Professor Louis Dupree (August 23, 1925 – March 21, 1989) was an American archaeologist, anthropologist, and scholar of Afghan culture and history. He was the husband of Nancy Hatch Dupree, who is the Board Director of the Afghanistan Center at Kabul University in Afghanistan and author of five books about Afghanistan. The husband and wife team from the United States worked together for 15 years in Kabul, collecting as many works written about Afghanistan as they could. They travelled across the country from 1962 until the April 1978 Saur Revolution, conducting archaeological excavations.
Dupree was born on August 23, 1925, in Greenville, North Carolina. He had served in World War II (1939–1945), where he joined the United States Merchant Marine and was stationed in the Philippines. At the end of the war he decided to transfer to the 11th Airborne Division of the United States Army. When World War II ended, he began Asian archeology and ethnology studies at Harvard University. After receiving his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees, he planned to re-visit the Philippines for research purposes but was rejected by its government, instead he was invited to join an archeological survey in Afghanistan in 1949. This led to his lifelong interest in southwestern Asia, from 1959 and 1983.