 While he was still a child, his family emigrated, first to England, and then to Canada.Butzer died on May 4, 2016 in Austin, Texas at the age of 81.At the University of Wisconsin (1960-66), Butzer regularly offered a course on Pleistocene environments, including what is now called geoarchaeology, in addition to introductory physical geography, and graduate seminars in climatology and coastal geomorphology.