I am a 77-year old American archaeologist/anthropologist, who's worked a good deal with and for the U.S. government and many Indian tribes, trying to use federal law to protect historic places. I've published a dozen or so textbooks and tradebooks around these subjects, with various academic publishers. Thirty years ago I got involved with The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), researching the 1937 disappearance of aviation pioneers Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan. This work took me repeatedly to the small, uninhabited, beautiful island of Nikumaroro, in the South Pacific nation of Kiribati.

Doing archaeology on Nikumaroro, and researching Earhart, led me to co-author "Amelia Earhart's Shoes" in 2004, a non-fiction account of TIGHAR's adventures to that date. Then, speculating about the events surrounding Earhart's disappearance, I wound up composing two historical novels. The first, self-published through Dog Ear Press in 2009, is titled "Thirteen Bones," and imagines the (historically documented) discovery of human bones that quite likely were Earhart's on Nikumaroro in 1940, and the complications resulting from this discovery for the colonists who were at that time trying to make the island their home. The second, "Amelia Earhart Unrescued," was published by Flat Hammock Press in 2018. It imagines what actually happened to Earhart and Noonan, based on all the historical, archaeological, and environmental data we've collected through the years. Kirkus Reviews found it "an intellectually intriguing but dramatically unsatisfying historical novel." Oh well.

I took what was almost certainly my last trip to Nikumaroro in 2019, with National Geographic, conducting further excavations at the site where we think the bones were found in 1940. Although the results were intriguing as usual, they were also inconclusive. Research is continuing, however.

I'm widowed, have four grown kids and seven grandkids, and continue to work when I can with Indian tribes and local communities to protect what's historically important to them. My major writing at the moment (July 2020) is a biography of my late wife Pat Parker, a cultural anthropologist and National Park Service executive.

“As the book opens, Earhart is in the process of making history- she's attempting to become the first female pilot to circumnavigate the globe- when she's forced to perform an emergency landing in the Pacific Ocean on a reef circling Nikumaroro Atoll in the Phoenix Islands. There, she finds herself stranded with virtually no fuel, and her navigator, Fred Noonan, is badly injured, his head a "great blazing bruised bump with the wound at its center still oozing pus and blood." Within sight of them is the shipwrecked vessel Norwich, and luckily, Earhart finds some basic provisions, left behind by the since-rescued crew at what's left of its encampment. However, the famed pilot's good fortune ends there: The glaring heat of the sun proves to be punishing, and she constantly frets that her plane will float away with the current. At the same time, Noonan's condition worsens steadily; it becomes clear that he surely sustained a concussion during the landing. To make matters even more dire, hungry hermit crabs relentlessly attack both Earhart and Noonan - and eventually, those ravenous, "godawful monsters" devour Noonan's ravaged body”
– Kirkus Reviews