P.J. Capelotti

Historical archaeologist and writer P.J. Capelotti, Professor of Anthropology at Penn State University, Abington College, is author or editor of more than a two dozen non-fiction histories, including By Airship to the North Pole: an archaeology of human exploration (1999), Sea Drift: Rafting Adventures in the Wake of Kon-Tiki (2001), Life and Death on the Greenland Patrol (2005), The Whaling Expedition of the Ulysses (2010), Shipwreck at Cape Flora: The expeditions of Benjamin Leigh Smith, England's forgotten Arctic explorer, (2013), and The Greatest Show in the Arctic: the American exploration of Franz Josef Land, 1898-1903 (2016). A collection of essays covering 25 years of fieldwork appeared in 2018 as: Adventures in Archaeology: The Last Logbook of the Orca II. His international collaboration with Grenna Museum in Sweden was published in 2021 as: The Coldest Coast: the 1873 Leigh Smith expedition to Svalbard in the diaries and photographs of Herbert C. Chermside.

His book: Your Sheep Are All Counted: a roadside archaeology of South of the Border billboards, was published on July 5, 2022.

His theory of archaeological research in space: The Human Archaeology of Space, was published in 2010 by McFarland. A volume of essays and poetry, Gods Meadow: a summer of poems on the edge of Oslo fjord, was published in 2005, and his first novel, Nautilus: a modern sequel to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, has been described by Clive Cussler as "an amazing tale filled with enigmas filled with riddles and dark mysteries. Truly a fascinating read." Nautilus was published in August, 2015, under the pen name Pete Shaw.