Donald Lathrap

Donald Ward Lathrap (4 July 1927 in California - 13 May 1990 in Illinois) was an American archaeologist who specialized in the study of neolithic American culture. He was a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at the time of his death.

Lathrap was raised in the area north of Berkeley, California. He graduated from Berkeley High School. In 1950 he received a Bachelor's degree in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, studying under Alfred L. Kroeber and Carl Sauer. While at UCB, Lathrap worked as an assistant archaeologist for the California Archaeological Survey. He published several papers on the archaeology of the California area. He also worked at Berkeley's Lowie Museum of Anthropology (now the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology). This exposure to museum artifacts convinced him that material culture is a valuable source for historical research.

Lathrap left California in 1959, taking a post at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where he significantly influenced the department's archaeological direction. He worked in South American archaeology, which focused on the Amazon and Peru. He also researched California and Mid-West archaeology. His orientation was significantly influenced by Sauer's geographical considerations. Much of his early career was marked by his heated disagreements with Betty Meggers over the respective roles of diffusion and local development. Lathrap (1971) proposed that Amazonia was an important center for early Formative pottery, whereas Meggers looked to the Japanese as the inventors of pottery and attributed South American pottery to diffusion from Japan. Lathrap, generally, looked at Amazonia as a source of innovation in South America (197), whereas Meggers looked more to the Andes as the main source of innovation (1972).

Lathrap took graduate studies at Harvard University, where he studied under Gordon Willey. He received a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Harvard in 1962.

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