William T. Sanders, 82, influential anthropologist
NEW YORK - Dr. William T. Sanders, an anthropologist whose influential studies of early civilizations in Mexico and Central America included a vast and invaluable aerial survey of ancient archeological sites, died July 2 in State College, Pa. He was 82.
The cause was complications after a fall, said a spokeswoman for Pennsylvania State University, where Dr. Sanders taught from 1959 to 1993.
Late in his career, Dr. Sanders achieved a degree of popularity as a cohost of a PBS series on ancient cultures. But in the field of Mesoamerican archaeology, he was best known for a landmark survey of central Mexican sites in the 1970s.
With his colleagues Jeffrey R. Parsons and Robert S. Santley, Dr. Sanders conducted an aerial survey of the vast Basin of Mexico to try to identify and photograph the remains of temples, dwellings, outbuildings, and farming terraces built by Aztec and Teotihuacán civilizations before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century.
Their work, accomplished before the advent of global positioning systems, infrared imaging, and other advanced tools, produced an important inventory of ancient sites that had not been studied.
They published their findings in 1979 in what became an influential book, "The Basin of Mexico: Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization."
The book included an analysis of the interplay between landscape and culture, for example, the relationship between soil fertility and the growth of population centers.
Deborah L. Nichols, a professor and chairwoman of the anthropology department at Dartmouth College, said that in recording the history of human occupation of the region "from the earliest farming villages to the Spanish Conquest," the book represented "a whole new idea for using aerial images."
