William Denevan

William Maxfield Denevan (born October 16, 1931, in San Diego) is an American geographer. He is professor emeritus of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is a prominent member of the Berkeley School of cultural-historical geography. He also worked in the Latin American Center and the Institute for Environmental Studies at Wisconsin. His research interests are in the historical ecology of the Americas, especially Amazonia and the Andes.

Education

He earned B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees 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 revised into a monograph in 1966.

Career

In 1963 he became assistant professor of geography at Wisconsin, where he remained throughout his career, serving as Chair of the Geography Department from 1980 to 1983 and Director of the Latin American Center from 1978 to 1980, becoming the Carl O. Sauer Professor of Geography in 1987, and retiring as Professor Emeritus in 1993.

His 1961 monograph on fire and pines in Nicaragua was one of the first studies to show the relation of pine forest distribution to human burning. In an article in 1973 he was an early reporter of massive deforestation in Amazonia. The book, The Native Population of the Americas in 1492 (1976, 1992), which he edited, provided an influential estimate of the pre-Columbian population of the Americas, which he placed at between 43 and 65 million.