Jeremy A. Sabloff

Jeremy (Jerry) Arac Sabloff (1944 – present) is an American archaeologist and an External Faculty Fellow and Past President of the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. Sabloff is an expert on ancient and pre-industrial urbanism. His academic interests have included settlement pattern studies, archaeological theory and method, the history of archaeology, the relevance of archaeology in the modern world, complexity science, and transdisciplinary science. Sabloff received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1964 and his PhD in 1969 from Harvard, where his doctoral supervisor was archaeologist Gordon Willey. Prior to coming to the Santa Fe Institute, Sabloff was at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was the Williams Director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum (1994-2004) and a professor in the Department of Anthropology. He also has taught at Harvard University, the University of Utah, the University of New Mexico (where he was chair of the Department of Anthropology), and the University of Pittsburgh (where he also was chair of the Department of Anthropology). Sabloff is an outspoken proponent of science communication. In 2010 he delivered the distinguished lecture at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting, encouraging anthropologists to make their work accessible to their relevant publics and cultivate a new generation of scientist-communicators in the style of Margaret Mead. Sabloff is past president of the Society for American Archaeology, a past anthropology section chair of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and past editor of ''American Antiquity.” He has served as chair of the Smithsonian Science Commission (2001-2003) and currently is a member of the Committee on Research and Exploration of the National Geographic Society. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society of Antiquaries, London, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the author of ''Excavations at Seibal: Ceramics'' (1975), ''The Cities of Ancient Mexico'' (1989,1997), ''The New Archaeology and the Ancient Maya'' (1990), and ''Archaeology Matters'' (2008). He is co-author of ''A History of American Archaeology'' (1974, 1980, 1993), ''A Reconnaissance of Cancuen, Peten, Guatemala'' (1978), ''Ancient Civilizations: The Near East and Mesoamerica'' (1979, 1995), ''Cozumel: Late Maya Settlement Patterns'' (1984), and ''The Ancient Maya City of Sayil'' (1991). He has edited or co-edited more than a dozen books, the most recent of which is (with Paula L. W. Sabloff) ''New Perspectives on the Development of Complex Societies" (2018). Sabloff resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is married to anthropologist Paula Sabloff, an External Faculty Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute.