Dr. Marcello Canuto is Director of Tulane University’s Middle American Research Institute and an Associate Professor of Anthropology. He is co-director of the La Corona Regional Archaeological Project, a multi-disciplinary study of the heart of lowland Maya civilization. He has received a series of grants from the National Geographic Society to continue his research into the Maya city of La Corona in northern Guatemala. In 2012, Dr. Canuto was part of a team that discovered a 1,500-year-old Maya text that supplied the second known reference to the so-called “end date” of the Maya calendar, Dec. 12, 2012. He received his degrees from Harvard University (A.B.) and the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D.), both in Archaeology, and is the author of Archaeology of Communities: New World Perspective. Dr. Canuto has been Assistant Curator, Pre-Columbian Collections, at the Peabody Museum since 2003, and a consultant with the UN Development Program in Guatemala since 2008.
