Robert D. “Dick” Drennan, a 45-year Department of Anthropology faculty member who founded its Center for Comparative Archaeology while conducting worldwide research on the organization of the earliest complex societies, died April 18, 2025, at 77.
“Dick was one of the foremost anthropological archaeologists of his generation,” said one-time student and long-time collaborator, Christian E. Peterson, now professor and graduate chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Hawaiʻi–Mānoa.
“Dr. Drennan’s impact during his time at Pitt is hard to overstate,” said departmental colleagues Adriana Maguina-Ugarte (the center’s managing editor) and faculty member Elizabeth N. Arkush in a joint memorial.
“Envisioning a long-term role for Pitt in building scholarship in Latin American archaeology,” they noted, “he and like-minded colleagues obtained multiple grants from the Heinz Foundation starting in 1988 to support graduate fellowships in that field.”
These efforts also created the Latin American Archaeology Publications program of bilingual Spanish-English monographs, totaling 46 publications thus far. Drennan secured other major grants that have supported more than 75 doctoral students and the creation of the Latin American Archaeology Database to store and offer access to primary data from fieldwork.
The Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences supported the establishment of the Center for Comparative Archaeology, expanding the existing approach to Latin American research into “comparative study of ancient social change at the global level,” Maguina-Ugarte and Arkush said, a project that “will continue as his enduring legacy.” Drennan directed the center from 2009 until his retirement in May 2022.
Drennan had joined the University in 1977, and by 1981 had begun his research on chiefdoms outside Mesoamerica, conducting “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). In the first 25 years of his research, he mentored more than 300 Colombian students, many of whom attended graduate school at Pitt and went on to worldwide impact as faculty members and researchers, they said.
In 1998, Drennan also started a collaborative research project at Chifeng in Inner Mongolia, China, the Chifeng International Collaborative Archaeological Research Project (1998-2007), followed by 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,” his colleagues said.
“Dick often stated that the most rewarding part of his job was working with graduate students, and he was a careful and dedicated mentor,” they continued. “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.”
Drennan’s final book is still in press, co-authored by C. Adam Berrey of California State University–Sacramento and Christian E. Peterson.
Drennan was Peterson’s advisor and the chair of his PhD committee at Pitt (1999-2006), and Peterson began working under Drennan on the Chifeng project in 2000, then as one of its senior collaborators. The pair published several articles and book chapters together during Peterson’s student years, and more than 30 articles, books and book chapters overall.
“This represents only a fraction of Dick's total productivity as a scholar,” Peterson said. “Our work together initially focused on refining or developing new methods for the collection and analysis of information about how ancient people distributed themselves across regional-scale landscapes, and in what numbers. Later, it expanded to include new ways of inferring interaction and of delineating the boundaries of ancient communities from archaeological data collected at the regional scale, and of studying ancient social dynamics from the garbage prehistoric households threw away.”
The pair collaborated on Drennan’s second China project and, in 2007, established the Chiefdoms Dataset Project “to compile primary archaeological data for as many different regions of the world for which archaeological information on the development of the earliest complex societies was available, and then subject them all to the analytical approaches we had been developing and publishing on together up to then, aimed at taking global comparative analysis of such societies to a new level. We thought that project might take the two of us a few years to complete. We were wrong. It took 17 years, and required the help and expertise of more than a dozen Pitt graduate students and a third principal investigator” — C. Adam Berrey, another Pitt alumnus.
“Few archaeologists possess the particular combination of broad vision, good judgment, organizational skills, analytical acumen and commitment necessary to pursue comparative goals of this scope, complexity and duration,” Peterson said. “I have no doubt that the Chiefdoms Dataset Project would have collapsed under its own weight years ago had Dick not been expertly steering the ship.
“In all cases,” Peterson further noted, “Dick’s research sought to document the development of regional trajectories of societal change over thousands of years, in order to compare them so as to identify patterns in the ways that early complex societies and their attendant structures of inequality emerged. …
“He was also one of the most highly respected practitioners, teachers and authors of quantitative methods in archaeology. His contributions to the discipline earned him admission to the American Association for the Advancement of Science and election to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences.”
The Center for Comparative Archaeology, Peterson explained, is most significant for providing archaeological information “especially to historically underserved and economically disadvantaged communities of international scholars in Latin America and Asia …”
He added: “Dick also worked tirelessly for decades to protect, preserve and repatriate global archaeological heritage through his efforts to educate students, academics, government employees and the public through his teaching and publications…; repeated presentation of verbal and written testimony before the U.S. Department of State's Cultural Property Advisory Committee; and his service on various national and international standing committees of the Society for American Archaeology (including as chair of its International Governmental Affairs Committee).”
Drennan was deeply committed to providing graduate students with “training in field and laboratory methods; in the organization and management of field projects; in the mechanics of successful scholarly collaboration; and introduced students to colleagues and cultural heritage agencies and authorities without whose assistance their own research could not be undertaken.”
Given that graduate study in archaeology most often sends students to foreign countries for lengthy projects without direct supervision, Peterson said, it was crucial that “Dick worked, seemingly inexhaustibly, with most University of Pittsburgh archaeology students over the years to help develop their research questions, decide upon appropriate methodologies, and/or draft, submit and revise for resubmission proposals for the funding of their research.”
In particular, he helped graduate students obtain prestigious and tough-to-gain funding from the National Science Foundation: “That a larger share of these grants was awarded to archaeology students at the University of Pittsburgh than to those enrolled in any other archaeology program in the United States in the 25 years leading up to Dick's retirement is a lasting tribute his efforts to professionalize them.”
Raised in Lexington, Ky., Drennan earned his undergraduate degree in the arts and archaeology department at Princeton (1965-1969), then earned his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1975.
In 2007, he earned the Provost’s Mentoring Award at Pitt. He eventually chaired almost 50 PhD dissertation committees here.
Christian Peterson keeps a framed photo of himself with Drennan from the Liaoning project on display in his home office: “We were visiting the site during a break from field research in the nearby Chifeng region. This site was very important to my developing research interests and I wanted to investigate it thoroughly. But earlier that same season I had badly injured my knee during fieldwork and was unable to walk on my own. In the photo, Dick is carrying me on his back around the site, providing me with an opportunity to do what I otherwise would not have been able to. That photo serves as a metaphor for the role that Dick's friendship and mentoring have had on my life and academic career — and on the lives and careers of so many of his former students — without which I, at least, would have achieved far less than I have.”
He is survived by his wife, Jeanne, and his daughter, Margaret Ferrary Drennan.
Memorial gifts are suggested to the Archaeological Conservancy or Doctors Without Borders.
— Marty Levine