In Memorium: William T. Sanders (1926-2008)
William T. Sanders, one of the leading Mesoamericanist archaeologists of his
generation, passed away on July 2, 2008. Formal obituaries will be appearing
in archaeology journals and newsletters. Sanders received just about every
honor that an archaeologist can receive, including the Alfred Kidder Medal
for Lifetime Achievement in Mesoamerican Archaeology (1980) and membership
in the U.S. National Academy of Science (1985).

This post outlines briefly Sanders's work on urban history and urbanization.
Starting with his senior honors thesis at Harvard University (Sanders 1949),
ancient urbanization and its comparative study was a major theme in the
intellectual work of William Sanders. He introduced Louis Wirth's
sociological definition of urbanism (Wirth 1938) into archaeology (cities
are permanent settlement with large populations, dense populations, and
social heterogeneity), initially in his senior thesis and then for a broader
audience in his influential textbook, Mesoamerica: The Evolution of a
Civilization (Sanders and Price 1968). Sanders worked to devise
archaeological measures of Wirth's four features and other measures of
urbanism.

Although William Sanders conducted archaeological fieldwork at a number of
urban sites in Mesoamerica (e.g., Teotihuacan, Copan, and Kaminaljuyu), his
greatest methodological and theoretical contributions stemmed from his
regional perspective on urbanism that involved fieldwork in rural
hinterlands. He helped pioneer the use of systematic surface survey in
archaeology. By documenting the entire range of settlements in a region,
Sanders enabled archaeologists to trace the regional impact and context of
urban growth and decline.

Sanders' first influential fieldwork was in the Teotihuacan Valley,
northeast of Mexico City, where his survey established the regional context
of the rise and fall of the great Classic period metropolis of Teotihuacan.
This survey has been published in a series of more than fifteen technical
volumes. He joined with Jeffrey Parsons and other colleagues to extend
survey coverage to the entire Basin of Mexico. The Basin of Mexico
Archaeological Survey Project was one of the largest-scale and most
influential projects in Mesoamerican archaeology (Sanders et al. 1979).
Sanders also directed a major project at the site of Kaminaljuyu, a Maya
city with Teotihuacan connections located in modern Guatemala City (Sanders
and Michels 1977). In the 1980s, Sanders co-directed (with David Webster) a
major survey of the Copan Valley of Honduras, home of the major Classic city
of Copan. This project helped establish the regional context for Copan and
provided an important complement to the dominant approach in Mayan studies
that emphasizes hieroglyphic inscriptions.

Two aspects of William Sanders's approach to ancient urbanism stand out.
First, he situated urbanization within the context of the natural
environment. Sanders was a major exponent of the "cultural ecology" approach
in archaeology (Sanders and Price 1968). In order to understand cities (and
all human settlements), archaeologists need to study the agricultural
history of a region (Sanders 1976a, 1979) and they need a good understanding
of regional demography. Sanders made methodological advances in both
archaeological demography (estimating populations from settlement patterns
and the results of regional survey) and historical demography (estimating
central Mexican population on the eve of Spanish conquest); see Sanders
(1976b).

A second notable component of Sanders's approach to ancient urbanism was his
insistence on comparative analysis. He published many studies comparing
cities within Mesoamerica and between Mesoamerica and other areas of ancient
urbanism (Sanders and Santley 1983; Sanders and Webster 1988). Late in his
career he spearheaded a series of international comparative conferences on
Mesoamerican urbanism that brought together specialists on individual cities
and scholars of urbanization from other parts of the world. The first
conference volume was published in 2003 (Sanders et al. 2003), and
illustrates Sanders's close ties to Mexican scholarship with its inclusion
of many Mexican participants and bilingual publication in English and
Spanish. At least one additional volume in this series is currently in
production.

One final note about the scholarship of William Sanders is his commitment to
fully publishing his data. For archaeologists, it is difficult and
time-consuming to assemble excavation and survey results for publication,
and far too many fail to publish their basic data. Sanders was exemplary in
this respect, and his list of data reports is even more impressive as his
list of methodological and theoretical papers.

Michael E. Smith, Professor
School of Human Evolution & Social Change
Arizona State University

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