Jon McVey Erlandson

Executive Director, Museum of Natural and Cultural History; Professor of Anthropology; Knight Professor of Arts and Sciences. Career focused on the evolution of maritime societies, the role of fishing and seafaring in human migrations, and the historical ecology of coastal ecosystems. Published more than three hundred scholarly articles, wrote or edited twentybooks, and coedited seven volumes of the international Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology. Papers have appeared in Science, PNAS, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, American Antiquity, American Anthropologist and other journals. Field research focused on California's Channel Islands, the Pacific Coast of North America, and Viking Age Iceland, with broader syntheses of the archaeology of coastal adaptations, human impacts on coastal fisheries and ecosystems, and the potential role of maritime migrations in the peopling of the Americas. Contributed significantly to a fundamental reassessment of the antiquity of coastal settlement, fishing, seafaring, and human alteration of nearshore ecosystems. In a ground-breaking case study, has led a long-term multi-disciplinary effort to understand the historical ecology of California's Channel Islands, integrating paleontological, archaeological, historical, and ecological data into a detailed reconstruction of human interaction with marine and terrestrial ecosystems over the past 13,000 years. Research has contributed significantly to a broad recognition that a coastal migration of Upper Paleolithic peoples from northeast Asia may have contributed to the initial human colonization of the Americas, what many scholars now refer to as the kelp highway hypothesis.