Dr. Stephen Loring

Dr. Stephen Loring is the Arctic Archaeologist and Museum Anthropologist with the Arctic Studies Center at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). He has long suffered from a decidedly 19th-century antiquarian proclivity to search for arrowheads and possibly extinct species of birds. He received his PhD in 1991 from the University of Massachusetts shortly after which he began work at the Smithsonian's Arctic Studies Center. He has conducted archaeological, ethnohistorical and paleo-environmental research in New England, Quebec, Labrador, Arkansas, Peru, Argentina, the Brooks Range and on the outermost ("so far west its east") Aleutian Islands.

He is fond of adverse conditions, preferring his weather to be windy and wet. He has been down in caves and up on mountains, slept in fossil beds and eagle nests and prefers sunsets without any buildings in the way. There is almost nothing he wouldn't do for cloudberries and Ramah chert. Dr. Loring has canoed many of the wild rivers in Quebec-Labrador, he led the first canoe party to ever descend the Korok River in northern Labrador (in 1978). His current research includes community archaeology projects with both the Inuit and Innu in northern Labrador.