Professor Eerkens is interested in how humans, especially small-scale societies, adapt to social and environmental conditions and how these adaptations affect kinship, diet, resource extraction, land tenure practices, and the adoption and modification of material technologies, especially ceramics and stone-tools. He applies evolutionary models to better understand change in the archaeological record, especially ideas from cultural transmission theory. He has conducted archaeological field research in California, Nevada, South-Central Peru, and Northwest Europe. Much of his research incorporates archaeometric applications such as stable isotope analysis, proteomics, gas chromatography, electron microprobe, neutron activation, and X-Ray Fluorescence.