Profile of Charles Stanish

Abstract

A magazine photograph shows archaeologist Charles Stanish posing against the bleak backdrop of Northern Chile's Atacama Desert in the shimmering heat of noon. Thrown into relief by the desert’s vast emptiness, Stanish stands in the foreground of a forbidding landscape marked by the remains of a centuries-old irrigation canal built by indigenous people who introduced agriculture into the desert. For nearly four decades, Stanish, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and professor of archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), has followed a winding path through two continents to discover the origin of ancient American societies. His zeal has helped reconstruct the fortunes of indigenous folk who thrived around Lake Titicaca, nestled in the Andes between Bolivia and Peru at an altitude unmatched by any other navigable lake in the world. Charles Stanish. Stanish holding an artifact in Chincha, Peru. Raised under modest circumstances, Stanish grew up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. From an early age, he nursed a love of ancient Greek and Roman history. Upon graduation from high school in the mid-1970s, Stanish pursued a bachelor’s degree in archaeology at Pennsylvania State University. There, he absorbed the teachings of a coterie of Jewish emigres from the Vienna School of Philosophy who had fled Nazi Germany. Among his teachers were proteges of the renowned Austrian philosopher Karl Popper, whose treatise exploring the nature of the scientific quest for knowledge, The Logic of Scientific Discovery , was hailed as a milestone by communities of scientists and philosophers alike. “That experience cemented my love of science,” he says. Yet it was the authority and erudition of late Penn State archaeologist William Sanders, who studied the rise of ancient societies in Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras, that fed Stanish’s interest in the field. “He asked the big questions …