The Center for Comparative Archaeology (CCA) announces with deep sorrow that Dr. Robert D. “Dick” Drennan passed away on April 18^th, 2025 at the age of 77. Dick Drennan taught in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh for 45 years, from 1977 until his retirement in May 2022.

Dr. Drennan’s impact during his time at Pitt is hard to overstate. Envisioning a long-term role for Pitt in building scholarship in Latin American archaeology, he and like-minded colleagues obtained multiple grants from the Heinz Foundation starting in 1988 to support graduate fellowships in that field. This funding also went to support the inaugural Latin American Archaeology Publications (LAAP) program of bilingual Spanish–English monographs, which continues today totaling 46 publications. In 1996, his efforts helped secure major endowment gifts from the Howard Heinz Endowment and Andrew Mellon Foundation to the Latin American archaeology program. These funds have supported over 75 doctoral students to date from 15 Latin American countries, the United States, and elsewhere. They also supported the creation of the Latin American Archaeology Database (LAAD), whose groundbreaking mission was to preserve and widely disseminate primary data recovered during fieldwork.

In 2009, Dr. Drennan obtained support from Dietrich School Dean N. John Cooper to formally establish the Center for Comparative Archaeology, meant to expand the Latin American focus to fostering the comparative study of ancient social change at the global level, and strengthening connections among an international community of scholars. Under the CCA, the Comparative Archaeology Database (CADB) expanded greatly from the former LAAD datasets. The CCA also provided graduate support for students working outside of Latin America and has funded 29 doctoral students from 9 countries to date. As the founder and first director of the Center for Comparative Archaeology, Dr. Drennan’s vision established the CCA’s mission of supporting globally comparative archaeological research, which will continue as his enduring legacy. He served as Director of the CCA until his retirement in May 2022.

Education and Research

Captivated by archaeology since his childhood in Lexington, Kentucky, Dr. Drennan attended Princeton University for his undergraduate degree in the Arts and Archaeology department (1965-1969). Interested in an anthropological archaeology approach, he started the graduate program in Anthropology at the University of Michigan in 1969, where he studied under the guidance of Kent V. Flannery, as well as Jeffrey R. Parsons, Henry T. Wright, Richard I. Ford, Marcus Winter and others. His first fieldwork took him to the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico in 1970, as part of the Human Ecology Project directed by Flannery. Dick successfully defended his dissertation, Fabrica San José and Middle Formative Society in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico in 1975.

Dr. Drennan then worked as Curator for a few years at the R. S. Peabody Foundation for Archaeology, Andover, MA. He worked closely with Peabody Foundation director Scotty MacNeish, who at the time was completing his research in Mexico’s Tehuacán Valley, northeast of Oaxaca. Having inherited in 1974 the task of continuing the Tehuacán Valley Project from MacNeish, Dr. Drennan’s scholarly work concentrated on the origins of complex societies in that region.

In 1977 he started as Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. By 1981, he had become interested in studying chiefdoms outside Mesoamerica and building a better base of knowledge about these social formations from other understudied regions of the world. He chose Colombia, located in what is known as the Intermediate Area, the region between Mesoamerica and the Central Andes.

Dr. Drennan accomplished pioneering large-scale archaeological survey, excavations, and analysis in Colombia through the Proyecto Arqueológico Valle de la Plata (1983-1991) and Programa de Arqueología Regional en el Alto Magdalena (1993-2017). By 2006, through his work in the Southwest of Colombia, and collaborations with the Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia (ICANH), the Universidad de los Andes, and Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Dr. Drennan was recorded to have mentored over 300 Colombian students, many of whom came to the University of Pittsburgh (and other universities elsewhere) to receive graduate degrees. These students now carry on his legacy as they hold faculty or research positions of their own, across Latin America, as well as the Unites States, Canada, Israel, China, Japan, and beyond.

During the 1980s, he noted that local archaeologists published their findings in Spanish-language journals and books that exclusively circulated within Colombia, and did not have an audience abroad; nor did they have access to international scholars’ works published in other languages than Spanish. It was this situation that led him to promote international collaboration by creating the bilingual publications series under LAAP and by making databases available, two programs that are now housed in the Center for Comparative Archaeology.

In 1998, Dr. Drennan started a collaborative research project at Chifeng in Inner Mongolia, China. He had imagined a brief participation while political conditions in Colombia made it temporarily unsafe to carry on fieldwork, but he found the research too compelling to relinquish. The Chifeng International Collaborative Archaeological Research Project ran from 1998 to 2007, after which he immediately started another major fieldwork program, the Liaoning Hongshan Period Community Project, in Western Liaoning Province.

The contrasts in sociopolitical developments in these three world regions furnished data for Dr. Drennan’s overarching scholarly achievement, the identification and study of contrasting pathways to ancient social complexity based on evidence that was meticulously collected, documented, and analyzed.

Dr. Drennan published prolifically, many times in true collaboration with colleagues and graduate students. He published 25 books or monographs, over 92 journal articles and book chapters, in addition to 5 datasets. Along with his substantive contributions to the fields of Mexican, Colombian, and Chinese archaeology, he also published widely used methodology guides for statistics in archaeology (second editions published in English, Spanish, Chinese, and Korean), for regional demography in archaeology, and for archaeological survey.

His remarkable scholarly achievements were recognized in multiple awards. He was elected to the American Association for Advancement of Science in 1998, and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2004. The Society for American Archaeology awarded him the Presidential Recognition Award (1995), and an Award for Excellence in Latin American and Caribbean Archaeology (2016). In recognition of his contributions, the Universidad de los Andes, Colombia awarded him the title of Doctor Honoris Causa in 2011, while the Shanghai Archaeology Forum gave him a Major Archaeological Research Findings Award in 2013.

Service

Dick often stated that the most rewarding part of his job was working with graduate students, and he was a careful and dedicated mentor. Under his guidance, his students were exceptionally successful at receiving external funding for their doctoral projects from NSF and Wenner-Gren, and many went on to successful university careers in many countries. In 2007, when Dr. Drennan had only chaired 30 dissertation committees, had advised 16 doctoral students, and had helped about 35 graduate students obtain research grants, he received the University of Pittsburgh Provost’s Mentoring Award. At the time of his retirement in 2022, Dr. Drennan had chaired close to 50 dissertation committees.

Dr. Drennan was also active in his service to the profession beyond Pitt, serving on the NSF Senior Grant Panel in Archaeology, and contributing to committees at the Society of American Archaeology, including founding the Committee on the Americas (1995).

Dick Drennan (center), Christian E. Peterson (to his left), with graduate students on survey in China.

Dr. Drennan’s final opus is a book co-authored with his former PhD students Christian E. Petersen (University of Hawai'i at Mānoa) and C. Adam Berrey (California State University, Sacramento), which will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2026. His intention was that the accompanying database would be housed at the Comparative Archaeology Database.

He often stated that the most rewarding part of his job was working with graduate students. Dr. Drennan formed lasting and deep relationships with his many students, who have gone on to reshape archaeological research in Latin America, China, and elsewhere.

Dr. Drennan disliked formal accolades, preferred plaid shirts and jeans to suits and ties, and would surely be embarrassed by this tribute. Nevertheless, the warm gratitude of his students, colleagues and friends meant a good deal to him. We extend our heartfelt condolences to his family, colleagues, and the many students he mentored throughout his distinguished academic career. His contribution to the field will be remembered and built upon by generations of archaeologists to come.

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Tributes to Dick Drennan

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Post-Gazette Obituary
Profile of Robert D. Drennan (2006)
Pittsburgh City Paper interview (2007)
Video - Doctor Honoris Causa Discourse at UNIANDES (2011)
Universidad de los Andes homage (2023)