Eric Jones

  • Associate Professor
  • Undergraduate Director and Associate Department Chair
  • (PHD
  • PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY
  • 2008)
Address

Hale 179

Dr. Jones is a historical archaeologist with research specialties in settlement ecology, landscapes and built environments, socioeconomic interactions, and demographic archaeology. His research is community-based and multiscalar and incorporates GIS-based landscape reconstruction and spatial analysis; historic documents, census records, and oral histories; and artifact analysis. His current focus is on late 19th and early 20th-century rural communities in the U.S., the factors that gave rise to commercial farming, and the impacts commercialization had on household consumption, farming practices, community economics and social interactions, landscapes, and health and mortality. Essentially, his work is examining how rural communities formed around family farms as businesses. He is currently working with communities in Upstate New York, where he grew up on a third generation family-run dairy farm, and locally in Boulder County.

Recent Publications

  • Eric E. Jones, Annabelle J. Lewis, Kelli M. Hajek, Amber M. Wellings, and Abagail Dietrich. 2025. Women’s Labor and Dairy Production in a Late 19th-Century Upstate New York Town. Historical Archaeology.
  • Sharon N. DeWitte, Eric E. Jones, and Catherine Livingston. 2025. Health and Mortality in the 19th-Century Rural U.S.: the Second Epidemiological Transition in Madison County, NY. American Journal of Human Biology. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ajhb.70017
  • Jones, Eric E., Jordan Davis, Amber M. Wellings, and Kelli M. Hajek. 2024. The Settlement Ecology of Emerging Commercial Dairy Farming in the 19th-Century Northeast. Historical Archaeology 58(2)
  • Capps, Matthew and Eric E. Jones. 2021. Morphological and Functional Variability in Triangular Projectile Points in the Piedmont Southeast, 1300 -1600 CE. Southeastern Archaeology 40(4): 266-283.
  • Jones, Eric E., Maya B. Krause, Caroline Watson, and Grayson O’Saile. 2020. Economic and Social Interaction in the Piedmont Village Tradition-Mississippian Boundarylands of the North American Southeast, 1200-1600 CE. American Antiquity.
  • Jones, Eric E. 2019. Why Do We Live Where We Do? Teaching Native American Settlement Ecology in the North Carolina Piedmont, in Grounded Education in the Environmental Humanities: Exploring Place-Based Pedagogies in the South, edited by Lucas Johnston and Dave Aftandilian, pp. 115-131, Routledge Press, New York.
  • Jones, Eric E. 2018. When Villages Do Not Form: A Case Study from the Piedmont Village Tradition-Mississippian Borderlands, AD 1200-1600, in The Power of Villages, edited by Victor S. Thompson and Jennifer Birch, pp. 73-88, University of Florida Press, Gainesville, FL.
  • Jones, Eric E. 2017. Significance and Context in GIS-Based Spatial Archaeology: A Case Study from Southeastern North America. Journal of Archaeological Science 84C: 54–62.