Jon M. Erlandson

• 1. Introduction

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  Jon M. Erlandson grew up in Santa Barbara, California, swimming, surfing, and sailing the same Pacific waters he would later spend decades studying. That childhood on the coast, it turns out, was the beginning of a career that would push back against one of archaeology's longest-held assumptions: that humans only became serious seafarers in the last ten thousand years or so. Erlandson has spent his professional life proving otherwise, and the evidence he has gathered stretches from the kelp forests of Baja California to the Viking graveyards of Iceland. How did ancient people first move along ocean coastlines? What did they eat, where did they settle, and what did they leave behind when sea levels rose and swallowed their campsites? Those questions drive every chapter of his work, and the answers have redrawn the map of how our species spread across the planet.

• 2. Coastal Roots and Early Career

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  Erlandson completed his B.A. in Biological Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1980, then stayed at the same institution to earn both his M.A. and Ph.D. in Archaeology. The blend of biology and archaeology in that training would shape everything he did next. He moved to Alaska in 1982, and in 1989-90 he found himself in the middle of a crisis: the Exxon Valdez oil spill had contaminated coastal Alaska, and Erlandson worked to protect archaeological sites from the damage. He also taught for a year at the University of Alaska Fairbanks before moving south to join the University of Oregon faculty. Those years in Alaska brought him into close contact with marine biologists and ecologists, a partnership that pulled him toward policy questions involving endangered coastal fisheries and ecosystems. He went on to win several awards for teaching and research, including recognition for his mentoring of minority students. In 2001, a paper he co-authored with Jeremy Jackson and others, titled "Historical Overfishing and the Recent Collapse of Coastal Ecosystems," was named the top science story of the year by Discover Magazine.

• 3. The Kelp Highway Hypothesis

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  Sites such as Monte Verde in Chile and Oregon's Paisley Caves have long puzzled archaeologists because they date to roughly 14,000 years ago, before the inland ice-free corridor through North America appears to have opened. Erlandson and his colleagues developed the "kelp highway" hypothesis as a way to account for that early presence. The idea is that migrating people followed the Pacific Coast southward, moving along a chain of productive kelp forests that runs from northeast Asia all the way to Baja California. Kelp forests are unusually rich environments. They support sea mammals, fish, and shellfish, and the kelp itself is edible. The forests also offered shelter from the heavy swells of the open ocean, making coastal travel far less dangerous than crossing exposed water. The kelp highway paper appeared in the Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology in 2007, with Erlandson as lead author. The main obstacle to testing the hypothesis is the same one that haunts much of maritime archaeology: rising sea levels since the last Glacial Maximum have submerged the coastlines that migrants would have traveled, hiding the sites beneath the ocean. Erlandson has pointed to California's Channel Islands as one place where evidence of early Pacific Coast occupation survives above water.

• 4. Channel Islands and Historical Ecology

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  The Channel Islands, lying off the California coast, have been continuously occupied by humans for more than 13,000 years. The Chumash people lived there from at least 9,500 years ago until they were removed from the islands around AD 1820. That long, unbroken sequence of habitation makes the islands an unusually valuable laboratory. Erlandson and his colleagues have reconstructed the diet of the Island Chumash and their ancestors, tracing how their food sources shifted across thousands of years. A 2009 paper in Pacific Science examined 12,000 years of maritime subsistence on the Channel Islands, looking at how people adjusted their fishing and foraging as marine ecosystems changed around them. A 2007 paper in American Antiquity traced human impacts on nearshore shellfish over a 7,000-year record from Santa Rosa Island. The goal across all of this work is to understand not just what people ate, but how they altered the ecosystems they depended on and how those ecosystems in turn shaped human behavior. The Channel Islands also connect to Erlandson's broader interest in submerged sites: the continental shelf around the islands once extended further out to sea, and those drowned landscapes may yet hold the earliest evidence of Pacific Coast occupation.

• 5. The Viking Valley of Mosfell

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  Iceland's Mosfell Valley sits far from California's kelp beds, but Erlandson's seven field seasons there illustrate the range of his collaborative approach. Working with Jesse Byock of UCLA, Philip Walker of UC Santa Barbara, and other colleagues, the team excavated three sites from the Viking Age, spanning the early 10th to the mid-12th century. What they uncovered was exceptional. The sites included the well-preserved remains of an early Christian church and graveyard, a large Viking longhouse, and a ritual cremation feature built atop a knoll that had been shaped to resemble the prow of a ship. Written sagas associated with the farm and its earliest inhabitants existed, and the physical evidence matched what those texts described: bodies had been moved from older pagan burials into the new Christian graveyard, and there were signs of violence consistent with the blood feuds the sagas recorded. Most significantly, the site yielded the first archaeological evidence of cremation ever found in Iceland. Before this discovery, the absence of cremation evidence had fueled debate about who the island's original settlers were and what traditions they brought with them.

• 6. A Career in Evidence

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  By the time Erlandson retired to California in 2023, he had published more than 400 scholarly articles and edited or written 29 books. He was a founding co-editor of the Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology, and in 2013 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2021 he was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His 1994 book, Early Hunter-Gatherers of the California Coast, remains a foundational text. His co-edited 2008 volume, Human Impacts on Ancient Marine Ecosystems: A Global Perspective, brought together research from around the world on how ancient peoples changed the seas they fished. Shell middens, the ancient refuse heaps of coastal communities, were the subject of a 2013 paper in which Erlandson argued that these deposits and other human-altered soils should be recognized as global stratigraphic signatures for the Anthropocene. Across all of this, a single thread runs: the coastline is not a margin. It is where some of the most complex and densely populated human societies took shape, and the submerged shelves of the world's continents still hold most of what those societies left behind.