Staff
Jonathan Kaplan
Jonathan Kaplan
jonathan_kaplan2005@yahoo.com
Jonathan Kaplan (Ph.D., Yale, 1999) is a former OAS employee who now directs an excavation project in Chocolá, a large Maya city in southern Guatemala. His research focuses on the material and ideological underpinnings of Classic Maya civilization. He is also a research associate at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. His work has been published in Latin American Antiquity, Ancient Mesoamerica, Mexicon, and the Journal of Field Archaeology.
Dr. Kaplan is also in the vanguard of a movement called community archaeology. The goal of the movement is to protect a local people's culture and improve their quality of life to protect sites and biodiversity. If economic opportunities exist for locals and a collaborative approach is adopted, local pride and community cohesiveness is enhanced, and looting, logging, and unplanned and destructive town growth can be curbed or avoided.