Joe Alan Artz has conducted archaeological fieldwork since 1976 in Idaho, Belize, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, the Dakotas, and Iowa. He has published articles and book reviews in a variety of journals and newsletters. He is a past President of the Professional Council for North Dakota Heritage, a past Editor of the North Dakota Archaeological Association Journal, and presently serves as President and webmaster of the Plains Anthropological Society.

He joined the Highway Archaeology Program in 1989, and in 1999 became OSA's Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Coordinator. He is currently engaged in a project to create a GIS for Iowa archaeology, digitizing the locations of the state's 19,000+ recorded sites. His research interests also include geoarchaeology, in particular Holocene landscape evolution and pedogenesis, and the effects of pedologic and geomorphic processes on archaeological sites.