Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Eric Johnson is Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Native American and Indigenous Art and Architecture in the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. He earned his Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard University in 2021. His research combines archaeological and historical methods to examine intersecting effects of colonialism and capitalism in North America, specifically northern New Jersey. His current book project, “An Archaeology of Settler Capitalism: Appropriating and Industrializing Wampum Manufacture in New Jersey (1770–1900),” exposes the entwined nature of capitalist and settler ideologies through the untold story of Euro-American settlers who produced Indigenous shell beads for export to the fur trade. He has begun a new project examining potential stone landscape features of the Northeast that are not currently recognized by state agencies as Indigenous heritage. Combining landscape surveys, mapping, and re-reading the colonial archive of New Netherland, this project seeks to survey, contextualize, and ultimately preserve at-risk sites while interrogating settler-state criteria for recognizing Indigenous architectural heritage.