Jon Erlandson

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• PhD
• Archaeologist, Professor Emeritus. Museum Director Emeritus at University of Oregon

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

Tuqan (a.k.a. San Miguel) Island, totaling just 37 km ² and situated 44 km off the Southern California Coast, has been occupied by people for at least 13,000 years, a period in which the geography and ecosystems of the island have changed dramatically. Early historical accounts described Tuqan as a marginal and windswept island with limited fresh w...

Here we review issues related to the archaeology and interdisciplinary study of long-term human persistence, resilience, and sustainability in island settings around the world. While the study of human impacts on island ecosystems and the collapse of ancient island societies have contributed valuable information, the vast majority of island societi...

We discuss the deep history of human societies in island settings, the effects island peoples had in altering the insular landscapes and ecosystems they have inhabited for centuries or millennia, and how archaeology can contribute to our understanding of long-term human resilience and sustainability on islands around the world. Among the paradigmat...

The Norse colonized Iceland approximately 1,150 years ago (~AD 870) and their descendants have lived there ever since. From Iceland, Viking Age settlements were established in Greenland and on the eastern shores of North America, but these colonies failed. In Iceland, in contrast, the Norse and their descendants survived substantial climatic change...

The northwest coast of Wimaɬ (Santa Rosa Island) has long been a focus of archaeological research, including former Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History archaeologist, geologist, and paleontologist Phil Orr’s work from the 1940s to the 1960s. Orr pioneered the use of radiocarbon dating on the California Channel Islands, built extensive archaeolo...

People who colonized islands often caused significant environmental impacts, including extirpations, extinctions, and landscape degradation. Given the relatively late colonization for many of these islands and archipelagoes compared to mainland areas, it is easy to see why these impacts occurred. Initial colonizing groups—particularly those that r...

The complex relationship between sociopolitical complexity, natural climatic change, and subsistence strategies on California’s Northern Channel Islands has long been a topic of archaeological inquiry. One period of particular interest to researchers is the Middle-to-Late Period Transition (MLT, 800–650 cal BP), during which Chumash hierarchical so...

In this short article, I summarize current research on the antiquity of seafaring in the Pacific and it's implications for the peopling of the Americas.

Relationships between archaeologists, anthropologists, Native Americans, and other Indigenous peoples have often been contentious [1,2], the result of a legacy of colonialism, discrimination, and White privilege, combined with a longstanding focus on scientific exploration of cemeteries, human remains, and sacred places or objects. As scientists, w...

This is an edited collection of 12 articles exploring various aspects of interdisciplinary archaeological perspectives to understanding the role of coastal and marine ecosystems in the deep history of humans around the world. It includes contributions from South Africa, the Zanzibar Archipelago in East Africa, the Iberian Peninsula in Europe, the N...

This is the editorial for the research topic of our special issue entitled 'Living on the edge—interdisciplinary perspectives on coastal and marine ecosystems in human prehistory'

Sea level rise and marine erosion threaten coastal archaeological sites around the world, forcing difficult decisions about how to prioritize which sites to document and analyze. Here we present the results of research at a heavily eroded Late Holocene shell midden at CA-SRI-26, Santa Rosa Island, California. Systematic surface collection and radio...

This poster is a literature review which culminates a variety of sources to outline what we know about chipped crescents. It includes a distribution map, a discussion of crescent function, outlines different methods of analysis, and provides a background on eccentric crescents.

Founding populations of the first Americans likely occupied parts of Beringia during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). The timing, pathways, and modes of their southward transit remain unknown, but blockage of the interior route by North American ice sheets between ~26 and 14 cal kyr BP (ka) favors a coastal route during this period. Using models and...

Volume I of The Cambridge History of the Pacific Ocean provides a wide-ranging survey of Pacific history to 1800. It focuses on varied concepts of the Pacific environment and its impact on human history, as well as tracing the early exploration and colonization of the Pacific, the evolution of Indigenous maritime cultures after colonization, and th...

In a recent issue of California Archaeology, Jim Cassidy (2021. “A Technological Assessment of the North Pacific Seafaring Hypothesis: Informed by California Channel Island Research.” California Archaeology 13 (1): 69–92). provided a flawed assessment of the potential role boats and seafaring played in the initial peopling of the Americas, as well...

On global, regional, and local scales, sea level histories and paleoshoreline reconstructions are critical to understanding the deep history of human adaptations in island and coastal settings. The distance of any individual site from the coast strongly influences decisions about the transport of coastal resources and has a direct impact on human s...

Humans and the diverse ecosystems we inhabit face numerous sustainability challenges due to climate change, rising seas, population growth, overfishing, natural habitat destruction, accelerating extinctions, and more. As an interdisciplinary paradigm that leverages both natural and social sciences to better understand linkages between humans and th...

California’s Northern Channel Islands contain an incredible record of terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene human occupation. Since the hunter-gatherer-fishers who created these sites relied heavily on marine resources, a critical aspect of understanding early settlement patterns is calculating distance to paleoshorelines. This has traditionally...

There are few things more pathetic than an aging white male professor defending every word of something he wrote 25 years ago. Haley's world, is black and white, but historical archives and their interpretations are many shades of gray. He would have you believe that in 1997-98, he was right and I was wrong. He is apparently an expert while I am a...

In a rejoinder to Gill et alia (2021), Martin (2022) accuses us of perpetuating misconceptions about human nutrition and erroneously describing geophytes as a dietary staple. We provide authoritative definitions for the terms “essential” and “dietary staple” to show that it is Martin who mischaracterizes and misunderstands the foundational role of...

Archaeologists have long emphasized the importance of large-scale excavations and multi-year or even decades-long projects at a single site or site complex. Here, we highlight archaeological field strategies, termed coring, profiling, and trenching (CPT), that rely on relatively small-scale excavations or the collection of new samples from intact d...

There is growing evidence for human use of geophytes long before the advent of agriculture. Rich in carbohydrates, geophytes were important in many coastal areas where protein-rich marine foods are abundant. On California's Channel Islands, scholars have long questioned how maritime peoples sustained themselves for millennia with limited plant reso...

In a recent paper published in The Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology, John Terrell (2020) objected to the proposition that islands can offer model systems to study human behavior and ecodynamics. He argues that a review of insular model systems in the study of non-human taxa is empirically flawed and theoretically incoherent and implies tha...

Explore the remarkable history of one of the jewels of the US National Park system California’s Northern Channel Islands, sometimes called the American Galápagos and one of the jewels of the US National Park system, are a located between 20 and 44 km off the southern California mainland coast. Celebrated as a trip back in time where tourists can ca...

Explore the remarkable history of one of the jewels of the US National Park system California’s Northern Channel Islands, sometimes called the American Galápagos and one of the jewels of the US National Park system, are a located between 20 and 44 km off the southern California mainland coast. Celebrated as a trip back in time where tourists can ca...

Explore the remarkable history of one of the jewels of the US National Park system California’s Northern Channel Islands, sometimes called the American Galápagos and one of the jewels of the US National Park system, are a located between 20 and 44 km off the southern California mainland coast. Celebrated as a trip back in time where tourists can ca...

Explore the remarkable history of one of the jewels of the US National Park system California’s Northern Channel Islands, sometimes called the American Galápagos and one of the jewels of the US National Park system, are a located between 20 and 44 km off the southern California mainland coast. Celebrated as a trip back in time where tourists can ca...

Explore the remarkable history of one of the jewels of the US National Park system California’s Northern Channel Islands, sometimes called the American Galápagos and one of the jewels of the US National Park system, are a located between 20 and 44 km off the southern California mainland coast. Celebrated as a trip back in time where tourists can ca...

Explore the remarkable history of one of the jewels of the US National Park system California’s Northern Channel Islands, sometimes called the American Galápagos and one of the jewels of the US National Park system, are a located between 20 and 44 km off the southern California mainland coast. Celebrated as a trip back in time where tourists can ca...

Explore the remarkable history of one of the jewels of the US National Park system California’s Northern Channel Islands, sometimes called the American Galápagos and one of the jewels of the US National Park system, are a located between 20 and 44 km off the southern California mainland coast. Celebrated as a trip back in time where tourists can ca...

Explore the remarkable history of one of the jewels of the US National Park system California’s Northern Channel Islands, sometimes called the American Galápagos and one of the jewels of the US National Park system, are a located between 20 and 44 km off the southern California mainland coast. Celebrated as a trip back in time where tourists can ca...

Explore the remarkable history of one of the jewels of the US National Park system California’s Northern Channel Islands, sometimes called the American Galápagos and one of the jewels of the US National Park system, are a located between 20 and 44 km off the southern California mainland coast. Celebrated as a trip back in time where tourists can ca...

Explore the remarkable history of one of the jewels of the US National Park system California’s Northern Channel Islands, sometimes called the American Galápagos and one of the jewels of the US National Park system, are a located between 20 and 44 km off the southern California mainland coast. Celebrated as a trip back in time where tourists can ca...

Explore the remarkable history of one of the jewels of the US National Park system California’s Northern Channel Islands, sometimes called the American Galápagos and one of the jewels of the US National Park system, are a located between 20 and 44 km off the southern California mainland coast. Celebrated as a trip back in time where tourists can ca...

During the last 10 years, we have learned a great deal about the potential for a coastal peopling of the Americas and the importance of marine resources in early economies. Despite research at a growing number of terminal Pleistocene archaeological sites on the Pacific Coast of the Americas, however, important questions remain about the lifeways of...

An accurate understanding of biodiversity of the past is critical for contextualizing biodiversity patterns and trends in the present. Emerging techniques are refining our ability to decipher otherwise cryptic human-mediated species translocations across the Quaternary, yet these techniques are often used in isolation, rather than part of an interd...

Large cetaceans were heavily impacted by commercial whaling, so relatively little is known about their biogeography prior to historic times. On California’s Channel Islands, maritime peoples hunted dolphins and porpoises for millennia, but ethnohistoric data suggest that larger cetaceans were not hunted. The Island Chumash scavenged beached whale c...

A synthetic history of human land use Humans began to leave lasting impacts on Earth's surface starting 10,000 to 8000 years ago. Through a synthetic collaboration with archaeologists around the globe, Stephens et al. compiled a comprehensive picture of the trajectory of human land use worldwide during the Holocene (see the Perspective by Roberts)....

Late Pleistocene estuaries, palaeoecology and humans on North America's Pacific Coast - Volume 93 Issue 372 - Jon Erlandson, Torben Rick, Amira Ainis, Todd Braje, Kristina Gill, Leslie Reeder-Myers

The Pacific coast of North America is a hypothesized route by which the earliest inhabitants of the Americas moved southwards around the western margin of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet just after the last glacial maximum. To test this hypothesis, we have been using a stepwise process to aid in late Pleistocene archaeological site discovery along the co...

Since the collapse of the Clovis-first model of the peopling of the Americas some 30 years ago, there has been growing interest in the Pacific Coast as a potential early human dispersal corridor. With postglacial eustatic sea level rise inundating most New World paleoshorelines older than ~7000 years, however, locating terminal Pleistocene sites al...

Forty years ago, Knut Fladmark (1979) argued that the Pacific Coast offered a viable alternative to the ice-free corridor model for the initial peopling of the Americas—one of the first to support a “coastal migration theory” that remained marginal for decades. Today, the pre-Clovis occupation at the Monte Verde site is widely accepted, several oth...

Four recently identified sites from eastern Santa Rosa Island contain flaked-stone artifacts diagnostic of Paleocoastal occupations between ∼13,000 and 8000 calendar years ago. The largest site (CA-SRI-997/H) contains two discrete loci that have been the subject of recent testing and data recovery excavations reported elsewhere. Three smaller, near...

• For over 10,000 years, black abalone (Haliotis cracherodii) were an important resource in southern California, first for coastal Native Americans, then beginning in the nineteenth century, as one of the state's first commercial shellfisheries. By 1993, after years of heavy fishing, rising sea surface temperatures (SST), and the spread of witherin...

Archaeobotanical remains recovered from a large ∼8000-year-old-shell midden (CA-SRI-666) on Santa Rosa Island provide the first ancient plant data from this large island, shedding light on ancient patterns of plant use, subsistence, and sedentism. Faunal data from shell midden samples retrieved from three site loci contain evidence for harvesting o...

Inhabited by Native Americans for at least 13,000 years, California’s Channel Islands were isolated from the adjacent mainland throughout the Quaternary. A rich archaeological record demonstrates that island peoples thrived for millennia, with access to abundant marine and terrestrial resources. Exchange with mainlanders for various goods is well d...

Spanish arrival to Alta and Baja California in AD 1542 marked the beginning of widespread ecological changes for California Island ecosystems. Over several centuries, Native peoples were removed to mainland towns and missions, intensive commercial fisheries and ranching operations developed, and numerous exotic plants and animals were introduced. T...

The California Islands provide a case study that suggests that historical depictions of many islands as marginal environments for hunter-gatherers have been exaggerated by the ecological effects of the introduction of exotic plants and animals, historically or prehistorically. The perception of island marginality is traditionally based on variables...

Until recently, with a few exceptions, California Islands were believed to be relatively impoverished in high-quality materials for making stone tools. This chapter summarizes the distributions of known mineral resources on the islands, including numerous sources identified during recent geoarchaeology surveys. For islands occupied since the Termin...

Due to their isolation, insularity, and lower biodiversity, the islands of Alta and Baja California have often been perceived as marginal habitat for humans compared to the adjacent mainland. Recent archaeological work, however, has revealed a deep history of sustained human settlement on many of the islands from the Terminal Pleistocene to the pre...

The terrestrial ecosystems of California's islands have long been described as depauperate, with island peoples relying more heavily on marine resources and trading for plant resources with mainland neighbors. Island plant communities were decimated by more than a century of overgrazing, however, with heavy soil erosion and the introduction of non-...

Archaeologically, the use of marine kelps and seaweeds is poorly understood, yet California's islands are surrounded by extensive and highly productive kelp forests with nearshore habitats containing more than 100 edible species. Historical accounts from around the Pacific Rim demonstrate considerable use of seaweeds and seagrasses by native people...

Islands have long been viewed as marginal habitats compared to mainland regions where terrestrial resources are generally more abundant and diverse. We examine this concept of island marginality by reviewing evidence for Paleocoastal settlement of islands off the Pacific Coast of Alta and Baja California. If the islands were marginal, we should exp...

Maritime occupation sites in upland dune settings (10–150 m elevation mean sea level) in San Miguel Island (37 km2 in size), located 40 km offshore of the south‐central California mainland, were analyzed for reported ages, component types, and distances from paleo‐shorelines around the island’s shelf platform. The occupation sites (dated ~12,200 to...

Complex processes in the settling of the Americas The expansion into the Americas by the ancestors of present day Native Americans has been difficult to tease apart from analyses of present day populations. To understand how humans diverged and spread across North and South America, Moreno-Mayar et al. sequenced 15 ancient human genomes from Alaska...

In 1960, a private donor gave an archaeological collection to the University of Oregon Museum of Natural and Cultural History (MNCH) that she and her father had excavated in 1957 from a rockshelter north of Silver Lake, subsequently identified as 35LK53. It included human remains and artifacts, some of them burial-associated, along with detailed do...

We provide an update to the fossil avifauna of San Miguel and Santa Rosa Islands based on the identification of 3509 small bird bones recovered from fossil sites on Santa Rosa and from 3 archaeological-paleontological cave deposits and 20 fossil sites on San Miguel. This work adds 64 species to the fossil avian community of these 2 islands, increas...

We provide an update to the fossil avifauna of San Miguel and Santa Rosa Islands based on the identification of 3509 small bird bones recovered from fossil sites on Santa Rosa and from 3 archaeological-paleontological cave deposits and 20 fossil sites on San Miguel Island. This work adds 64 species to the fossil avian community of these two islands...

Archaeological materials in museum collections provide an excellent opportunity for researchers to investigate social, cultural, and environmental change. However, the precision of the archaeological analysis and interpretation is dependent on a firm understanding of the site chronology. The Par-Tee site (35CLT20), located on the northern Oregon Co...

The submersion of Late Pleistocene shorelines and poor organic preservation at many early archaeological sites obscure the earliest effects of humans on coastal resources in the Americas. We used collagen fingerprinting to identify bone fragments from middens at four California Channel Island sites that are among the oldest coastal sites in the Ame...

This article describes, classifies, and provides the calculated ages of 14 basally thinned and fluted points of obsidian in the Borden collection from Rose Valley in southern Inyo County, California. With the exception of one item of Fish Springs obsidian, the specimens are all made of glass from geologic subsources in the Coso Volcanic Field. Typo...

The use of islands as ‘model systems’ has become particularly relevant for examining a host of important issues in archaeology and other disciplines. As papers in this special issue of the Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology demonstrate, islands can serve as critical and ideal analytical platforms for observing human populations in the past a...

Part 1 of this study investigated evidence of biomass burning in global ice records, and here we continue to test the hypothesis that an impact event at the Younger Dryas boundary (YDB) caused an anomalously intense episode of biomass burning at ∼12.8 ka on a multicontinental scale (North and South America, Europe, and Asia). Quantitative analyses...

Santa Cruz Island contains a remarkable array of cultural and biological resources and a rich tradition of research across the social and biological sciences and humanities. Given dramatic changes in climate forecast in the coming decades of the Anthropocene, however, many questions remain about the sustainability and future of island ecosystems an...

Rats and mice are among the most successful mammals on earth, with some of these species thriving in and around human settlements or areas disturbed by human activities. Here, we present morphological, taphonomic, and chronological data on two mice (Peromyscus nesodytes [extinct] and P. maniculatus [extant]) from a trans-Holocene sequence at Daisy...

The first humans to reach the Americas are likely to have come via a coastal route

In a controversial study published in Nature, Holen et al. (2017) claim that hominins fractured mastodon bones and teeth with stone cobbles in California ∼130,000 years ago. Their claim implies a human colonization of the New World more than 110,000 years earlier than the oldest widely accepted archaeological sites in the Americas. It is also at od...

In the face of environmental uncertainty due to anthropogenic climate change, islands are at the front lines of global change, threatened by sea level rise, habitat alteration, extinctions and declining biodiversity. Islands also stand at the forefront of scientific study for understanding the deep history of human ecodynamics and to build sustainab...

Once thought to be restricted to the last 10,000 to 15,000 years, seafaring and maritime adaptations now have a much deeper history. Coastlines and voyaging are now implicated in several major human dispersals, from Africa to SE Asia, Sunda to Sahul and western Melanesia, and from NE Asia to the Americas. I discuss the nature of coastal ecosystems,...

Using 1929 aerial photos of western Santa Cruz Island, we identified numerous potential shell midden locations, followed by confirmation of site locations via field reconnaissance. Heavy grazing by sheep, cattle, and pigs closely cropped island vegetation in the early twentieth century, exposing shell middens now often covered with thick vegetation...

In the face of environmental uncertainty due to anthropogenic climate change, islands are at the front lines of global change, threatened by sea level rise, habitat alteration, extinctions and declining biodiversity. Islands also stand at the forefront of scientific study for understanding the deep history of human ecodynamics and to build sustaina...

Methodological advances are reshaping our understanding of island colonization. Refinements in dating methods, paleoenvironmental reconstructions, and search techniques have resulted in discoveries that challenge outdated theories of islands as marginal to human migration, settlement, and subsistence. This is particularly true for research related...

Excavation of a cache feature eroding from a sea cliff on the northwest coast of San Nicolas Island produced two redwood boxes containing more than 200 artifacts of Nicoleño, Native Alaskan, and Euroamerican origin, along with four asphaltum-lined basketry water bottles and other artifacts. An abalone shell “treasure-box” was found inside the weste...

In America's Far West, chipped stone crescents dating between approximately 12,000 to 8000 cal BP are often found associated with Western Stemmed Tradition points. Crescent function is debated, but scholars have suggested that they are closely associated with wetland habitats, an association that has never been systematically investigated. Using a...

We are pleased Ellis et al. (1) found value in our recent synthesis of the deep history of human impacts on global ecosystems (2) and agree that our paper should influence the current debate on if and how an Anthropocene epoch is defined. We also agree that the ecological consequences of human niche construction have profound and growing effects on...

Erlandson, J.M., M.A. Zeder, N.L. Boivin, A Crowther, T. Denham, D.Q. Fuller, G. Larson & M.D. Petraglia *2016 Reply to Ellis et al.: Human niche construction and evolutionary theory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (doi/10.1073/pnas.1609617113).

Glassow's (2015) synthesis of "red abalone middens" on California's Santa Cruz Island does not include the broader geographic, chronologic, and ecological context to this phenomenon. We explore the wider distribution of these site types and emphasize their importance for addressing modern fisheries management issues. Spanish La síntesis de Glassow...

Glassow’s (2015) synthesis of “red abalone middens” on California’s Santa Cruz Island does not include the broader geographic, chronologic, and ecological context to this phenomenon. We explore the wider distribution of these site types and emphasize their importance for addressing modern fisheries management issues.

Understanding how human activities have influenced the foraging ecology of wildlife is important as our planet faces ongoing and impending habitat and climatic change. We review the canine surrogacy approach (CSA)—a tool for comparing human, dog, and other canid diets in the past—and apply CSA to investigate possible ancient human resource provisio...