Prof. John Rick

Professor John Rick is Associate Professor Emeritus and former Chair of Anthropological Sciences at Stanford University, previous Curator of Anthropological Collections, and past Director of Stanford’s Archaeology Center. He focuses on South American archaeology including the lost city of the incas. For the last 26 years he has directed fieldwork at Chavín de Huántar, a monumental World Heritage site dating to around 1000 BC. His interests there concentrate on understanding how early religious cults strategised the beginnings of political authority in the Andes. A previous long-term project focused on early hunter-gatherer cave sites in the high grasslands of Peru, but he has also done archaeological fieldwork throughout South America and the American Southwest; he has been participating in a major fieldwork project on Preclassic sites near Lake Atitlán in the Guatemalan highlands. He has written and published numerous works in his area of expertise. He has led more than 35 university travel groups to Peru as well as eight trips for Archaeological Tours.