As an archaeologist Joshua Wright has worked on a wide range of expeditions in Greece, Egypt, India, Pakistan, Belize, Mexico, China, Turkmenistan, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Jordan, Madagascar, and Mongolia.
Only after earning an M.Phil from Cambridge University in 1995 and developing his field research did he settle on archaeology as an academic discipline. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Harvard University in 2006 where he studied the relationship between community, subsistence and landscape while writing on the transformation of the monumental landscape in northern Mongolia during the adoption of nomadic pastoralism.
He continues to pursue his research into the archaeological prehistory and history of Inner Asia as well as broadening his focus into general anthropological, spatial, and natural science based studies of megaliths, monumentality, mobility and nomadism under the rubric of landscape archaeology, human ecology, space, and place. His other major scholarly interests are geographic information systems, databases and visualization of the past; the application of the archaeological perspective to modern human relationships with food and food production; and the experience of the past, studying— and experiencing—the way that archaeological and other material remains of the past are interpreted as they are discovered and transformed into what we see in museums, media, fiction, re-enactments and living history.