Michael "Mike" Kunz

Born in Texas and growing up in upstate New York, Michael "Mike" Kunz came to Alaska in 1970 to work for John Cook on the Healy Lake archeological site. He earned a bachelor's degree in anthropology from Eastern New Mexico University, where he became interested in archeology and gained field experience at a type site for the Clovis culture, and was a graduate student at Washington State University. When John Cook became the project manager for the Trans-Alaska Pipeline archeology project, he hired Mike in March 1974 as a supervisory archeologist for the section from Linda Creek to Prudhoe Bay (Sections 5 & 6). After the pipeline, Mike continued working on northern archeology, and eventually became an archeologist for the Arctic Field Office of the Bureau of Land Managment in Fairbanks, Alaska. In this position, Mike became well-known for research on the Mesa Site in the western Brooks Range, and its connections to early hunting cultures of northern Alaska and human migrations across the Bering Strait and into the Americas. Mike retired from the Bureau of Land Management in 2012.