William Denevan, Date of Birth, Place of Birth
TweetWilliam Denevan
American geographer
Date of Birth: 16-Oct-1931
Place of Birth: San Diego, California, United States
Profession: geographer
Nationality: United States
Zodiac Sign: Libra 
About William Denevan
- William Maxfield Denevan (16 October 1931, San Diego) is professor emeritus of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a prominent member of the Berkeley School of Latin Americanist Geography.
- He also worked in the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the same university.
- His interests are in historical ecology and indigenous demography of the Western Hemisphere. He earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D.
- in Geography at the University of California at Berkeley.
- Motivated by the German guest professor Herbert Wilhelmy, 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 at Wisconsin, where he remained throughout his career, serving as chair of the department from 1980–1983, and becoming the Carl O.
- Sauer Professor of Geography in 1987.
- In 1977, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.
- In 2001, he became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In his book The Native Population of the Americas in 1492 (1976), he provided an influential estimate of the Pre-Columbian population of the Americas, which he placed at 57.3 million, plus or minus 25 percent.
- The second edition (1992), after reviewing more recent literature, he revised his estimate to 54 million.His research often deals with how native peoples of the Americas changed their landscape.
- This is in contrast to what he calls "the pristine myth," the idea that these people had minimal impact on the environment.
Read more at Wikipedia