pair found tickets to Tikal waiting for them and a warm welcome at the site. For Denny the visit stretched into the 1961 field season, then another, and another…. As a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, Dennis met and married Olga Stavrakis. Dennis and Olga had a son, Cedric, and a daughter, Lyda. During many of Dennis's adventures his family would accompany him. His brother, Peter and his wife, Olga were partners and contributors to a number of his projects, and his son, Cedric is now in conducting post-doc work in the field. Puleston's career was intimately tied to Tikal. Originally invited to join the Tikal Project in 1961 by Edwin Shook, the Project Director, Dennis entered graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania Museum in 1964 continuing his work at Tikal under the direction of William Coe. Puleston became interested in how the ordinary Tikal citizen lived and focused his research on population and subsistence asking questions about how the Classic Maya managed their environment in such a way that it could feed large populations without degrading the delicate ecological balance of the sub tropical forest. At the time, archaeological research focused on the central mapped area of Tikal, representing the urban and ceremonial core of the polity. Dennis began to explore the surrounding jungle in order to learn where settlement dropped off and the agricultural area began. Up until that time, few archaeologists ventured regularly into the jungle and many of the smaller sites mapped today remained unknown. Dennis searched for the city limits to try to determine the site and, ultimately, the population of Tikal and to this end he began exploring and mapping the smaller sites outside the city center. He then developed a major research program, called the Sustaining Area Project, which mapped four 12 km strips extending out from the center of Tikal. Using a compass and pace method for the mapping he and his research teams were able to quickly and accurately cover large areas of dense jungle within which they discovered a number of previously unknown small sites, causeways, an enormous earthworks north of Tikal and hundreds of housemounds and residential platforms. Based on this work, Puleston proposed a new population estimate for Tikal of at least 80,000 inhabitants within the boundaries defined by the earthworks and by drops in population density. He suggested that the earthworks may have served