Jesse Martinez specializes in prehistoric, protohistoric, and historic archaeology. His experience includes archaeological surveying, extensive archaeological excavation, laboratory management, artifact analysis, and field crew supervision. He is an accomplished writer and has coauthored and contributed to numerous resources management reports for CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act), Section 106, and National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) compliance, and archeological reports for the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), Caltrans, Department of Water Resources (DWR), and several other federal and state agencies. He has extensive experience in the prehistory of California and the Great Basin, having worked in the Mojave Desert, Eastern California, Northern California, San Francisco Bay Area, the Western Sierra Nevada, and the Central Valley. Mr. Martinez has also worked in Idaho, Washington, Nevada, and Montana.

Mr. Martinez completed his master’s degree in anthropology with an emphasis in archaeology from California State University, Sacramento. His thesis was a diachronic study of obsidian use across various environmental zones at the Mount Hicks obsidian source in Mineral County, Nevada. His thesis work included stratified random sampling of four different environmental zones and development of an obsidian hydration rate for the Mount Hicks source. Mr. Martinez performed the hydration and lithic analysis for his thesis himself, cutting more than 300 artifacts for hydration analysis and analyzing thousands of obsidian artifacts. He has particular interest in the theory technological organization and how it relates to hunter-gatherer subsistence-settlement strategies.