Tom King has been doing archaeology since the 1950s, when as a teenager he organized an avocational society--the Northwestern California Archaeological Society--in his hometown of Petaluma, California. After a stint in the Navy in southeast Asian waters, he entered college at what is now San Francisco State University, and began making his living on “salvage” projects--excavating sites that were about to be destroyed by dams, highways, and other construction projects.
He moved on in the late 1960s to UCLA, where he headed up the university’s Archaeological Survey and helped organize the Society for California Archaeology. But he had become depressed by working in salvage--grabbing what little could be grabbed before the bulldozers came--and welcomed the opportunity in the 1970s to become involved in trying to influence planning to preserve sites under the newly enacted National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA).
He has built his career around work in what is commonly called “cultural resource management” or CRM--using laws like NHPA to influence project planning to protect cultural resources like archaeological sites.
The scope of his efforts has grown over the years, so he is now routinely involved in planning for the protection not only of archaeological sites but of historic buildings, neighborhoods, rural landscapes, the spiritual places of Indian tribes and Pacific Island groups, and places that are important for their association with the beliefs and ways of life of living communities.
King has spent years in the Federal government in Washington DC, first with the National Park Service and then with the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. He has headed up university and statewide archaeological programs in California and New York, and oversaw the establishment of historic preservation programs in several emerging Pacific island nations.
He was awarded the PhD in anthropology by the University of California, Riverside, and has conducted archaeological fieldwork throughout California and in the islands of Micronesia. He is currently affiliated with SWCA Environmental Consultants, consulting and teaching about many aspects of cultural resource management.
He is the author of five textbooks on CRM, as well as a book on the archaeological effort to solve the mystery of aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart’s 1937 disappearance over the Pacific--a “recreational” volunteer project for The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR).
