Eduardo Matos Moctezuma and Leonardo López Luján enter the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Archaeologists Eduardo Matos Moctezuma and Leonardo López Luján, from the Templo Mayor de Tenochtitlan Project, both researchers from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) and members of El Colegio Nacional, were announced this Thursday as new international honorary members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), in the Social and Behavioral Sciences Class, Anthropology and Archeology Section.

The president of the Academy, David W. Oxtoby, and the president of the board of directors, Nancy C. Andrews, announced the list of the 261 outstanding personalities who will join this prestigious institution founded in 1780, based in Cambridge, Mass.

“We are celebrating the depth of achievement in a variety of areas,” said David Oxtoby. “These people stand out in ways that excite and inspire us at a time when recognizing excellence, praising expertise and working for the greater good is absolutely essential to a better future.”

For her part, Nancy C. Andrews said: “The Academy’s dual mission continues to this day. Membership is both an honor and an opportunity to shape ideas and influence policy in areas as diverse as the arts, democracy, education, global affairs and science.”

Artists, scholars, scientists, and leaders from the public, private, and nonprofit sectors chosen for the Academy this year include novelists, Salman Rushdie, actress, Glenn Close, painter, Sam Gilliam, mathematician, Claire Voisin, the historian Heather Cox Richardson, the writer Sandra Cisneros, the physicist Gabriel Kotliar and the epidemiologist Camara Phyllis Jones, among others.

“I share the joy with archaeologists Bárbara Arroyo (Guatemala) and Eduardo Matos Moctezuma (INAH, Mexico) for this distinction that encourages us to continue carrying out our scientific and cultural work with PASSION,” López Luján wrote on his Twitter account.

Historical members

The new members join a distinguished group of people elected to the Academy before them, including Benjamin Franklin (1781) and Alexander Hamilton (1791) in the 18th century; Ralph Waldo Emerson (1864), Maria Mitchell (1848), and Charles Darwin (1874) in the 19th century; Albert Einstein (1924), Robert Frost (1931), Margaret Mead (1948), Milton Friedman (1959), Martin Luther King, Jr. (1966), Stephen Hawking (1984), and Condoleezza Rice (1997) in the 20th century; and more recently Jennifer Doudna (2003), Bryan Stevenson (2014), M. Temple Grandin (2016), John Legend (2017), Viet Thanh Nguyen (2018), James Fallows (2019), Joan Baez (2020), and Sanjay Gupta (2021), detailed the Academy.

Eduardo Matos Moctezuma

Eduardo Matos Moctezuma (Mexico City, December 11, 1940) is a Master in Anthropological Sciences, specializing in Archeology, from the ENAH and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), institutions with which he conducted research on archaeological sites such as Tepeapulco, Bonampak, Comalcalco, Cholula, Coacalco, Tlatelolco, Tula and Teotihuacan.

He has been director of the National Anthropology and Templo Mayor museums, president of the INAH Archeology Council and head of the Templo Mayor Project, of which he was founder, as well as the Urban Archeology Program (PAU). He is an emeritus of INAH and the Seminary of Mexican Culture and a member of El Colegio Nacional.

A professorship at Harvard University is named after him.

Leonardo Lopez Lujan

Leonardo López Luján (Mexico City, March 31, 1964) has a degree in Archeology from the National School of Anthropology and History. He did his postgraduate studies at the University of Paris Nanterre, Paris I-Pantheon-Sorbonne and at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. He is considered one of the most outstanding archaeologists in Mexico.

Researcher at the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH); director of the Templo Mayor Archaeological Project and member of El Colegio Nacional.