William T. Sanders

William Timothy Sanders (1926–2008) was an American anthropologist who specialized in the archaeology of Mesoamerica. Sanders was born into a working-class family in Patchogue, New York. His interest in Mesoamerica was sparked by reading William H. Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico. During his high school years, he struck up a friendship with classmate and fellow future anthropologist Harold C. Conklin. After serving in the United States Navy during World War II, he undertook his undergraduate and postgraduate education at Harvard University under the G.I. Bill, completing his bachelor's degree in 1949, his master's degree in 1953 and a doctorate in 1957. His senior honours thesis, The Urban Revolution in Central Mexico, applied the cultural evolutionary model outlined by V. Gordon Childe in his book What Happened in History to the study of Tenochtitlan. At Harvard he studied under Alfred Tozzer, Earnest Hooton, who inspired Sanders to apply to Harvard after he read Hooton's books as a teenager, Carleton S. Coon, who stimulated his interest in comparative ethnography, and Gordon Willey, who taught him about the regional settlement survey work he had led in the Viru Valley: Sanders would subsequently apply and refine Willey's methods in the course of his own work. In 1951 Sanders studied at the National School of Anthropology and History in Mexico City under Pedro Armillas, who also sought to apply Childe's thinking to Mesoamerica, and fostered Sanders' interest in landscape archaeology. Other significant intellectual influences included Julian Steward, Karl August Wittfogel and Leslie White. Sanders completed his doctoral dissertation, Tierra y Agua: a Study of Ecological Factors in the Development and Personality of Mesoamerican Civilizations after taking up a post as an assistant professor at the University of Mississippi in 1956, subsequently moving to Pennsylvania State University, where he would spend the rest of his academic career, three years later and becoming an Associate Professor in 1962. He undertook a survey of Teotihuacan from 1960 to 1964, the results of which were published in the 1965 book The Cultural Ecology of the Teotihuacan Valley. He was named a Professor in 1966. He subsequently shifted his attention southward to Kaminaljuyu in Guatemala, in part due to evidence of links between that Mayan site and Teotihuacan.