Gustavus Adolphus College

Dennis Stanford, curator of archaeology and chairman of the Anthropology Department at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Dennis Stanford has devoted his career to early American prehistory and done field work from Alaska to Monte Verde in Chile, where the oldest human remains in the Americas have been found. With his Smithsonian colleague Bruce Bradley, he is known for advocating the “Solutrean hypothesis,” which contends that Clovis points found in North America and dating back around 11,000 years, derive from similar flaking techniques developed thousands of years earlier by the Solutrean culture in Spain and may have been brought to North America by early visitors who traveled by boat along the edge of an icecap that rimmed the North Atlantic during the last Ice Age.

Stanford earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Wyoming (B.A., 1965), and his master’s (1967) and Ph.D. (1972) in anthropology from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Affiliated with the Smithsonian since 1972, he now heads the Archaeology Division of the National Museum of Natural History and is director of its Paleo-Indian Program. He has also served as a research associate of the Denver Museum of Natural History since 1989.

Stanford has authored or co-authored more than 100 articles and chapters and five books, including Ice Age Hunters of the Rockies (co-editor, 1992) and Paleoamerican Origins: Beyond Clovis (2006). He also co-edited an earlier book, Pre-Llano Cultures of the Americas: Paradoxes and Possibilities (1979).