Consultation and Cultural Heritage ─ Let Us Reason Together

This pragmatic guide to consultation in cultural heritage and environmental impact management distills decades of experience by two of the leading figures in this area. Claudia Nissley and Tom King reject the idea that consulting with communities and other stakeholders is merely checking off a box on the list of tasks required to implement a project. Instead, they show government agencies and project sponsors how to find the relevant parties, to discuss the project in an open and continuous fashion, to consider alternative strategies, and to seek agreement that meets everyone’s needs. The authors also provide useful guidance to community leaders and other stakeholders to represent their interests in the consultation process. Complete with practical suggestions and cases of successful (and less successful) consultation projects, Consultation and Cultural Heritage is a book that no one involved in this field should be without.

Claudia Nissley, president of Nissley Environmental Consultants, specializes in historic preservation and conservation. She served as the State Historic Preservation Officer at the State of Wyoming and was the Director for the Western Office of the Advisory Council for Historic Preservation. She has worked with American Indian Tribes, government agencies, and others in 40 states. As a nationally-recognized expert on the National Heritage Preservation Act, she provides expert testimony, assistance with consultation, and conflict resolution, and teaches classes nationally through the National Preservation Institute on working with five federal environmental and cultural property laws. Thomas F. King holds a PhD in anthropology, with research in western North America and the Pacific Islands. His career since the late 1960s has been devoted to environmental impact assessment and cultural heritage management, working with government agencies, indigenous communities, and non-governmental organizations. He has authored, co-authored, or edited ten textbooks, numerous journal articles, and writes a blog at http://crmplus.blogspot.com/. He provides consulting, writing, training, and expert witness services to Indian tribes, government agencies, and private sector clients. He also serves as volunteer senior archaeologist with The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (www.TIGHAR.org), and has published a novel and co-authored a non-fiction book about the group’s research into the fates of aviation pioneers Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan.