William Maxfield Denevan (born October 16, 1931, in San Diego) is an American geographer.
He also worked in the Latin American Center and the Institute for Environmental Studies at Wisconsin.
His dissertation (1963) was on "The Aboriginal Settlement of the Llanos de Mojos: A Seasonally Inundated Savanna in Northeastern Bolivia," which he revised into a monograph in 1966.
This is in contrast to what he calls "The Pristine Myth" (1992), the controversial belief that most of those people had minimal or no impact on the environment.
He helped discover prehistoric raised fields, causeways, canals, and other earthworks in Amazonia, reported in Scientific American (1967) and Science (1970).