Lathrap was raised in the area north of Berkeley, California. He graduated from Berkeley High School. In 1950 he received a Bachelor's degree in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, studying under Alfred L. Kroeber and Carl Sauer. While at UCB, Lathrap worked as an assistant archaeologist for the California Archaeological Survey. He published several papers on the archaeology of the California area. He also worked at Berkeley's Lowie Museum of Anthropology. This exposure to museum artifacts convinced him that material culture is a valuable source for historical research. Lathrap left California in 1959, taking a post at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where he significantly influenced the department's archaeological direction. He worked in South American archaeology, which focused on the Amazon and Peru. He also researched California and Mid-West archaeology. His orientation was significantly influenced by Sauer's geographical considerations. Much of his early career was marked by his heated disagreements with Betty Meggers over the respective roles of diffusion and local development. Lathrap proposed that Amazonia was an important center for early Formative pottery, whereas Meggers looked to the Japanese as the inventors of pottery and attributed South American pottery to diffusion from Japan. Lathrap, generally, looked at Amazonia as a source of innovation in South America, whereas Meggers looked more to the Andes as the main source of innovation. Lathrap took graduate studies at Harvard University, where he studied under Gordon Willey. He received a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Harvard in 1962.
Career
In his career Lathrap curated several museum exhibits. His most influential exhibit, "Ancient Ecuador: Culture, Clay and Creativity 3000-300 B.C.," was organized for the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and traveled to many major museums. In 1975 he was appointed a research associate with the Department of Anthropology at the Field Museum. In one of his most recent works, Lathrap and R. C. Troike joined their expertise in California archaeology and linguistics to model the dynamics of West Coastculture history. Using their understanding of linguistics, they suggested that the West Coast was an important corridor and had been occupied earlier than generally accepted today. Lathrap was a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois when he died of an embolism following abdominal surgery in May 1990.
