William Denevan

William Maxfield Denevan (born October 16, 1931 in San Diego) is professor emeritus of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a prominent member of the Berkeley School of cultural-historical geography.[1] He also worked in the Latin American Center and the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the same university. His interests are in historical ecology and indigenous demography of the Western Hemisphere, especially Amazonia and the Andes.

He earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in Geography at the University of California at Berkeley. His dissertation (1963) was on "The Aboriginal Settlement of the Llanos de Mojos: A Seasonally Inundated Savanna in Northeastern Bolivia," which he edited into a book in 1966. In 1963 he became Assistant Professor of Geography at Wisconsin, where he remained throughout his career, serving as chair of the department from 1980–1983 and director of the Latin American Center from 1975 to 1977, becoming the Carl O. Sauer Professor of Geography in 1987, and retiring in 1994. In 1977 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1987 he given Honors by the Association of American Geographers. In 2001 he became an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the Gerlach Prize for 2001-2005 from the Pan American Institute of Geography and History.

In his book The Native Population of the Americas in 1492 (1976, 1992), he provided an influential estimate of the Pre-Columbian population of the Americas which he placed at between 43 and 65 million in the second edition. His research often concerns with how pre-1492 native peoples of the Americas modified their landscapes. This is in contrast to what he calls "The Pristine Myth" (1992), the idea that these people had minimal or no impact on the environment <ref> Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus(2005). He discovered Pre-Columbian raised fields and other earthworks in Amazonia, reported in Science (1970). His book ("an epic account") on native cultivation in South America was published by Oxford (2001). He contributed to a reconsideration of the achievements of native Amazonians.