David Freidel

Washington University in St. Louis

David Freidel went to the field for the first time in 1963 to join the Hellgap Project of Harvard and NGS (he is shown wielding a geology pick at Locality 1 in the 1967 National Geographic article on the research). He graduated magna cum laude in Anthropology from Harvard in 1968 and did survey of the Kazeroon valley in Iran in his spare time in the Peace Corps 1968-1970. He returned to Harvard to work with Carl Lamberg-Karlovsky but switched to Maya studies and trained with Gordon Willey and Jerry Sabloff. After his dissertation research on Cozumel with the Harvard-Arizona project, also funded by NGS, where George Stuart befriended him, he directed the first Cerros Project between 1974 and 1982. He was the youngest recipient of a senior NSF grant in archaeology in that work. In 1987 he initiated the Yaxuna Project and directed work there until 1996 with funding from NGS, NEH, and the Selz Foundation. In 2003 he launched the El Peru-Waka' Project with Hector Escobedo. Saving the mature forest around the site became a mission of the work, now continued by Juan Carlos Perez and a sequence of now well-established professionals from the US. He collaborated with Linda Schele between 1979 and 1993, publishing articles and two books that integrated archaeology, epigraphy, and iconography. After thirty-four years at Southern Methodist University he received an appointment as Professor at Washington University in St. Louis in 2008. He will become emeritus after December of this year and move to Boston, where he will continue to write and participate in scholarly activities.