Jeremy Arac Sabloff is the 2016 recipient of the Alfred Vincent Kidder Award for Eminence in the Field of American Archaeology.
The core of Sabloff’s work exemplifies a rare intellectual commitment to the balancing of science and humanism. His profound scholarly and ethical contributions to the study of the rise and fall of ancient Maya civilization, Mesoamerican urbanism, and new theoretical and methodological approaches, have made a lasting impact on anthropological archaeology in the Americas and beyond. . Sabloff’s wide-ranging interests have been published in more than a dozen books and more than 130 articles, to provide innovative and insightful perspectives on the archaeological study of trade, ancient economics, settlement patterns, urbanism, intellectual history, theory and method,. and how crucial it is that archaeologists engage the public in our work and in the shared responsibility of heritage management (e.g., his book Archaeology Matters: Action Archaeology in the Modern World).
Sabloff is one of the most respected public intellectuals and scholars in archaeology worldwide. He continues to be an innovator, a catalyst for change, a respected and sought-after synthesizer, and a unifier of disparate perspectives and approaches. Sabloff does all of these things while combining a tremendous seriousness of purpose with a lightness of being that make him welcome in all circles.
Sabloff is a superb archaeologist, a practitioner and historian of science, a humanist and activist public intellectual. He embodies the credo of Willey and Phillips that “Archaeology is Anthropology, or it is nothing” by making the practice of archaeology much more anthropologically informed and useful to the public, to students and to his colleagues.
Sabloff will be honored at an awards ceremony on November 16, 2016 at the 115th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association.
