Daniel Odess

Dan Odess is an archaeologist with extensive experience conducting research in Alaska, northern Canada, and arctic Russia. His work focuses on how people have met the challenges of living in extreme environments, including: what they ate and how they procured it, how they organized their technology, their social strategies, and what it meant to colonize a place where nobody had ever lived before. In addition to his work in the Arctic he is part of the team that recently discovered ancient tracks at White Sands National Park, currently the oldest solid evidence for humans in the Western Hemisphere.

His approach to research is multidisciplinary, involving collaboration with Indigenous people, paleoecologists, biologists, paleontologists, physicists, and geologists. He is keenly interested in how the knowledge of Indigenous people can inform our understanding of the past and how in turn, the study of the past can help inform the decisions we and they face today.

Dan is a natural teacher, with great enthusiasm for archaeology and the Arctic, and is a firm believer that far more can be learned and taught in the field than in the classroom. He has held a variety of academic and government positions including Professor of Anthropology and Curator of Archaeology at the University of Alaska, and Chief Scientist for the U.S. National Park Service.