Jo Anne Van Tilburg

Who is Jo Anne Van Tilburg?

Jo Anne Van Tilburg is an American archaeologist best known for her research on the statues of Easter Island. Her primary specialty is rock art.

Van Tilburg was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota and graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1965, receiving her Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1986. She is currently Research Associate of The Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA and Director of the UCLA Rock Art Archive.

Van Tilburg directs "Captured Visions", an award-winning rock art recording project in the Great Basin. Other projets in which Van Tilburg is involved include the administration of a small grants program, training in field methods, and the creation of prototype digital storage projects for special collections.

Van Tilburg is also director of the Easter Island Statue Project. She has conducted seasonal fieldwork in the Pacific since 1982, including in the Republic of Belau and on Easter Island. She is considered one of the world's leading experts on Easter Island statues, and has worked closely with the Easter Island community to inventory, describe and catalog nearly 900 statues. She has produced a typological analysis and classification of the statue corpus that is a significant aid to chronological studies. She has conducted extensive archival and museum studies throughout the world and, since 1995, has researched the life of Edwardian archaeologist Katherine Routledge, the first woman, to conduct field work on Easter Island and in the Pacific. Van Tilburg wrote a biography of Routledge entitled "Among Stone Giants: The Life of Katherine Routledge and Her Remarkable Expedition to Easter Island".