[5] After serving in the United States Navy during World War II, he undertook his undergraduate and postgraduate education at Harvard University under the G.I.
His senior honors thesis, The Urban Revolution in Central Mexico, applied the cultural evolution model outlined by V. Gordon Childe in his book What Happened in History to the study of Tenochtitlan.
[2] He subsequently shifted his attention southward to Kaminaljuyu in Guatemala, in part due to evidence of links between that Mayan site and Teotihuacan.
[6] He argued that this area saw earlier and more acute urban development and state formation than other areas of Mexico, which he believed was the result of its physical geography: a semiarid climate which facilitated land clearance, variations in altitude meaning that it contained conditions suitable for growing maize, cotton and agave, and unpredictable levels of rainfall which spurred the development of irrigation and intensive agriculture.
This in turn led to high population densities which could support more sophisticated agricultural techniques[5] Sanders died on July 2, 2008, in State College, Pennsylvania, following a fall.