William B. Griffen has done ethnohistorical work in Northern Mexico with a basic focus on the culture change of native groups as they were influenced or dominated by the Spanish colonial system. In the late 1970s, he worked specifically on Chiricahua Apache contact under the late eighteenth-century Spanish presidio system at Janos, Chihuahua. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Arizona and became chairman of the anthropology department at Northern Arizona University in 1965. After three years as associate professor at St. Louis University, he returned to Northern Arizona University as professor and chairman of the anthropology department.