Ronald L. Bishop received his doctorate in Anthropology in 1975 from southern Illinois University and is presently the Curator for Mexican and Central American Archaeology in the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. In 1973 he began the first of what would be several years in the Department of Chemistry at Brookhaven National Laboratory, carrying out research with Edward V. Sayre and Garman Harbottle, applying neutron activation analysis to archaeological problems. He has spent 40 years analyzing ceramics and jade from Mesoamerica (especially Maya), Lower Central America, the greater U.S. Southwest, and more recently, Hispanic and Mexican Colonial pottery in California, Texas and Mexico. He has written extensively on the compositional analysis of cultural materials, integrating the analytical data obtained from the study of museum objects with analyses of artifacts from recent excavation and surveys. He has published extensively on subjects of ceramic manufacture and distribution, especially as these are aided through the use of chemical and petrographic analyses of pottery. His mathematical modeling of compositional data incorporates both geological and social aspects of material production, use and exchange.