What is archaeology, and why should we do it? Tom King, arguably the best-known heritage management consultant in the United States, answers the basic question of every introductory student from the unique perspective of one who actively uses archaeology for cultural resource management. Designed as a supplement for introduction to archaeology classes, this brief and breezy book runs the reader through the major principles of archaeology, using examples from the author’s own field work and that of others. King shows how contemporary archaeology, as part of the larger cultural resource management endeavor, acts to help preserve and protect prehistoric and historic sites in the United States and elsewhere. Brief biographies of other CRM archaeologists help students envision career paths they might emulate. The bookends with an exploration of some of the thorny problems facing the contemporary archaeologist to help foster class discussion. An ideal ice-breaker for introductory college classes in archaeology, one that will get students engaged in the subject and thinking about its challenges.
I got interested in archaeology at a tender age, and was a teen-aged pothunter by age 15.
But in about 1966, as an undergraduate at San Francisco State University (then College) surviving on the GI Bill and work in 'salvage archaeology,' I fell in with a remarkable fellow student named Eric Barnes, who mixed art and urban planning with anthropology in his creative brain, and he introduced me to a law just signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson ' the National Historic Preservation Act. Eric felt that it might be used to preserve and manage archaeological sites, rather than simply to get them dug up before they were destroyed. He convinced me, and my career lurched away from mainstream academic archaeology into what we now call 'cultural resource management' or CRM.
Over the next ten years I oversaw the UCLA Archaeological Survey, helped set up the Archaeological Research Unit at the University of California, Riverside and completed a PhD there in Anthropology, did fieldwork in California's North Coast Range, Sierra Nevada, and Mojave and Colorado Deserts, and along the Pacific coast from Los Angeles north to the Oregon border. I set up a private consulting firm in northern California, took part in litigation, helped organize the Society for California Archaeology, and helped coordinate a legislative effort that would have established a state archaeological survey, modeled on one in Arkansas, had the legislation to create it not fallen to a veto by Governor Ronald Reagan. Becoming unemployable in California, I was enabled by the late, great New York State archaeologist Marian White to shuffle across the continent to Buffalo to set up a contract archaeology program for the New York Archaeological Council. I lasted a bit over a year on the Niagara Frontier before being recruited by the National Park Service to help write regulations and guidelines for the newly enacted Archaeological and Historic Preservation Act. I was a bit over a year in Washington DC before being 'detailed' to Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands to help the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands with its historic preservation programs. A tough job, but somebody had to do it.
Returning to the mainland in 1977, having established a pattern of employment suggesting that I'd never work anyplace for more than two years at a time, I was honored to be asked by the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation to head the office that nagged Federal agencies nationwide about compliance with Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. This took me back to Washington, where I actually worked for ten years with the Council, through the Reagan administration and the beginning of Bush I. Policy disputes then led me to quit in a huff and go back into private practice, where I remain to this day. At various times in the last sixteen years or so I've worked intensively for agencies like the General Services Administration, the Department of Defense, and the Farm Service Agency in the Department of Agriculture, and consulted a good deal with Indian tribes and Native Hawaiian groups, besides authoring several textbooks and a number journal articles on CRM topics. I've taught short classes for the University of Nevada, Reno and the National Preservation Institute, and now both teach and consult with SWCA Environmental Consultants (www.swca.com). And I've returned to archaeology as the volunteer Senior Archaeologist on The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery's Amelia Earhart Search Project ' read all about it at www.tighar.org or in Amelia Earhart's Shoes (AltaMira Press 2004). Most recently I've tried my hand at a novel -- "Thirteen Bones," Dog Ear Press 2010-- built around the 1940 discovery of what were probably Earhart's bones on Nikumaroro in the Phoenix Islands.
