David J. Wilson
Heroy Hall, Room 455
(214)768-3545
dwilson@smu.edu
For more information on courses taught by Dr. Wilson, please go here.
My research interests in the indigenous
peoples of Latin America, and more specifically in the rise of complex prehispanic
societies on the north coast of Peru, began when I worked as a Peace Corps volunteer
in Bolivia during the late 1960s. My Peace Corps group was trained intensively in
both the Aymará and Spanish languages at the University of Washington which,
coincidentally, was the university where I had just received a B.A. in Political
Science. In addition, in the training program we were introduced to the cultural
anthropology of the Aymará people by several experts who had lived and worked
with this group. During the two years in Bolivia, I spent several vacations visiting
Quechua towns and Inca archaeological sites in the area around Cuzco, Peru. After
Peace Corps, together with several friends I traveled home overland to the U.S. and
had an opportunity to visit a number of other impressive archaeological sites,
including Pachacámac and Chan Chán, in Peru, and Monte Albán
and Teotihuacán, in Mexico. In addition, we visited several indigenous groups
who still maintained their traditional way of life, including the Colorados of
Ecuador, the Kuna of the San Blas Islands, Panama, and the Maya Quiché near Antigua, Guatemala.
Upon my return to the U.S., I had an opportunity to work seven
months at the site of Calico Hills, California -- whose subsurface remains are now
quite rightly seen as highly unlikely to represent human occupation, in contrast to
the claims of its excavators of a pre-Paleo Indian presence here. The titular head
of the Calico Hills excavations was L. S. B. Leakey, and, during several of his
visits, I heard him speak with great enthusiasm about his early hominid finds at
Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, and about the work Goodall, Fossey, and Galdikas were
carrying out with higher primate groups. As a result, I became quite enthused myself
about the study of anthropology more generally beyond the narrower confines of
prehispanic archaeology. Nevertheless, before embarking on a career in anthropology,
I spent two years at San Diego State University earning a Masters degree in Spanish,
with a focus on the indigenous novel of Middle and South America.
Following this, in 1973 I was admitted to the Ph.D. program in the Department of Anthropology
at the University of Michigan, with the goal of working on the rise of complex civilizations in
Mesoamerica and the Central Andes. During my time at Michigan, I worked one season with Kent
Flannery's Oaxaca Valley project, participating in excavations carried out by one of his students
on habitation terraces at Monte Albán, the capital of the ancient Zapotec state; an other
two seasons with Jeffrey Parsons on his monumental Valley of Mexico settlement pattern surveys;
as well as part of a season with Jeff Parsons on a settlement pattern survey in the Tarma area of
the Andes east of Lima, Peru. During my years at Michigan I was much influenced by the
publications and teaching of Professors Kent Flannery, Jeffrey Parsons, and Henry Wright. I also
took (or sat in on) courses with Professors Aram Yengoyan, Roy Rappaport, Richard Ford, Roberto
Frisancho, John Earls, Conrad Kottak, Frank Livingstone, and Robert Whallon. All of them
influenced me strongly toward an ecological-evolutionary paradigm and the need to make theory
formulation and testing in archaeology not only an anthropologically-oriented endeavor but an
explicit part of research strategy as well. With John Earls (Ph.D. from U. Illinois), I spent a
semester intensively reading the 16th- and 17th-century Spanish documentary sources on late
Pre-Colonial and early Colonial Peru, which gave me some appreciation of the richness of the
ethnohistorical data available on the Inca state.
During the late 1970s, while still a graduate student at Ann
Arbor, I taught a number of courses at the Flint and Dearborn campuses of the
University of Michigan, which provided an opportunity to begin developing some of the
courses that I now teach at Southern Methodist University, including Prehistoric
Cultures and Human Ecology. In addition, since the anthropology faculty at both
campuses was relatively small, I was pressed into teaching a general introductory
course in Cultural Anthropology. Beyond the earlier reading of selected ethnographies
I had done in courses on ecological anthropology at Ann Arbor, this gave me additional
impetus to read a number of ethnographie s ranging reasonably widely around the world.
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