William M. Denevan

William Maxfield Denevan (16 October 1931-)

William M. Denevan is professor emeritus of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a prominent member of the Berkeley School of Latin Americanist Geography.

Bill was born 16 October 1931 and grew up in San Diego, California. He later began studies at Long Beach City College and transferred to the University of California, Berkeley where he studied under professors like Sauer, Leighly, Kesseli, Parsons, and Rostlund, and obtained his bachelor's degree in 1953. After a stint in the US Navy and timeout exploring Mexico and South America, Cape Horn, Peruvian Andes and Amazon writing articles during 1956 - "the defining event of [his] life as a geographer" - he returned to Berkeley to take his master's.

His field research was in Nicaragua during 1957 and his master's thesis was completed in following year and published as "The Upland Pine Forests of Nicaragua: A Study in Cultural Plant Geography".

After returning to Gualala, Bill married Patricia Sue and they had their first child, William Curtis. Before his second, Victoria Alden, was born he was fortunate to receive funding from The Foreign Field Research Program (through the National Academy of Sciences - National Research Council and the Office of Naval Research). This helped Bill with his Berkeley doctoral research in Bolivia - this thesis was published as "The Aboriginal Cultural Geography of the Llanos de Mojos of Bolivia" (1963).

Joining the Geography Department at the University of Wisconsin (Madison) as Professor, Bill obtained a tenure-track record as biogeographer over his first decade, working with anthropologists like Frank Salomon, Donald Thompson, and Louisa Stark and so on Henry Sterling's retirement in 1973 Bill inherit the role as the department's expert on Latin America and took the role as Director of Ibero-American Studies (1975-77). He then became Chairman of the Department of Geography between 1980 and 1983 and then the 'Carl O. Sauer' Professor of Geography in 1987.

His total published legacy consists of twenty authored and edited books, monographs, reports, and proceedings; and more than sixty articles and book chapters (as of 1999).

A few can be singled out as especially important to cultural ecology. His 1967 article "Pre-Columbian Ridged Fields" in Scientific American (co-authored with James Parsons), together with "Aboriginal Drained-Field Cultivation in the Americas" (Science, 1970) effectively promoted raised field studies in the wider scientific literature, and still frame many of the terms of debate. His article, "Development and the Imminent Demise of the Amazon Rain Forest" (The Professional Geographer, 1973) sounded the alarm for a problem that attracted worldwide concern in the 1980s. His essay on "Latin America" i(Gary Klee's World Systems of Traditional Resource Management, 1980) remains the best overview of its kind. His short essay on "Adapation, Variation, and Cultural Geography" (The Professional Geographer, 1983) a rare foray into theory which remains a succinct and eloquent statement of principles. And "The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492" (Annals of the AAG, 1992) attracted attention both inside and outside geography as an attack on oversimplified "wilderness" models of nature.