Jeffrey Quilter

Jeffrey Quilter was born and raised in New York City. He received his B.A. (Social Sciences) from the University of Chicago, and his M.A. and Ph.D. (Anthropology) from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Trained as an Anthropological archaeologist, Quilter has devoted most of his career to the pursuit of archaeology in Latin America, especially Peru and Costa Rica. He is the former Director of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology a post he held from 2012 to 2019. Prior to that, he was Curator of Intermediate Area Archaeology at the Peabody (2005—2012), Director of the Pre-Columbian Studies Program at Dumbarton Oaks (1995—2005) in Washington, DC, and Professor at Ripon College, Wisconsin (1980—1995). He has been conducting research on pre-Columbian art and archaeology for four decades, including a decade-long project in Costa Rica, part of the prehistoric cultural realm in which Colombia was located. He is the author of five books including Cobble Circles and Standing Stones: Archaeology at the Rivas Site, Costa Rica (2004) and, soon to be published, Magdalena de Cao: An Early Colonial Town on the North Coast of Peru.