Wendy Ashmore, former associate professor in Penn’s department of anthropology and emeritus fellow of the Museum’s Kolb Society, died January 8 in Riverside, California, after a long battle with two auto-immune diseases. She was 70.

Dr. Ashmore was born in Los Angeles and earned her BA in anthropology from UCLA in 1969. She began her career in academia as a teaching fellow in anthropology at Penn from 1974 to 1979. She then went to Rutgers, where she began as an adjunct instructor and moved up to associate professor. She also served as consulting curator for The University Museum at Rutgers.

She earned her PhD in 1981 from Penn, where her dissertation, Precolumbian Occupation at Quirigua, Guatemala: Settlement Patterns in a Classic Maya Center, brought a deeper understanding of the complexity of Maya settlement patterns to the archaeological community.

She joined the Penn faculty in 1992 as an associate professor of anthropology; she also served as associate curator of the American Section of the Penn Museum. While here, she earned multiple Research Foundation Awards and was selected to be a Kolb Society Senior Fellow in 1997. In 1998 she received the Elizabeth Bingham Award from the Association for Women in Science (AWIS), Philadelphia.

She left Penn in 2000 for UC Riverside, where she became a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Anthropology. She received the Kidder Award from the American Anthropological Association; she was the 24th recipient and the third woman. She also won the 2002 President’s Service Award from the American Anthropological Association.

She was a pioneer in the areas of settlement patterns, landscape and household archaeology, pushing the field to consider the importance of symbolic behavior and more humanistic archaeological narratives before such approaches were considered standard. Her consideration of the social and symbolic aspects of spatial organization has been expressed in the archaeology of households, the analysis of civic planning in cities and towns and the study of ancient landscapes. She turned her attention to how gender affects, and is affected, by architecture and other kinds of spatial order.

Dr. Ashmore wrote, edited, or co-edited several books, including Lowland Maya Settlement Patterns, Household and Community in the Mesoamerican Past and Archaeologies of Landscape: Contemporary Perspectives. She and co-author, Robert Sharer, the late Penn museum curator emeritus and Shoemaker Professor Emeritus of Anthropology (Almanac October 23, 2012) published multiple editions of two popular archaeology textbooks that have been adopted for introductory courses to archaeology in numerous universities, Archaeology—Discovering Our Past (third edition in 2002) and the related Discovering Our Past: An Introduction to Archaeology (the 5th edition was published in 2013 and the 6th in 2014).

Dr. Ashmore is survived by her husband, Thomas Patterson; and siblings Patrick Matthews, Carol Matthews and Elizabeth Gould.