Adrian Chase

Dr. Adrian S.Z. Chase is currently Doris Stone Postdoctoral Fellow of the Middle American Research Institute and the Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University. He received AB from Harvard College in 2012, his MA from Arizona State University in 2014, and his PhD from Arizona State University in 2021. Before coming to Tulane University, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Boston University and before that a Postdoctoral Scholar/Fellow in the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation and Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago.

Dr. Chase is an anthropological archaeologist studying urbanism among the ancient Maya through the use of lidar datasets, excavated materials, and computational methods. His current research focuses on urbanism at the Maya city of Caracol, Belize – and its extensive database deriving from forty years of archaeological investigation – to better understand urban life. His interest in combining computational methods with archaeological data began during his undergraduate degrees in Anthropology and Computer Science from Harvard College, and has persisted throughout his academic career. This interest has led him to investigate ancient Maya urbanism by combining lidar and archaeological data to reconstruct and test for ancient neighborhoods, examine urban services and their provisioning, and analyze shifts between collective and autocratic governance. In addition to archaeological investigations at Caracol, he has participated in field research at Hirbemerdon Tepe in Turkey and at both Chichén Itza and Teotihuacan in Mexico.