Jeffrey H. Altschul, Ph.D., RPA
Chairman of the Board

Dr. Jeffrey H. Altschul is the founder and chairman of the Board of Directors of SRI. For more than 20 years, Dr. Altschul served as SRI’s president, shepherding the company from an entrepreneurial start-up to one of the largest heritage resource management firms in the United States. In 2004, he assumed the strategic role of chairman from which he oversees company operations, ensures SRI’s standard of care, surveys national and international trends in historic preservation, and works with partners from industry, historic preservation, and government to champion public policy positions that balance the preservation of historic and cultural values with development. Dr. Altschul is also involved with other members of the SRI family, including serving as chairman of Nexus Heritage, which provides heritage resource management services in Europe, and as president of the Board of Directors of the SRI Foundation, which advances historic preservation through training, research, and education. Dr. Altschul has a B.A. in Anthropology from Reed College and a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Brandeis University.

Active in archaeological fieldwork throughout North America since 1969, Dr. Altschul first became involved in CRM in 1976. In 1983, Dr. Altschul founded SRI as a comprehensive CRM consulting firm with a unique mission: to promote interesting and innovative work relating to the human condition. In 2001, he established the SRI Foundation to advance heritage preservation in the United States and throughout the world; in 2008 he cofounded Nexus Heritage-SRI Ltd to extend SRI’s mission to Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. For most of his career, Dr. Altschul worked primarily in North America, where he has served as principal investigator on more than 1,000 projects. He has directed field projects in central and northern Mexico as well as the Northeast, Midwest, Southeast, Southern Plains, Southwest, California, and Great Basin in the United States. Recently, Dr. Altschul has become active in assisting with heritage preservation programs in Europe and Latin America.

Dr. Altschul is a nationally recognized expert on spatial analysis and quantitative methods—in particular, predictive modeling and cultural landscapes. He authored or coauthored numerous chapters in the 1988 seminal text on the subject, Quantifying the Present and Predicting the Past; directed the modeling component of the Department of Energy’s effort to streamline oil and gas compliance in the western United States; and served as a principal investigator on the Department of Defense’s initiative to integrate predictive modeling into the agency’s cultural resource management program. Dr. Altschul has authored more than 40 published articles, chapters, and books, as well as more than 300 contract reports. Among his recent publications is the volume Fragile Patterns: The Archaeology of the Western Papaguería, which he coedited with Adrianne Rankin. He is currently writing, with Tom Patterson, an invited chapter for the seventy-fifth anniversary volume of the Society for American Archaeology on the future of employment and training in American archaeology. Dr. Altschul takes an active role in the profession, having served as the president of the Register of Professional Archaeologists and treasurer of the Society for American Archaeology. He also has served on the boards of directors of the American Cultural Resources Association, the Archaeology Division of the American Anthropological Association, the Society for Professional Archeologists, and several state archaeological organizations. Dr. Altschul served two terms as a commissioner on the Arizona Governor’s Archaeology Advisory Commission; he also represented the United States at the Congress of Rescue Archaeology Research, which met in Pultusk, Poland. Dr. Altschul is currently serving on the steering committee of the Andrew K. Mellon Foundation Digital Archaeological Archive initiative.