Eric D. Johnson is an archaeologist who examines the global entanglement of colonialism and capitalism from 1500 to 1900 CE. From landscapes of dispossession in rural Iceland to shell bead factories in New Jersey, his work centers on the genealogy of capital and its material effects in the wider North Atlantic. He received his PhD in Anthropology/Archaeology from Harvard University in 2021, and has since held postdocs at the University of Iceland (Fulbright Fellowship) and Brown University (Cogut Humanities Scholar). Eric was recently awarded an NWO Veni for his project Living Stonework: Indigenous Ceremonial Landscapes, Colonial Palimpsests, and Transatlantic Collaborative Archaeology. As a collaboration with the Ramapough Munsee-Lenape Nation of New Jersey, Living Stonework combines the methods of landscape archaeology with an analysis of Dutch and American archives to help identify, contextualize, and ultimately protect ceremonial stone landscape features of the Indigenous Northeast. These at-risk features have been largely neglected by archaeologists in part because many were destroyed (or transformed) by settler-colonial farming infrastructure from the seventeenth century to today.

In prep.   Factory Wampum: Shell Bead Conscripts and the Limits to Settler Capital.

2025        Johnson, Eric D. and Zoë Antoinette Eddy. "Beads of Settler Bafflement: White-Owned Wampum Factories and Native Baby Yoda," American Anthropogist, 127(2025): 707–719. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.28099.

2023        Johnson, Eric D. “The Chaîne Opératoire of Settler Wampum Manufacture at the David Campbell House in Northern New Jersey” International Journal of Historical Archaeology, 27(4): 1068–1099. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10761-023-00702-w

2022        Johnson, Eric D. “Industrializing Shell Bead Production in Northern New Jersey: Reuniting Collections from Stoltz Farm (1770–1830) and the Campbell Wampum Factory (1850–1900).” Historical Archaeology, 56(3): 594–619.  https://doi.org/10.1007/s41636-022-00346-3

2020        Bolender, Douglas J., Eric D. Johnson, and Grace E. Bello. “Tenancy, Finance, and Access to Commercial Goods: Interpreting Impoverished Assemblages in Skagafjörður, Iceland, AD 1300–1900.” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 60: 101227. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaa.2020.101227 

2019        Johnson, Eric D. and Douglas J. Bolender. “Deeper Histories of Dispossession: The Genealogy of ‘Proletarian’ Relations in Iceland.” Historical Archaeology 53(3): 559–574. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41636-019-00197-5

2018        Bolender, Douglas J. and Eric D. Johnson. “Reassembling the Household for Icelandic Archaeology: A Contribution to Comparative Political Economy.” Journal of Post-Medieval Archaeology, 52: 65–83.  https://doi.org/10.1080/00794236.2018.1461325

2015        Johnson, Eric D. “Moated Sites and the Production of Authority in the Eastern Weald of England.” Medieval Archaeology 59: 233–254. https://doi.org/10.1080/00766097.2015.1119396

In press        Johnson, Eric D. "Race, Capital and Resilience in New Jersey's Nineteenth-century Wampum Industry." In Exposing Erasure: Archaeologies of Marginalization and Resilience in the Northeast, edited by Christopher Matthews, Megan Hicks, and Will Williams. Tuscaloosa: Alabama University Press, forthcoming.

2022        Johnson, Eric D. “Archaeology and Ramapough Sovereignty” and “Ceremonial Stone Landscapes” in Bakshi, Anita (ed.). Our Land, Our Stories: Excavating Subterranean Histories of Ringwood Mines and the Ramapough Lunaape Nation. Princeton, New Jersey: Labyrinth Books.

2017        Johnson, Eric D. “Moated Sites in the Wealden Landscape” in Lived Experience in the Later Middle Ages: Studies of Bodiam and Other Elite Landscapes in South-Eastern England, edited by Matthew Johnson, 158–170. Oxford: Oxbow Books. 

2017        Johnson, Eric D., Matthew Johnson, and Timothy Sly. “Scotney: Archaeological Survey and Map Analysis” in Lived Experience in the Later Middle Ages: Studies of Bodiam and Other Elite Landscapes in South-Eastern England, edited by Matthew Johnson, 95–105. Oxford: Oxbow Books.

2026 - 2028     Veni - Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) | NWO Talent Programme

2021 - 2022     Fulbright-National Science Foundation Arctic Social Science Scholar | Fulbright Commissionin Iceland

2019 - 2021     Dissertation Fieldwork Grant | Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research

2019 - 2021     National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement (NSF-DDRI, AwardNo. 1905092) | National Science Foundation Archaeology Program

2015 - 2018     National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (GRFP) | National ScienceFoundation