upon the twists and turns of fate, the millions of tiny points, some chosen but most by chance, that defined my path as opposed to someone else’s. I feel a sense of gratitude for where I personally have been, for the people I have known and what I have been able to accomplish.”

(Philip M. Hobler, Incidents Along the Way, Chpt. 11 – Looking Back)