Barbara J. Price

Barbara J. Price (1941 – February 18, 2016) was an American cultural anthropologist and teacher. She specialised in sociocultural anthropology, while also making theoretical contributions to archaeology. She co-authored the book Mesoamerica: The Evolution of a Civilization with archeologist William T. Sanders.

Education Price's father was a master sergeant and she grew up Fort Monmouth and studied at Red Bank High School, where she was valedictorian. She then graduated from Swarthmore College in 1961 with a Bachelor of Arts with high honours in psychology. She was offered both a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship which used the ecology of Mesoamerica as a way of understanding its cultural development. Price and Saunders considered that population growth, competition and cooperation were the most influential ecological processes. Price also wrote extensively on Teotihuacan and prehispanic America. As a specialist in socio-political evolution, ecological systems, and political economy, she went on to work as a visiting associate professor and eventually a Fulbright Professor at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).

Selected works William T. Sanders & Barbara J. Price, Mesoamerica: The Evolution of a Civilization (Random House, 1968).