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About Jon Erlandson

 

Director, University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History

 

 

 

 

Dr. Jon Erlandson is an archaeologist, professor of anthropology, and Knight Professor of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon (UO), where he also serves as the Director of the Museum of Natural and Cultural History and co-editor of the Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, (UCSB) in 1988, and taught at UCSB and the University of Alaska-Fairbanks before joining the faculty at the UO in 1990. Erlandson's research revolves around the origins and development of maritime societies, human migrations, the peopling of the Americas, historical ecology, and the history of human impacts on marine fisheries and ecosystems. His primary focus of field research is on the California Channel Islands and the California Coast, although he has also worked along the Oregon Coast, in Alaska, and on Viking Age sites in Iceland. Erlandson has published 16 books and over 200 scholarly articles on these and other topics. His most recent books include Human Impacts on Ancient Marine Ecosystems: A Global Perspective (University of California Press, 2008, with T. C. Rick) and A Canyon Through Time: Archaeology, History, and Ecology of Tecolote Canyon, Santa Barbara County, California (University of Utah Press, 2008).