George Cowgill
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George L. Cowgill is an American anthropologist and archaeologist. He was the 1992 Distinguished Lecturer at the American Anthropological Association. He is currently professor emeritus at Arizona State University. He received his PhD from Harvard in 1963 with a dissertation on The Post-Classic Period in the Southern Maya Lowlands. He taught at Brandeis University between 1960 and 1990.
He has carried out excavations and research at Teotihuacan in Mexico. With René Million, Cowgill spent years systematically mapping the city of Teotihuacán in the Valley of Mexico near modern Mexico City during the 1960s. In the late 1980s, he co-directed excavations at the Feathered Serpent Pyramid at Teotihuacan with Saburo Sugiyama and Ruben Cabrera. George Cowgill is also a pioneering researcher in the use of computers and quantitative methods in archaeology.
With regard to the Maya civilization, Cowgill stated that no single factor was responsible for the collapse of the Classic Maya and claims that military expansion was more of a factor than had previously been thought.
[edit] Publications
- 1988 "The Collapse of Ancient States and Civilizations" (co-edited with Norman Yoffee). University of Arizona Press.
50+ published articles
