Robert King, the Alaska State Archeologist for the Bureau of Land Management will be speaking in Valdez on Thursday March 12th and 13th. The first speech, entitled Curious Tales, Stories of Dog Mushers with Connections to the Copper River Basin, will be at The Valdez Consortium Library from 7:00 to 9:00 pm and is open to the public. King will be speaking about archaeology along the Iditarod trail and some of the interesting findings to students of Valdez Public Schools from noon to 2:00 pm on Friday, March 13th.
King is originally from Pullman, Washington and is a graduate of Washington State University with degrees in anthropology/archaeology and history and went on to receive a doctorate in Archaeology and Ethno-history from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He first came to Alaska in 1979 to work on an archaeological project documenting the historical remains within the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, including along the Chilkoot and White Pass Trails. He worked for the Bureau of Land Management in Fairbanks until 1984, when he moved to the Anchorage office. He has been the State Archaeologist since 1986. He is also involved in paleontology (King notes that yes, this does include dinosaurs) and historical research. He has become the BLM’s historian for homesteading Alaska and the rest of the US and has spoken frequently on the subject.
In addition to his duties for the State of Alaska, King is an author, having published several historical articles about early photography and a book of early Alaska postcards. His ‘Curious Tales’ speech is in part based on one of the postcards he found while working on this book. It showed Harry and Estell Mason who were supposedly setting off from Nome on a seven-year trip around the world by dogsled.
He is currently working on a biography of his great-great-uncle, Moritz Mecklenburg, who was in the Nome Gold Rush.
This will be King’s third public speaking engagement in Valdez. On this occasion he is the Keynote Speaker for the Valdez Big Read, a project funded by the National Endowment of the Arts and implemented by KCHU Public Radio, Valdez Consortium Library and Valdez Museum and Historical Archive. He has also visited previously for The Last Frontier Theater Conference, where he met his cousin, Patricia Neal.
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