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People in the Anthropology Department
Tom Layton
Professor
Thomas Layton
PhD - Harvard, 1971

Tom Layton has retired, but has returned this Spring to teach.

Dr. Layton is a specialist in North American archaeology and cultural ecology, with research foci in California and the Great Basin. He offers courses in New World and Old World archaeology, archaeological method and theory, and California Indians. He directs the Archaeology Field School alternating summers at sites on the Mendocino Coast. He also directs lab analysis of archaeological materials and manages the Obsidian Hydration Dating Laboratory.
photo - Layton

Office: CL-465

Phone: (408) 924-5542

Email:  tnlayton@email.sjsu.edu
 

Frolic ShipwreckA former director of the Nevada State Museum, he has now taught for 25 years in the California State University System. His current research spans both the prehistoric and historic periods. He is particularly interested in the interactions of Native Americans and Euro-Americans. He is also interested in 19th century commerce. This work includes the Frolic Shipwreck Project, focusing on commerce across the Pacific Rim, and the Mendocino Research Project, now investigating the prehistory of the Pomo and Coast Yuki peoples and the now vanished logging mill town of DeHaven.

Dr. Layton employs field archaeology, archival research and oral history to carry out his investigations. His students have completed Masters Degrees in topics ranging from Chinese ceramics to prehistoric settlement and commerce in Mendocino county, based on obsidian hydration and geological sourcing. A current student's masters project is a plan for an underwater park at Fort Ross.

Dr. Layton is trying to develop methods to make archaeological knowledge more accessible and meaningful to the public. These efforts include working jointly with professional illustrators, and museum professionals and careful interpolation between the archaeological facts to tell stories that include people. Dr. Layton's Frolic Shipwreck research was featured in two museum exhibitions: at the San Francisco Maritime Museum through 1999, and at the Oakland Museum through 1998. In 1997 the Discovery Channel featured his work on The Search for Amazing Treasures.

In 1996 Dr. Layton received the Mark Harrington Award for conservation from the Society for California Archaeology. In 1998 he received the Austin Warburton Research Award from the College of Social Sciences at San Jose State University. He was the recipient of a full year National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship for college teachers.

Tom Layton has returned from leave and working on his third book of his Frolic Shipwreck series for Stanford University Press: Dixwell's Concubine: Lost Generations of an American Family. The first two volumes, also published by Stanford are: The Voyage of the Frolic: New England Merchants and the Opium Trade (1997) and Gifts from the Celestial Kingdom: A Shipwrecked Cargo for Gold Rush California (May 2002).